We’re beginning our 2008 round of podcasts! I’d like to thank Russell Willems for doing the audio editing!

Below is a list of the speakers in the order of their presentation as well as their paper abstracts as found in the 2008 SfAA Annual Meeting program. Note that as the session chair, Kedia introduces each speaker.

CHAIR: Satish Kedia (U Memphis)

Presidential Plenary Session in Honor of John van Willigen:
The Art and Science of Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century.
Anthropology has historically represented a bridge between the arts and sciences in explorations of human cultures. Anthropologists’ seamless blending of humanity and scientific rigor to address contemporary public issues to meet the needs of the larger community, both globally and locally, pushes us to the forefronts of engaged scholarship. As our discipline evolves and adapts to continual changes in the cultures and institutions around the world, the work of applied anthropologists becomes even more critical in transforming their knowledge into meaningful practices. This session will respond to some of these issues and provide frameworks for the future direction of applied anthropology and its practitioners in the 21st century. The plenary session will include an open forum and a reception in honor of John van Willigen.

Susan Andreatta (U NC-Greensboro)

Marietta L. Baba (Michigan State U)

Truth and Reconciliation: Acknowledging Mutual Theory-Practice Exchanges in an Era of Anthropological Engagement
The history of anthropology reveals the relevance of larger contexts to theory-practice relations. Practice has played a leading role in periods of economic and political turbulence in nations around the world. Periods of theoretical development often are related to, or follow on from, engagement in the larger world, whether this is acknowledged or not. The present era of uncertainty is one that challenges theoretical structures to respond to rapid changes in our contexts; engagement, not only criticism, is an ethical responsibility and a requirement for learning. This paper acknowledges the historical and current exchanges of theory and practice, and explores ways to reconcile these crucial forms of inquiry with new intellectual approaches that can encourage synergy between them.

Erve Chambers (U Maryland)

Applied Ethnography, Part Two
Nothing in anthropology brings us closer to bridging the artfulness of our profession and the scientific rigor of our discipline than does the melding of those processes that underlie the production of ethnography and the conceptualization of culture. How are ethnography and culture transformed as we learn to situate both as processes in which we participate rather than as properties that we declare? How are the practice of ethnography and the declaration of culture affected by our relationships with research clients, our obligations to the subjects of our inquiries, and our engagement with what we perceive to be a greater public good?

Please click here to listen to the audio

OR click download audio
OR Subscribe to podcast.

I’d like to thank our 2008 SfAA Podcast team for all of their great work last week!  Everyone was SO wonderful and I think we all had a lot of fun while working so hard

The majority of the speakers in the seventeen sessions were also super wonderful, helpful, and understanding when we ran into a few glitches.  Thank you speakers!!

And, of course, thank you to the SfAA Office for all of their support and work- we can’t do it without you Tom, Melissa, Trish, and Neil!

And lastly, thank you to the UNT department of anthropology for their support and for providing us with a lot of great material resources.  StickerGiant.com also provided us with really neat stickers which we handed out in Memphis- we had a ton of compliments on the stickers

I’ve posted the tentative schedule of the 2008 SfAA Podcasts.  I say it’s tentative because timely publication of the blog posts and audio is dependent on the speakers to an extent- I need them to submit their bio info for the post as well as electronic versions of the papers and PowerPoints (this is optional, but I encourage it).   It’s also tentative because I may publish podcasts early if I have extra time to work on the editing.  I chose the order based on the ease of coordinating with speakers and the amount of editing involved with the audio files.

Here is the (very) tentative schedule of podcasts for the 68th Annual Meeting of the Society of Applied Anthropology (SfAA).

14 April 2008 Presidential Plenary Session in Honor of John van Willigen: The Art and Science of
Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century

17 April 2008 Preparing Applied Anthropologists for the 21st Century, Part I

21 April 2008 Preparing Applied Anthropologists for the 21st Century, Part II

24 April 2008 Working with Governmental Agencies, Part I

28 April 2008 Working with Governmental Agencies, Part II

5 May 2008 The Scholar-Practitioner in Organizational Settings

8 May 2008 For Love and Money: Employment Opportunities in Medical Anthropology (SMA)

12 May 2008 COPAA International Invited Speaker

15 May 2008 Embodied Danger: The Health Costs of War and Political Violence (SMA)

22 May 2008 Mobile Work, Mobile Lives: Cultural Accounts of Lived Experiences

26 May 2008 Practitioners Rise to the Challenge: A Discussion of Methods in Business
Ethnography

29 May 2008 The Flawed Economics of Resettlement and Its Impoverishing Effects: What Can Social Scientists Do?

2 June 2008 Visualizing Change: Emergent Technologies in Social Justice Inquiry and Action,
Part I: Digital Storytelling and PhotoVoice

5 June 2008 Visualizing Change: Emergent Technologies in Social Justice Inquiry and Action,
Part II: Participatory Mapping and Visual Arts

12 June 2008 SMA Plenary Session: The Political Construction of Global Infectious Disease
Crises

16 June 2008 Anthropology Engages Immigration Reform

19 June 2008 Anthropology of the Consumer

Last week the SfAA Office began to contact each speaker in the 18 selected sessions to request their permission to be recorded for the podcasts. Each speaker received an email explaining what the project is, what will happen the day of, and asking them to sign and return a consent form to me before February 25, 2008.

I’ve already received a lot of ‘yes’ responses but we’ll wait until we receive permission from each session before we release the preliminary schedule.

For those of you that are in a session and have been contacted by the SfAA Office to participate in the podcast project, I’d like to remind you that we’re encouraging speakers to submit contact information (e-mail, phone number), personal website, a picture, recent/relevant publication titles and/or a PDF of your paper or PowerPoint to compliment the blog post that will be associated with the recording of the session. We found that additional information about speakers was very useful to listeners in 2007. If you’re interested in providing this information please email me before (or very shortly after) the Memphis meeting. (email:jencardew[at]gmail[dot]com)

(Here’s a great example of a blog post from last year when the speakers submitted extra information.)

Our very own Diana Harrelson has created a new logo for the project and it looks great! It’s a redesign of last year’s logo and is really a great improvement (I did last years, so I can say that )

Thanks Diana!

That’s right, we’ve extended the deadline until Friday. We’re looking for a few more people to join our team and we’ve expanded our search to include recent graduates (graduated from grad or undergrad in 2007).

Here’s the original post about the team member application:

The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Podcast team announces six openings for team members to participate in an ongoing podcasting project at the 2008 SfAA Annual Meeting, March 24 - 29, 2008, in Memphis, TN. The primary responsibility will be to audio record sessions and publicize the SfAA podcasts at the SfAA Annual Meeting. Interested individuals will be asked to dedicate 15 hours to the project between February 15 and April 30, 2008. All team member positions have identical duties and are open to any student, undergraduate or graduate, who will be attending the 2008 Annual Meeting of the SfAA in Memphis, TN March 24 - 29, 2008. Previous experience in audio recording or podcasting is not necessary as there will be training involved.

The SfAA Podcasts project began at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the SfAA in Tampa, Florida, managed by Jen Cardew. This year the project will be co-managed by Jen Cardew and Diana Harrelson. The goal of the 2008 SfAA Podcast team is to record 15 selected sessions, to be published to the web as free podcasts, making the meeting accessible to students who cannot travel as well as to members of other disciplines. Please visit this page for more information.

The deadline for applications is January 28, 2008 February 1, 2008. The application process is described in this PDF document:Team Member Application

Please help us spread the word about the available team member positions and link back to this page!

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!!

As of yet I have not received many suggestions for which sessions to record at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the SfAA. The original deadline was January 18, but I am extending it to January 23. Please see this post for details about making suggestions.

Also, I’d like to remind everyone that the deadline for team member applications is January 28, 2008.  Please see this post (original announcement) for details and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Podcast team announces six openings for team members to participate in an ongoing podcasting project at the 2008 SfAA Annual Meeting, March 24 - 29, 2008, in Memphis, TN. The primary responsibility will be to audio record sessions and publicize the SfAA podcasts at the SfAA Annual Meeting. Interested individuals will be asked to dedicate 15 hours to the project between February 15 and April 30, 2008. All team member positions have identical duties and are open to any student, undergraduate or graduate, who will be attending the 2008 Annual Meeting of the SfAA in Memphis, TN March 24 - 29, 2008. Previous experience in audio recording or podcasting is not necessary as there will be training involved.

The SfAA Podcasts project began at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the SfAA in Tampa, Florida, managed by Jen Cardew. This year the project will be co-managed by Jen Cardew and Diana Harrelson. The goal of the 2008 SfAA Podcast team is to record 15 selected sessions, to be published to the web as free podcasts, making the meeting accessible to students who cannot travel as well as to members of other disciplines. Please visit this page for more information.

The deadline for applications is January 28, 2008. The application process is described in this PDF document:Team Member Application

Please help us spread the word about the available team member positions and link back to this page!

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!!

I’ve started a discussion about which sessions people would like to have recorded at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the SfAA in the SfAA Ning Community SfAA Podcast group. Membership to the SfAA Ning Community is free and open to everyone.

Here is a copy of the post there (you can respond here if you would like):

Hello everyone!

We decided not to host a poll of the www.SfAApodcasts.net website but we’d still like to hear what sessions you would like to have recorded!

Here’s your assignment: Go through the SfAA preliminary program (available here: http://sfaa.net/sfaa2008.html) and pick what sessions you’d like to have recorded at the 2008 Annual Meeting.

Please consider:
*Topic is “hot”
*Topic is of widespread interest to many people
*Famous speakers

You can vote for your own session to if you want. SUGGESTIONS ARE DUE JANUARY 18. You can post them here or email them to me (jencardew@gmail.com). Please include the session number, e.g. S-46, and the session title.

The podcast project will be continued at the 2008 Meeting of the SfAA in Memphis, TN and planning is well underway! There are a few editions this year. I’ve asked Diana Harrelson to co-manage the project with me this year. My hope is that Diana will take over the project in 2009 and that she will find someone to co-manage it with her. We’ll also be hiring additional team members to help with the project, right now it seems like we’ll be adding six more positions. Details about the team member positions are forthcoming but I can say that there will be an application process, there will be a small payment for the position, and team members will receive free registration to the Meeting (thank you SfAA!!). We’ll be posting additional information about these positions along with the applications in the upcoming month.

The focus for the project this year is to create a sustainable project that can become a part of the SfAA for many years to come (although we may have to update our technology With this said, we’ll be recording 15 sessions in Memphis- this is 5 more sessions than last year. Instead of expanding the project we are going to focus the majority of our efforts on creating training manuals, developing the website, and documenting the entire process so that future SfAA podcasters can use it as a reference. We’re coordinating our efforts using Basecamp.

More updates will come soon. Please see our article in the November SfAA newsletter.