Conference Engaged Anthropology

25 – 26 September 2015, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA.

Anthropology is in a moment of creative rupture, redefinition, and profound possibility, and it is the task of the next generation of cultural anthropologists – particularly graduate students – to rethink the potentials of our work. While contemporary anthropologists engage with a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives and paradigms, there is still coalescence around a common commitment to ethnography.

In this conference, we aim to conceptualize the current political moment and possibilities for an engaged anthropology by bringing together graduate students thinking through the disciplinary potentials in their own research projects. Now is a time that can be variously characterized by social unrest, insecurity, and inequality across the globe, but also by possibility, connection, and social change. What responsibilities do we as anthropologists have to people engaged in struggles for justice? How can our deep ethnographic knowledge about complex social issues speak to the public and respond to current issues in a timely way? How do the politics of our situated locations as graduate students inform ethical commitments and obligations to the people with whom we work? If ethnography remains our central commitment as a discipline, how can we tell stories that are compelling and at the same time make sophisticated intellectual claims that do justice to the complexity of people’s social worlds?

Engaged Anthropology is a two-day interdisciplinary conference organized by graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Events are free and open to the public. The conference will be held Friday, September 25 and Saturday, September 26, 2015 and will include panels moderated by University of Colorado faculty. Laurence Ralph will give the keynote address.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 July 2015

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