May 13-16, 2009
Vancouver, Canada

Theme: Transnational Anthropologies

Convergences and Divergences in Globalized Disciplinary Networks

In an era when anthropology is increasingly attentive to transnational connections, globalized geographies, and diasporic identities, the discipline itself is subject to new and challenging forms of deterritorialization and re-territorialization. Anthropology has long been constituted by tensions between the gravitational force of its various national traditions and the pull toward an international intellectual cosmopolitanism. Yet the increasing presence of scholars from the world “periphery” in metropolitan universities, the rise to international prominence of subaltern academic centers, the deterritorialized concerns and priorities of funding institutions, and the growing transnational links between researchers, research institutions, and research subjects (among other factors) are further complicating the spatiality of anthropological practice.

These shifts, in turn, are transforming the way anthropologists examine the production of power relations, inequalities, and identities in local and global arenas. The 2009 CASCA-AES conference to be held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver calls anthropologists and scholars from across the social sciences and the humanities to offer a fresh look at the increasingly transnational nature of knowledge production, at the resilience of regionalized academic hierarchies, as well as at the different ways in which the latter are being reconstituted and subverted. Additionally, the conference welcomes submissions related to the internationalization of social practices, power relations, and subjectivities and to any other theme associated with ongoing anthropological questions.