32nd Annual James C. Young Colloquium
Conversations Toward Community and Diversity
February 18th, 2012
Call for Papers
Abstract Submission Deadline: January 20th, 2012
The Student Association of Graduate Anthropologists at the University of California, Riverside invites you to submit your abstracts for the 32nd annual James C. Young Colloquium. The colloquium, to be held on February 18th 2012, is an excellent opportunity to present your ideas and to engage in a dialogue with students and faculty from a variety of disciplines, departments, and campuses.
The theme of this year’s colloquium is: Conversations Toward Community and Diversity. While, once upon a time, the pursuit of many social sciences, including anthropology, may have been toward universal laws of behavior and sweeping generalizations of large-scale populations, recently there has been a move toward the local. In refocusing on the local and on community, we have begun to restructure the way we think about dichotomies of power, and have begun to see complex webs of communication and agentic actors where before we saw static, simplistic, oppressed populations. Moreover, we have come to understand that diversity, both at the social and biological level, is actually a key feature in developing adaptive strategies and new approaches to old problems aiding in the overall vitality of many communities. While exploring concepts of community elsewhere, however, the question of what constitutes an academic community and the importance of academic diversity has fallen to the wayside. The inability to communicate across our own disciplines has inhibited progress within the field of anthropology as well as many other disciplines in the social sciences. It is our belief that by bringing together up-and-coming scholars from a range of disciplines, we can begin a conversation to move toward a more diverse, inclusive, and progressive academy. Moreover, the perspectives offered by an interdisciplinary forum will encourage young scholars to reevaluate approaches to research and the development of arguments. The Student Association of Graduate Anthropologists welcomes abstract submissions from undergraduate and graduate students from all disciplines.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words, using the attached form, in WORD.doc format by January 20th 2012 to the James C. Young Committee at JamesYoungColloq@gmail.com (Electronic submissions only please).
Equipment: Projectors and laptops for PowerPoint presentations will be provided in each conference room (Please make sure your PowerPoint presentation is compatible with versions 97, 2003, or 2007 for PCs or version 2008 for Mac). Most memory media should be supported, but it is always a good idea to bring your own laptop to test your slide show before hand, just in case.
For further information, please direct all inquires and questions to the committee at
JamesYoungColloq@gmail.comor visit our website at http://anthropology.ucr.edu/news_events/index.html.