Society for Cultural Anthropology
Student-Faculty Workshops

Each year, the SCA sponsors five faculty-student workshop luncheons intended to provide an informal setting where students can discuss their work with scholars from other universities. A list of the workshops appears below.

The luncheon workshops are limited to 4-5 students each, and they take place at a restaurant in or near the conference hotel. The workshops are free to all participants and open to SCA student members at all levels of graduate training. Lunch is provided.

To join one of these workshops, students are asked to submit a one-page description of no more than 250-300 words (i.e.,one-page) about their research projects. They are encouraged to include within the description specific questions for the workshop leader(s) and for the group as a whole to consider. Descriptions are shared with fellow workshop participants in advance of the meeting.

Applications are accepted on a first-come first-serve basis, noting that:

1. the project descriptions are closely suited to the workshop themes;
2. students and workshop leaders are from different institutions;
3. students are members of the SCA.

If you are not yet a member of the SCA, but would like to join at the modest student rate of $12.50 a year, which includes a full print subscription to the journal, Cultural Anthropology, you can do so easily on our website: http://sca.culanth.org/join/join.htm

* * *

AAA 2011 Montreal Workshops

1) Gabriella Coleman (NYU) and Tom Boellstorff (UC Irvine) "The Anthropology of the Digital?"

Description:
This workshop opens with some tales concerning Anthropology's skepticism toward the study of the digital to spark a discussion centered on the following questions: 1) what are current opportunities and constraints for graduate students and young scholars working on topics that involve the study of digital media? 2) why has Anthropology embraced this field so reluctantly and slowly? 3) what distinguishes the Anthropology of the digital and how might the formulation of the digital as a distinct field/category act to enable and limit its study?

2) Naisargi N. Dave (U Toronto) and Andrea Muehlebach (U Toronto) "Ethnography of Affect"

Description:
Affect constitutes a rich site in anthropology, one of possibility but also caution. While rightly wary about romanticizing affect as a glimpse into uncharted social-analytical territory, anthropologists are also increasingly seeing affect as central to all processes of social mediation. The turn to affect in anthropology has enriched analyses of labor, ritual, bureaucracies and statecraft, imperial power and the postcolonial, public culture, violence and healing, gender and sexuality, and even the methods of ethnography itself. Most critically, perhaps, anthropologists are turning to affect to make sense both of the ordinary and of moments of radical social transformation. This workshop welcomes ethnographic projects focused on affect in its many forms and sites. Among the things we may discuss are: What analytical work does affect do in these ethnographic accounts? How do sensuous and tactile experiences link to broader social processes? Methodologically, how do we access affect as well as its objectification? And how does the surge in studies of affect relate to another set of key terms - emergence and potentiality - that are beginning to circulate widely in the discipline? We look forward to learning about your research projects.

3) Marisol de la Cadena (UC Davis) "Provincializing the Nature-Culture Divide"

Description:
In recent years, a number of theoretical developments in anthropology, geography, and Science and Technology Studies have problematized the modernist ontological divide between Nature and Culture and a whole series of binary oppositions that follow from it: mind-body. Subject-object, historical-ahistorical, representer-represented. We will discuss the conceptual-methodological tools that his concern with natureculture has generated: partial connections; the cyborg; multinaturalism; cosmopolitics; actor-network; intra-action; ontological politics. The epistemic and political implications of these tools go beyond their analytical usefulness as innovative devices to explore novel phenomena. They complicate well established fields of inquiry, s such as political ecology, sexuality and human reproduction, kinship, modern politics, and even history; as well as categories like space, place, and scale, and, indeed, the singular ontology that these fields sustain. How do we think 'research' after the provincialization of the nature-culture divide and the host of binary oppositions that follow?

4) Mayanthi Fernando (UC Santa Cruz) and Lucinda Ramberg (Cornell) "Sexuality/Secularity"

Description:
Anthropologists and other scholars have recently begun to problematize and to provincialize the ontological and epistemological assumptions that undergird ‘secularism’ as a political, legal, social formation. Part of that work – and the focus on this workshop – entails attending to the intersections of sex and secularity (and religion). How might the relationship between sexuality and secularity be mapped? Is sexuality one among many analytics to examine productively formations of the secular, or is there a more fundamental relationship between sexuality and secularity? Are the protocols for modern sexuality secular in their form? Does secularity mobilize a set of norms for the conduct and character of sexual personhood? How do protocols for sexual personhood function in relation to secularism as both a global project and a project that nonetheless instantiates differently in various local spaces? Moreover, what does recent work on sexuality and secularity imply for a (revised) anthropology of religion? And how can ethnography both generate and help to answer these kinds of questions? We are interested here in the conversation between queer and feminist theories that denaturalize reproductive heterosexuality and its gendered norms and theories of the theological-political that take up the relationship – integral to modernity – between religion and secularity.

Past Workshops

2010

2009

2008