ASA2021: RESPONSIBILITY
Online, 29 March - 1 April 2021
ASA2021. Online, 29 March - 1 April 2021
Call for Laboratories
#ASAResponsibilityThe Call for Laboratories is now open and will close at 23:59 GMT on 28 December. Please read the Call text below; you can submit your lab proposal via the “Propose Your Lab” button.
The ASA2021 Laboratories programme will provide spaces and opportunities for participants to explore the conference themes in sessions that differ from panels. With more flexible, experimental and collaborative formats, Laboratories will aim at opening up new methodological, ethical and epistemological possibilities for anthropological theory and practice. Labs will not gather individual 'paper' presentations, but the activities that are explored and executed will be done together, the convenors in collaboration with the participants.
Please note that since the conference will take place online, Labs need to be suitable for the virtual format and must actively incorporate and allow for participant engagement. Labs can require pre-registration (convenors can create Google forms for gathering participant data) and some preparation from pre-registered participants.
ASA2021 asks the potential lab proposers to consider the following key questions: Should anthropology be held responsible for the knowledge it produces? Why and on what terms? Is it necessarily correct to expect that anthropologists have responsibilities? And if so, who defines what they are? Is irresponsibility necessarily problematic? What responsibilities might anthropology or anthropologists demand of others? And has anthropology reached its limits of its “responsible image” (as both translator and provider of qualitative analysis) in light of current indigenous critiques of ethnography?
Alongside the conference panels, the Laboratories programme aims to engage with, trouble, challenge and critique these questions so as to stimulate debate around the conference sub-themes: extinction; who speaks and for whom?; evidence; health, and wellbeing; morality and legality; irresponsibility and failure.
Laboratories will be designed as interactive, reflexive and/or experimental sessions that prioritise dialogue and the exploration of questions rather than the presentation of research results. As noted above, Labs should be designed with the online format in mind. Interdisciplinary Labs are particularly welcomed.
Lab programme convenor: Emily Stevenson (University of St Andrews)
Proposing the lab
To convene a Lab, please submit a proposal through the online system used for the conference 'Call for Papers'. Notifications sent by the system will refer to your Lab as a 'paper' - by 'paper', in this case, the system means a 'Lab'.
Proposals should provide:
- a title for the Lab
- the name/s and email address/es of the Lab convenors
- a short abstract (fewer than 300 characters)
- a long abstract (fewer than 250 words)
The long abstract should outline the Lab's requirements, e.g. technical and material requirements. Please indicate the maximum number of participants for your Lab to run effectively, and also what participants will need (if anything) during the Lab activity. It is possible to limit the number of participants through the pre-registration system.
