I’m posting this message on behalf of my fellow SLA Executive Committee Member at Large, Jillian Cavanaugh, who is organizing this year’s SLA Annual Student Paper Prize competition.

In the hope of having more submissions and a more competitive field, she is extending the deadline until June 30. She would also like to make you aware that the cash prize (both undergraduate and graduate) is $500; and that the SLA will provide $300 in travel reimbursement for the prize winners, in order to help ensure that they’ll be able to attend the AAA conference and accept their prizes in person.

Details about the competition are below. Please contact Jillian directly, at the address given below, with any questions–and with your entries for the competition! (She may have somewhat irregular access to email, but she’ll get back to you.)

Yours,
Paul Garrett

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Dear SLA Colleagues,

On behalf of the SLA Executive Committee, I invite you to participate in this year’s Society for Linguistic Anthropology student essay prize competition for the best undergraduate and graduate papers in linguistic anthropology.

If you are a student who has written a paper that meets the contest guidelines (see below), please consider submitting it! If you are a faculty member who has read a student paper that you feel is worthy of consideration, please encourage the author to submit it.

Jillian R. Cavanaugh
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Brooklyn College, CUNY
2900 Bedford Ave.
Brooklyn NY 11215
(718) 951-5000 ex. 3803
jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu

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Society for Linguistic Anthropology Annual Student Essay Competition

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology holds an annual student essay competition at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In order to be eligible for one of these awards, the entrant must have been either a graduate or undergraduate student in a degree-granting program when the paper was written; must be the sole author of the paper; and must submit the paper no more than two years after it was written.

The paper must be an original work based on original research conducted by the author. It will be evaluated on the basis of its clarity, significance to the field, and substantive contribution. The paper should be suitable for submission to the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and must not exceed 25 double-spaced pages, not including bibliography. At the time of submission for this competition, the paper must not have been published or submitted for publication.

Submissions will be evaluated by a panel of judges. A prize will be awarded in each category only if a submission of sufficiently high quality is received. The winner or winners will be announced at the SLA business meeting, which is held during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The winner in each category (undergraduate and graduate) receives an award certificate as well as a cash prize. The graduate winner is invited and encouraged to submit his/her work for publication as an article in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.

Entries must be submitted electronically in either .pdf or .doc format. They should be sent to Jillian Cavanaugh (SLA Executive Committee Member at Large and organizer of this year’s competition) at jcavanaugh@brooklyn.cuny.edu by the deadline of June 30. The cover sheet should include: the title of the paper; the author’s name; the author’s email address; the author’s college or university affiliation; the prize category (undergraduate or graduate) for which the paper is being submitted; and the name of the faculty member who served as the student’s advisor with respect to the writing of the paper.

http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/about/prizes/

If this is a useful resource for you, we will hope to set up discount arrangements with other publishers in the future, as many of our sister professional organizations have. And if there are other things you’d like to see on our website, please let us know through this contact page.

6 undergraduate credits in anthropology

May 25–July 8, 2010 (two days on-campus, six weeks abroad)

Maury Hutcheson, Ph.D. mhutcheson@vcu.edu

Program cost: $2,380 (includes roundtrip airfare) plus applicable VCU tuition[1]

Based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, this six-week program will provide students with a comprehensive overview of Mayan indigenous life in Guatemala, past and present, including opportunities for individual and group research through participant observation, attendance at cultural events, lectures on selected topics, and excursions to museums and major archaeological sites, dating from the earliest days of the Olmec/Maya transition to the contact-era capitals that were toppled by the Spanish conquistadors. Highland Guatemala provides an ideal setting in which to explore different topics such as cultural pluralism, religious conservation and change, local responses to globalization and cultural revitalization movements. Students will gain practical experience in a variety of ethnographic research techniques as well as the ethical dimension of anthropological fieldwork while exploring historical continuities and transformations in Mayan culture and religious practice, especially in response to economic globalization and tourism. Students live with Guatemalan families. Course instruction is in English, but incorporates individualized one-on-one tutoring in Spanish. The program is well suited for students in anthropology, international studies, history, and religious studies. Interethnic relations between the Maya and their non-indigenous Ladino neighbors will be a special focus of this year’s program.

The international program fee of $2,380 includes the following:

• Roundtrip airfare
• All accommodations
• All meals while living with Guatemalan families
• Study visits and cultural excursions
• Ground transportation
• On-site program director support
• Application fee and deposit
• International Student Identification Card

Registration deadline: March 26, 2010

For more information, and to apply, visit the program website at:

http://www.international.vcu.edu/abroad/programs/vcu/programdetail/p48.aspx

[1] Out-of-state students who participate in faculty-led VCU Study Abroad programs are eligible for a 40 percent discount on the regular out-of-state tuition costs.

(please feel free to forward this email to potentially interested parties )

Dear Linguistic Anthropologists,

It’s that time of year again:  The Society for Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) invites your submissions for the American Anthropological Association’s 2010 Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, on November 17-21.  As this year’s SLA Section Program Editor, I am writing to encourage you to submit invited sessions, volunteered sessions, and volunteered papers and posters so that we can have an exciting meeting in New Orleans this November.  The theme of the 2010 Meeting is “Circulation.”  I hope that you will consider orienting your panels to the conference theme (see below), although you do not have to do so.

There are two deadlines for submission:  an internal SLA deadline for Invited Sessions (Friday, March 5), and the AAA deadline for volunteered sessions and volunteered papers/posters (5pm, Eastern Time, Thursday, April 1).  While you must submit your materials to the AAA website for both of these submission processes before these respective deadlines at www.aaanet.org , Invited Session submissions must also be sent by the March 5th deadline directly to the Program Chair (kira.hall@colorado.edu).  Your email to me should include a copy of your session abstract as well as individual paper abstracts from each of your proposed participants.  I will then send these out to the SLA Program (6-member) Committee for review.  (Note: Invited Session submissions to the AAA website by March 5 can still be somewhat preliminary;  you can make changes on your submission up until the general deadline on April 1.)

The word limit for a session abstract is 500 words and for a paper abstract 250 words.  More detailed information on panel or paper submission can be found on the AAA meetings website (www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm) under “Call for Papers PDF.”

This year, the Society for Linguistic Anthropology is encouraging panel organizers to make use of the official SLA website for the building of sessions: www.linguisticanthropology.org.  We encourage SLA members as well as nonmembers to visit the site and post descriptions of panels-in-progress.  This is potentially a great way to find other scholars working in your area of interest.  The email linganth list is also a great place to advertise panel ideas; for information on how to subscribe, visit http://www.linguisticanthropology.org/resources/mailing-lists/.

INVITED SESSIONS

For those of you unfamiliar with the conference structure, Invited Sessions are, in the words of the AAA, “innovative, synthesizing sessions intended to reflect the state-of-the-art in the major subfields and the thematic concerns of those fields.”  The SLA Program Committee is responsible for selecting sessions for invited status; we are especially interested in panels that feature cutting edge research and theory, topics that cross subdisciplines, and/or topics related to this year’s meeting theme.  If you are organizing a panel and would like it to be considered for invited status, please notify me of your interest via email (kira.hall@colorado.edu) as soon as possible, but by March 5th at the very latest (when the full panel submission is due).  Again, you must submit your materials both to the AAA website and to me (preferably in pdf format) by the March 5th deadline.  (When you submit your panel to the website, you will not yet know whether or not it has been chosen for invited status, so simply submit it as a volunteered session.  We can always change the session status later, should your panel be selected as invited.)

Important note:  The SLA unfortunately has very few allotted spaces for Invited Sessions:  we can choose either 3 single panels or 1 double panel plus 1 single panel.  We therefore encourage you to consider the possibility of having another AAA section co-sponsor your panel with the SLA, so that we can put more Invited Sessions on the conference program.  If there are other sections that you feel your panel might interest, please specify this on your application to me and I will consult with the Program Section Editor in those sections to see if there is a possibility for collaboration.  For a list of other AAA sections, consult www.aaanet.org/sections/ .  (You can also contact other Section Program Editors directly on your own, to see if co-sponsorship might be a possibility.)

If your panel is selected for invited status, I will send you an email to this effect in late March, with a password to use on-line.  You will need this password to answer question 2 on the proposal form, so as to complete your on-line submission by the deadline on April 1.

CONFERENCE THEME:

Please refer to the AAA website for more details on the theme, at www.aaanet.org/meetings/Call-for-Papers.cfm .  The AAA elaborates on the theme as follows:

“New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meeting: “Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms.
The idea of circulation invites us to consider what triggers, facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes, and for whom; and what their consequences might be for humans and for the environment. It opens up questions about what exactly circu lates: signs, objects or bodies. Do different things circulate in different ways? Do they change or remain constant? What new phenomena, arrangements and inequalities does circula tion produce? How are resources and ways of understanding them identified, made sense of, produced and distributed in the process? How and why do rates and types of circulation vary across time and space? What crystallizes and what continues to flow and reshape?
“Circulation” also invites us to think across boundaries, whether those are boundaries orga nizing phenomena we seek to describe and explain, boundaries within and across disciplines, or boundaries among anthropologists or other social groups. It asks us to turn our attention to zones of encounter, conjunctions and liminal passages. It also requires us to ask whether “circulation” is a helpful trope for the production of anthropological knowledge. What light does it shed on the (increasingly widely circulating) concept of “culture”—argu ably the central organizing construct of anthro pology—and on anthropology itself?
We are interested in bringing together papers reflecting the perspectives of all subfields and forms of anthropological practice, or across them, investigating this theme with data, method and theory oriented to all temporal and spatial horizons.”

ADDITIONAL DETAILS:

The AAA has again asked Program Chairs to encourage their memberships to consider allotting more time for discussion and experimenting with non-traditional formats.  You can certainly fall back on the tried-and-true standard sorts of formats if you wish, but the SLA Program Committee is eager to consider variation.  This year, the AAA is also encouraging submissions and presentations in languages other than English, a development that is obviously of great interest to us as linguistic anthropologists. If you are thinking of submitting a bilingual or multilingual panel, I encourage you to contact me in advance, as I will need to set up appropriate reviewers for assessing the submission.

Finally: Registration waiver. In an effort to facilitate the participation of and increase members’ access to international and community-based scholars at the AAA annual meetings, one registration waiver will be made available to each of the 38 sections of the AAA Section Assembly, of which SLA is a member. Unused or unallocated waivers will go back into a pool and a lottery held to redistribute them. Qualifying scholars need not be current AAA members and cannot hold employment in university-based anthropology departments nor work as practicing anthropologists in any of the discipline’s four main subfields (archaeology, sociocultural, biological, linguistic). Registration and membership fees will be waived for the qualifying scholar nominated by sections to receive this waiver. Individual qualifying scholars are responsible for all other conference-associated costs.The AAA deadline for the waiver nomination is March 1, so session organizers must contact Kira Hall before that date with nominations. Along with information on the proposed session, please provide the name of the qualifying scholar nominated to receive the section’s waiver, and a short description of the nature of the scholar’s proposed meeting participation as well as her or his credentials and qualifications (i.e., non-anthropologist, community-based scholar, international scholar, etc).

Please contact me if you have any questions.  I’m looking forward to another exciting AAA Annual Meeting with strong SLA participation!

Kira Hall
Chair, SLA Program Committee

***************
Kira Hall, Associate Professor
Director, Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP)
Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology
Campus Box 295
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado  80309-0295
Phone: (303)492-2912
Fax: (303)492-4416
Web: www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall/

The AAA is creating a Student Representative Caucus and wishes to include representatives from the various sections. Although SLA does not have a student representative on it board, we’ve been invited to appoint a student to the caucus who is interested in representing our wing and communicating to other SLA students about the caucus’s and AAA’s activities.

Please see the description below of the caucus’ makeup and activities, from its chair, Jason Miller.

We have been given a very narrow window in which to nominate such a representative for this year. If you would be like to be considered for this, please send a brief statement of your interest and your c.v. to kwoolard@ucsd.edu no later than 5 pm EST on Monday, January 25.

Addendum:  Please include names of 3 references and ask your faculty advisor/supervisor to email a reference for you.

If you are interested, or you would like to nominate someone who would be good for the position, please contact Kit Woolard president, Society for Linguistic Anthropology by January 25, 2010, by email at kwoolard@ucsd.edu. If you are applying for the position, please attach a CV and a statement describing your interest in the position; if you are nominating someone, please send contact information and a brief rationale supporting the nomination.

Below is a brief description of the JLA editor’s duties:

The JLA editor is appointed for a three-year term and oversees the publication of two issues of the journal each year.
The editor’s responsibilities include: facilitating peer review for article submissions, assigning books reviews (or designating a book review editor to do this), evaluating proposals for special issues, commissioning review articles on topics of current interest in the field, and working with Wiley-Blackwell (the publisher) on copyediting, proofreading and completing the production process.