The Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level either in the Rhetoric of Global Imaginaries of Race, or, in Environmental Rhetoric. Applicants who work at the intersection of these two fields are also encouraged to apply.

In the field of the Rhetoric of Global Imaginaries of Race, the Department seeks applicants whose research and teaching are focused by the discursive structures and practices that shape imaginaries of race and racialization globally. In the field of Environmental Rhetoric, it seeks applicants whose research and teaching centers around the rhetorics that inform natural or built environments, or their interfaces. 

Rhetoric is a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary department distinguished by its ongoing interrogation of existing and emerging fields of knowledge at their boundaries. While the Department is open to all disciplines in the humanities or the humanistic social sciences, it strongly values theoretical approaches that cross conventional disciplinary divisions. For more information about Rhetoric, visit the Department’s homepage.

Applicants should demonstrate evidence of a strong humanistic research agenda and scholarly potential in areas that complement existing strengths in the Department, as well as an ability to teach a wide range of courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels, to mentor graduate students in the Ph.D. program, and to participate in departmental and campus life.

Review of applications will begin September 26, 2023.

Additional details and instructions on how to apply may be found here.

Members of the HAR community may be interested in a new working group on the history of the language sciences hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. The group’s thematic focus this year will be on questions of epistemic transfer, highlighting historical connections to physical anthropology, archaeology, comparative philology, and ethnomethodology, among other topics. Anyone interested is encouraged to preview the schedule and sign up for membership here.

The first meeting of this working group will take place on September 12th, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT. It will be an opportunity for framing, orientation, and introductions. Participants who want to attend are asked to read a short position paper in advance and to bring an object (possibly from summer reading, research, or lived experience) for show-and-tell. Further information, registration, readings, and the video conference link are available at the History of the Language Sciences working group page. The co-conveners hope to see some of you there!

The Royal Anthropological Institute is delighted to announce the call for panels for a major conference on Anthropology and Education that will take place at Senate House, University of London, 25 to 28 June 2024.

Please browse the Conference Website to learn more!

The Call for Panels will close on 13 October 2023. The Call for Papers will follow, opening on 1 November 2023. Registration will open 26 February 2024.

The RAI has chosen Anthropology and Education as the theme of the conference, a focus that is sparked by the multiple contemporary challenges that we are faced with as a discipline as we seek to teach and educate. We are equally convinced that the best way to face these challenges is to share best practice and new responses. For this reason, we are delighted to welcome as co-organisers the Education Commission of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the Teaching Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and the Council on Anthropology and Education of the American Anthropological Association.

The conference will be face to face only. However, in order to have as wide a possible a discussion as possible, we will be running a series of virtual events with our partners beforehand. These will be recorded and placed on our website in order to ensure their wide dissemination.

There will be distinct strands which we invite delegates to explore, of which we offer a brief explanation below. However, panel proposals are also invited on any topic that may be found of interest. In no particular order of priority these are:

Indigenous Boarding Schools The historic phenomenon of boarding schools which take indigenous peoples away from their homelands for education is well discussed, notably with regard to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. However, there has been something of a return to this system in other countries. This strand invites panel proposals that will enable comment and discussion, as well as whether it will be possible to develop suggestions for best practice in this regard that might be adopted at an international level.

Anthropology in Pre-University Environments There are often attempts to teach anthropology at the school level, a notable example of which is the International Baccalaureate in Anthropology, a qualification that is well-established. Other initiatives may be pursued at the national level, both with regard to primary and secondary school, with varying degrees of success. We invite panels that seek to share experiences, both with regard to success and failure as to how anthropology can be strengthened in schools.

Translating Cultures and Diaspora Communities Anthropologists have long regarded themselves as translating cultures, but there is a striking more recent phenomenon, which is the way that Diaspora communities have started to codify for teaching purposes their hitherto predominantly oral cultures, often seeking formal recognition they do so from their host society. One instance of this is the Alevi community originally from Turkey, but there are many others. Proposals are welcome that seek to unravel the complexity of the pedagogic issues that come to the fore when such texts books have to be written where none have previously existed.

Anthropology, AI and Media The recent Covid lockdown made us all realise that traditional anthropology teaching will have to adapt and change if it is to remain and flourish in the classroom. This strand invites panels which seek to share this, and similar experiences in using innovative media in the classroom. In this connection, it may be noted that there will be a film stream at the conference, and panel proposals concerning film and pedagogy are also welcome.

Anthropology, Teaching and Museums One of the most interesting aspects of anthropology in recent decades is the gradual rapprochement between anthropology teaching and ethnographic museums. This relationship, having been in the second half of the twentieth century often rather distant, now is a central and creative part of our discipline. Panels are invited that reflect upon the implications of this growing proximity, and consider how we can build further on it.

Anthropology, Representation and Ethics The intensification of globalisation has rendered ethical understandings of the way that our discipline can be taught in need of reconsideration and revision. How is anthropology going to adapt and change as it becomes only one of a number of multiple actors in this complex process of mutual interaction?

Academic Teaching and Truth University teaching can be nothing without freedom of expression. Yet, from various parts of the world there appears to be increasing intolerance of a plurality of views. How can we as anthropologists contribute toward maintaining the integrity of our Higher Education institutions, wherever they may be found? Panel proposals are particularly invited that give instances of these potential problems, from whatever location.

Public Anthropology The interface between anthropology as an academic discipline and its public presence is one of the most crucial questions facing the subject today. How can it appeal to a wider, non-specialist audience? How can it teach the subject in a transparent way that ensures that it gains and attracts wider interest without compromising its intellectual message? Proposals are most welcome that will help us address this dilemma.

Anthropology in Non-Anthropology Departments All around the world, anthropologists may find a teaching position in a non-anthropology department, and likewise many universities may not have a distinct departmental structure. What implications does this have for individual careers, teaching and intellectual trajectories of the subject? Panels are invited that consider any aspect of this fascinating question as to the relationship between individual anthropologists, anthropology as a discipline and the wider structures of academia.

CONFERENCE SUMMARY DETAILS

DATES: 25 June – 28 June 2024

LOCATION: Senate House, University of London

CONFERENCE TYPE: In person

IMPORTANT DATES:

Call for Panels opens on 1 June 2023 and closes on 13 October 2023

Call for Papers opens on 1 November 2023 and closes on 13 January 2024

Registration opens on 26 February 2024

CONFERENCE FEES:

RAI Fellows; EASA Members; AAA Members; IUAES Members: £320

RAI Members: £390

Non-members: £420

Concessions (students; unemployed; retired persons): £150

Delegates with low income from low income countries (https://g2lm-lic.iza.org/call-phase-iv/list-of-lic/): £100

All conference delegates must register and pay the conference fee.

CO-ORGANISERS:

RAI Education Committee

IUAES Commission on Anthropology and Education

EASA Teaching Anthropology Network

Council on Anthropology and Education, A section of the American Anthropological Association

The editors of HAR would like to draw your attention to this conference, which will be held in person and online May 19-20, 2023. Those interested in attending should register with Dr. Frederika Tevebring (frederika.tevebring@kcl.ac.uk).

Culture has always been on the move, but the notion that culture is itself a product of movement is relatively recent. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, scholars hypothesised that the world’s cultures developed not by linear evolution, but through migration, invasion, conquest, trade and exchange. Diffusionism became a master paradigm across several disciplines. The fascination and concern with how movement had shaped cultures historically reflected the anxieties of a time that witnessed more global migrations of people than ever before. Further, the modern quest for lost origins was (and is) inherently entangled in contemporary debates about the rights to land and resources.

This conference explores the relation between scientific and artistic imaginings of prehistoric migrations. To map cultural diffusion is also to theorize the relationship between bodies, place, art, and innovation. When investigating societies who have left no written records, the visual has a dual role: it is both the means by which these cultures are reconstructed, and the tool by which knowledge about them is disseminated. We ask how artists and scholars influenced one another in reconstructing lost origins, and probe the ways that these images were embedded in contemporary debates about race and migration.

The conference will take place in the River Room, King’s College London (The Strand, London WC2R 2LS) and online. Dates and times are as follows: Friday, May 19th, from 6pm – 8pm (BST) and Saturday, May 20th, 10am – 5pm (BST).

PROGRAMME

Friday, 19 May
18.00 – Keynote lecture: Michael Kunichika (Amherst): ‘Debating the Origins of Art: Case Studies from the Prehistoric Front of the Cold War’
Response: Maria Stavrinaki (Paris)
Wine reception

Saturday, 20 May
10.00 – Introductory remarks by Frederika Tevebring and Matthew Vollgraff
10.30 – Felix Wiedemann (Berlin): ‘Pure and Mixed Types. The Anthropological Reading of Ancient Works of Art and Their Use as Visual Evidence in Bio-historical Narratives at the Turn of the 20th Century’
10.50 – Frederika Tevebring (London): ‘Women are from Venus, Men are from the Russian Steppe: Gendering Prehistoric Migration’
11.10 – Response: John Robb (Cambridge)
11.20 – Discussion

11.50 – Carlotta Santini (Paris): ‘Under Western Eyes. Prehistoric Art and the Migration of Culture in the Work of Leo Frobenius’
12.10 – Matthew Vollgraff (London): ‘The Monarch and Medusa: Wilhelm II, Leo Frobenius and the Quest for Sacred Kingship’
12.30 – Response: John Tresch (London)
12.40 – Discussion

Lunch Break

14.30 – Jonathan Dentler (Paris): ‘Revisiting “Red Atlantis”: Hilaire Hiler’s Aquatic Park Mural Project (1936-1939) and the Transatlantic Frontier’
14.50 – Eva Miller (London): ‘Only America Can Americanize: Immigration, Inheritance, and Civic Art’
15.10 – Response: Alison Boyd (Utrecht)
15.20 – Discussion

15.50 – Hans Hönes (Aberdeen): ‘Prehistoric Art, Climate Change and 19th-Century Geographies of Culture’
16.10 – Sria Chatterjee (London): ‘The Robbery of the Soil: Vitalism, Nationalism, and Art in Early Twentieth-Century India’
16.30 – Response: Chris Manias (London)
16.40 – Discussion

Link to conference flyer

The editors of HAR would like to draw your attention to the following upcoming event: a free online discussion of Erving Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community”—newly published as an open access book. The event will take place on Friday, May 5, 2023 at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT/4pm BST/ 5pm CET). It will run 45 minutes.

Details:

• A Rosetta Stone for Erving Goffman: An Online Discussion on Goffman’s Newly Published Dissertation (1953)
• 5 May 2023, 15:00 UTC (11am EDT/4pm BST/5pm CET) [45 minutes]
• Register here
• Open access book 

Discussants:

• Yves Winkin, University of Liège
• Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, University of Wisconsin-Parkside
• Peter Lunt, University of Leicester
• Greg Smith, University of Salford
• Filipa Subtil, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa

Join Yves Winkin, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Peter Lunt, Greg Smith, and Filipa Subtil for a discussion of Erving Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, “Communication Conduct in an Island Community”, recently published as an open access book with a new introduction by Winkin. This free Zoom session, sponsored by mediastudies.press, marks the dissertation’s publication with a discussion of the work’s significance by Winkin and other leading Goffman scholars.

Canadian-born Erving Goffman (1922–1982) was the twentieth century’s most important sociologist writing in English. Goffman’s 1953 dissertation, based on fieldwork on a remote Scottish island, presents in embryonic form the full spread of his thought. Framed as a “report on a study of conversational interaction,” the dissertation lingers on the modest talk of island “crofters.” It is trademark Goffman: ambitious, unconventional in form, and brimmed with big-picture insight. The thesis is that social order is made and re-made in communication—the “interaction order” he re-visited in a famous and final talk before his death in 1982. The dissertation is, as Winkin writes in the new introduction, the “Rosetta stone for his entire work.” It was here, in 360 dense pages, that Goffman revealed, quietly, his peerless sensitivity to the invisible wireframes of everyday life.

mediastudies.press is a scholar-led, nonprofit, no-fee open access publisher in the media, film, and communication studies fields.

Questions? Email press@mediastudies.press

The Anthropology of Art Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) will host an in-person workshop on “Fieldwork Sketches: Blurring the Lines between Art and Anthropology,” 16 February 2024 at the RAI, 50 Fitzroy Street, London.

Deadline for abstract proposal submissions: 1 September 2023

Fieldwork sketches, drawings, diagrams, and illustrations have been used by anthropologists since the beginning of the discipline. From Franz Boas, to Levi-Strauss, Raymond Firth and more recently Michael Taussig and Tim Ingold among others, ethnographers have variably used or discussed them as helpful aids to the construction of anthropological knowledge.

Capitalising on examples from the rich visual material stored in the RAI collections, the present workshop intends to bring together researchers and scholars to discuss the nature, roles, and modes of communication embodied in fieldwork sketches with the aim of evaluating what kind of information can be elicited from a study of images made for ethnographic purposes.

The workshop is intended to be a first step towards recognising the significance of this much neglected area of anthropological data within its own discipline, but also with reference to cognate fields such as art history, folklore, and visual culture studies. Raising methodological and theoretical questions related to the production, use, purpose, and not least anthropology’s inattention to this vast field of enquiry, the workshop hopes to contribute to the recent ‘graphic turn’ in anthropology, a disciplinary stance concerned with the potential of images, pictures, drawings, and illustrations to elicit and construct anthropologically-rich information that complements textual based knowledge.

The RAI invites presentations focused but not limited to the following topics:

• Production of images in fieldwork settings
• Drawing as ethnography
• Illustrations’ relationship to Visual Anthropology
• Case studies (from RAI collections, from external sources)
• Comparisons between anthropological traditions
• Fieldwork illustrations/drawings as art
• Fieldwork illustrations/drawings as data
• Fieldwork illustrations/drawings between Folklore Studies and Visual Anthropology
• Images in anthropological books
• Illustrations and photography
• Style, aesthetics, accuracy, objectivity, naturalism in ethnographic drawings and illustrations
• Art with ethnographic subjects as anthropological data

The workshop will be held in form of a study day during which there will be ample time for discussion following presentations. The aim is twofold: draw the attention to the RAI collections; encourage research, discussion and further study of this important facet of anthropological knowledge construction.

Proposals should consist of a title and an abstract of 200 words (maximum) and be sent to: admin@therai.org.uk no later than 1 September 2023. Refreshments will be provided on the day, and there is no conference fee.

CFP: Fieldwork Technologies: Transitional Histories of Ethnographic Mediation (Panel)

AAA/CASCA 2023 Call for Papers

Organizers: Jennifer Hsieh (University of Michigan), Matthew C. Watson (Mount Holyoke College)

Mythologies of ethnographic research – past and present – often construct fieldwork as a series of unmediated intersubjective encounters. But particular tools routinely enable, shape, and frame ethnographers’ field experiences. This panel rethinks the mediation of anthropologists’ embodied sensory, technical, and epistemic labors through fine-grained attention to historically-specific fieldwork technologies. We expect the panel to draw together work on past and present fieldwork technologies in order to reframe constructions of the field’s history and rethink the contemporary techno-politics of extended ethnographic embodiment. How might attention to technologies aid us to recompose fieldwork’s history and to reimagine the technical, ethical, and epistemic contours of ethnography today? How have anthropologists, and the tools that they use, uniquely constructed ethnographic fieldwork at a specific time and place? 

While a longstanding literature – bridging anthropological subfields – examines the social production of technologies, comparatively little attention has been directed to ethnography’s own tools of mobility, recording and documentation, and inscription. Work on the practical, aesthetic, and epistemic shapes of film and photography comprises a clear exception to this technical aversion. But the ethnographic imagination also forms through technologies of travel and mobility, audio recording tools, and varied inscription devices – ranging from pen and paper to typewriters to contemporary tablets and computers. Such tool-enabled recording and textualization are not just objects for use by the researcher; they produce ethnographic insights and modes of theorization—in cases when the tools are deployed as intended, and in cases when they aren’t. These technologies further invite consideration of the limits and potentials of ethnographic embodiment and access in terms that might engage disability studies critiques.

We invite presenters to track the role of technologies in affecting the sensorial, political, and ethical shapes of ethnographic labor across fieldwork, interpretation, and exposition. While panelists should situate ethnographic fieldwork and writing in specific sociotechnical contexts, this work of contextualization may take up diverse theoretical inspirations, including research in the anthropologies of technology and the body, science & technology studies, disability studies, digital ethnography, feminist assemblage theory, and affect theory.

Orienting questions for historical and critical work on this topic may include:

• How is the sensory and bodily experience of fieldwork constrained or extended through technological mediation?
• How have technological transitions and transformations shifted the very construction (including the imaginable site) of the ethnographic “field?”
• How have shifts in technologies of mobility shaped the imagination, planning, and practice of fieldwork?
• How have transitions in inscription technologies – e.g., typewriters and computers – reshaped the evidentiary, analytical, and expository work of ethnography?
• How have transitions in computer technology shaped the interpretation of ethnographic data and, hence, the field’s prevailing narratives of theoretical development and change?
• How do computer programs, software, or apps yield distinct kinds of ethnographic reasoning and analysis?
• How has the development of cellphones into discrete and ubiquitous audiovisual devices affected the terms and practices of recording and analysis in the field?
• How have technologies of record keeping – e.g., bibliographies, filing cabinets, computer hard-drives, the “cloud” – affected modes of ethnographic reasoning and reportage?
• How have anthropologists adapted technologies, using them in unintended ways?

For consideration, please send a draft abstract to jchsieh@umich.edu and mcwatson@mtholyoke.edu by Friday, March 17, 2023.

The HAR editors would like to draw your attention to a recent interview with linguist Andrew Garrett on Alfred Kroeber. The interview, which relates to previous posts on this site, is in the podcast series created by the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences group, where you will regularly find content on the history of linguistic anthropology.

This episode of the podcast series is described by HPLS as follows:

In this episode we talk to Andrew Garrett about the life, work and legacy of American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber achieved a number of firsts in American anthropology: he was Boas’ first Columbia PhD and the first professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. But Kroeber is not only of historical interest. The recent “denaming” of Kroeber Hall at UC Berkeley illustrates the clash of the past with our present-day social and political concerns.