ASA2016: Footprints and Futures: the Time of Anthropology

Przydatne informacje
Miasto: 
University of Durham
Data rozpoczęcia: 
04-07-2016
Zgłoszenia do: 
15-02-2016

The 2016 annual conference will attract over 500 social anthropologists and other social scientists to beautiful Durham next summer.

The conference will provide a space in which to consider the past impact and future directions of anthropological knowledge. In the shadow of debates on the Anthropocene, the event invites critical reflection on temporality and chronicity as contexts for social action and as organising principles of human narrative. The conference will be structured around five distinct sub-themes. These will consider the temporalities at work in 1) politics and economics; 2) development, energy and the natural world; 3) health and well-being; 4) cultural evolution and 5) the different modalities and experiences of fieldwork.

The call for papers is open and closes 15th February. Read why this theme was selected (below), then study theme in full, browse the accepted panels, and propose a paper. The call for labs and films will be announced in 2016.

Laura Bear (LSE) has accepted the association's invitation to deliver the Firth lecture. The other plenary speakers are all confirmed: Alex Alvergne, Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, Michael Jackson, Annemarie Mol, William Sax and Charles Stewart. They are listed on the theme and timetable pages, showing which sub-theme they will be addressing.

*Why ‘footprints and futures’?

The inspiration for ASA16 came in part from the magnificent, two volume Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology published in 2012.   This comprehensive, internationally-authored overview of social anthropology was originally conceived of by Richard Fardon in 2005 and the project carried on by subsequent ASA chairs John Gledhill and James Fairhead.  The assembly of over eighty reviews and commentaries relating to themes, theories, regions, issues and future directions of social anthropology was edited by Richard Fardon, the late Olivia Harris, Trevor Marchand, Mark Nuttall, Chris Shore, Veronica Strang and Richard Wilson.

In the Durham Department, we cover many of the sub-fields of anthropology. As such, we were keen to extend the spirit of the Handbook in using ASA16 as the occasion for a ‘brush with cutting edge opinion’  [Fardon 2012:1] and to do so on a number of different disciplinary fronts.  Taking a further cue from the Handbook we also wanted to incorporate reflection on ‘anthropologies to come’ [Marchand 2012: 217], the ‘futures’ of our title.   Indeed, it was fortuitous that the future directions outlined in the Handbook mapped neatly onto some of the main strengths of the Durham department.  We were keen to bring all this together in 2016-17 which marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of a Board of Studies in Anthropology at Durham.

Conference website