Risk and Disaster TIG call for proposals for 2025 SfAA (Portland)
Mark Schuller
Hello friends,
We hope this email finds you all healthy and resilient. We can’t believe that tomorrow is already August!
The TIG program committee (Terry Cannon, Irena Connon, Susanna Hoffman, myself, and Jennifer Trivedi) have put together this call for proposals for the TIG program at the SfAA conference in Portland, March 25-29. The text is copied below.
We ask that anyone interested in presenting on these questions submit their panel, paper, or poster abstracts to the SfAA annual meeting page when it opens by the October 15, 2024 deadline. In doing so, please select the Risk & Disaster TIG in the drop down menu as the appropriate group to consider your abstract.
We encourage everyone to use the Risk & Disaster TIG Listserv or Social Media to connect with others who are interested in forming collaborative panels. You can also use the directory to identify people who do similar work. To be listed or to update your information on the directory, please complete this form.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Risk & Disaster TIG leadership at riskanddisastertig [at] gmail [dot] com.
Thank you all. Have a good day!
Sincerely,
Mark and Irena, co-chairs
***
RISK AND DISASTER TIG CALL FOR PANELS & PAPERS FOR THE 85TH SFAA ANNUAL MEETING, 25th – 29th MARCH 2025, PORTLAND, OREGON
Revitalizing Applied Anthropology Work on Risk and Disasters
Given the acceleration of crises around the globe, the applied anthropology of Risk and Disaster has not only grown in recent years but represents a vitally important field of applied anthropology. However, despite over fifty years of applied anthropological research on risk and disaster and its recent expansion, we are now faced with an increasingly alarming situation as disasters continue to affect ever increasing numbers of people worldwide.
This, along with the pivotal role that anthropologists play in disaster studies more widely, makes it vitally important to critically reflect on the field’s achievements and shortcomings to date and to consider how to revitalize our efforts and continue building on previous endeavors to address ongoing suffering, losses, inequalities and inequities that lead to and result from disasters.
The Risk & Disaster TIG and the wider SfAA provide an important space for applied anthropologists who focus on risks and disasters from a variety of perspectives, as well as for those who temporarily move through this space as risks or disasters impact other areas of their work and the communities in which they work. This includes gatherings and communications within the TIG and in how the TIG converses with other groups, including the ExtrACTION TIG, PESO, and others.
The annual meeting in Portland offers an opportunity to think, share, collaborate, and critically re-examine, reconsider, and think about the ways we can revitalize the applied anthropology of risk and disasters. Large scale disasters and their aftermaths have always drawn more attention to our field of work, and COVID-19 has been no different. But as we progress forward, how should our work continue? In this light, we ask our members to consider a range of critical questions in their abstracts, including those asked by the larger SfAA and building beyond them:
- How can we build on what we know from previous risks and disasters to improve steps taken before, during, and after disasters and compounding disasters in the future?
- How should we revitalize our previous and ongoing work for a changing future?
- How can we do better at collaborating with a wider range of people? How do we listen better?
- How do we build on the history of risk and disaster applied anthropology to position it more centrally at the forefront of critical work on risk and disasters more broadly in the social sciences?
- How can we continue to reach across disciplinary boundaries to share what risk and disaster applied anthropologists know with other fields, in the social sciences and beyond?
- What concerns remain and what new concerns should our work now address?
- What concepts and theories that have shaped the history of the applied anthropology of risk and disaster and/or applied anthropology more broadly remain vital and how might these best be applied in changing and accelerating contexts of crises?
- How can we continue to build upon previous and ongoing efforts to diversify and decolonize the applied anthropology of risk and disaster as well as reconsider and revitalize our methodologies for doing applied anthropology in an age of cascading disasters and advancing precarity?
- How can we continue to develop and enhance anthropological methodologies and methods and apply these in ways that address uneven power dynamics in applied research on risk and disaster? How can the Society for Applied Anthropology and Risk & Disaster TIG better serve as the juncture where the practice of anthropology informs the discipline’s intellectual core?
- How might we best navigate a tenuous future for higher education institutions? How might we best navigate the complexities of practitioner futures?
- How might we better navigate working across academic and practitioner boundaries?
- What can we discern from the emergence and practice of the applied social sciences in varied global settings outside the United States?
- What can we discern from the ongoing political conflicts that look to reshape preparedness for, responses to, and recovery from risks and disasters around the world? How can we best approach navigating these situations?
- What can we do to best help students and junior scholars and practitioners to progress through their careers as risk and disaster interested applied anthropologists?
We ask that anyone interested in presenting on these questions submit their panel, paper, or poster abstracts to the SfAA annual meeting page when it opens by the October 15, 2024 deadline. In doing so, please select the Risk & Disaster TIG in the drop down menu as the appropriate group to consider your abstract.
We encourage everyone to use the Risk & Disaster TIG Listserv or Social Media to connect with others who are interested in forming collaborative panels. You can also use the directory to identify people who do similar work. To be listed or to update your information on the directory, please complete this form.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Risk & Disaster TIG leadership at riskanddisastertig [at] gmail [dot] com.
Mark Schuller, Professor
Anthropology and Nonprofit and NGO Studies
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
http://www.humanityslaststand.org