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2020 Intersections: Adversity, Identity, Perspectives

 

Intersections: Adversity, Identity, Perspectives

54th Annual Conference, Southern Anthropological Society and

Fourth Biennial Conference on Disasters, Displacement and Human Rights (DDHR)

April 3-5, 2020

The Southern Anthropological Society and

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Submissions due TBD | Call for Papers
Keynote speakers
Alisse Waterson, Presidential Scholar and Professor of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Past President of the American Anthropological Association, Author of “My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century” and editor of “An Anthropology of War: Views from the Frontline.” Faye V. Harrison, Professor of Anthropology and African-American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, author of “Outsider Within: Reworking of Anthropology in the Global Age” and editor of “Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights; African American Pioneers in Anthropology; and Decolonizing Anthropology” (three editions).
Intersections are a defining point of the human condition. The social constructs and material realities of race, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and class frame the human experience from the everyday mundane to the highest levels of institutional and structural hierarchies. Intersections within the context of disasters, displacement, and human rights are crucial variables of analysis studied by a multitude of disciplines and can define both research methods and applications. Intersections can subvert race and gender binaries, and expose the underlying nuances of structural violence, post-disaster relief efforts, identity politics, rights-claiming, and legacies of exclusion of marginalized groups. A focus on intersections highlights the ways underlying vectors of identity formation and their material groundings both connect and divide communities, as well as support and deconstruct prevailing social structures. Similarly, the concept of intersections draws attention to the possibilities (and limitations) inherent in multidisciplinary research and in the relationships between research and practice, science and activism, and local and global, in the past and present.

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Disasters Displacement and Human Rights (DDHR) Program issues a call for papers for its fourth biennial conference, organized in conjunction with the Southern Anthropological Society’s 54th annual meeting. Proposals for posters, papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops from all subfields of anthropology, and from related disciplines, are welcome.

Submissions that broadly address the theme of “Intersections” according to the above CFP are encouraged, with emphasis on the following topics or foci:
  • Race, racism, racial triangulation, and biracial and multiracial issues
  • Transnational identities, migration, immigration
  • Trafficking and other extralegal mobilities
  • Gender, sex, sexuality
  • Political economy and inequality in disaster relief
  • Indigeneity and DNA
  • Food security, hunger, and nutrition
  • Forensic science and human rights
  • Disaster victim identification and recovery
  • Biological and social profiles of race and gender
  • The social life of DNA and other biological materials
  • Race, class, and gender in the archaeological record
  • Climate change and its social and biological entailments
  • Multispecies approaches to research and advocacy
  • Humanitarian and human rights law
  • Natural resources and sustainable development
  • Migration, detention, and deportation
  • Peace and conflict
  • Transitional justice and alternative models
  • Natural and anthropogenic disasters
  • Refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people
  • Decolonizing indigenous histories
  • Policy, politics, and international relations
  • Field methods and human identification

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