Seeking discussant for American Anthropological Association panel

I am currently seeking a discussant for the following panel for the American Anthropological Association, Washington DC, Nov 30-Dec 4 2005. Please e-mail me at kmancuso at sc dot edu. There are no particular qualifications, but I would like to see something you've written and/or a CV first. I need to hear as soon as possible, but April 1 is the latest. Also note that you will have to join the Association and pay for the meeting by April 1.

I will also consider other student-written papers as backups in case one particular panelist pulls out, or if we can't find a discussant. If you don't get on the panel I know at least three options for you to submit a paper independently and have a decent chance of getting on the program.

thanks,
Kathy Mancuso

******

Proposal for National Association of Student Anthropologists invited
session, AAA 2005:

Parsing Culture: Cybersocial space and the making of group and
individual identity

co-organizers: Kathy Mancuso, University of South Carolina, and
Barbara Andersen, Simon Fraser University

Weblogs and other "social softwares" are hypertext communication
technologies that are pressed to uses both public and private by many
different actors - from widely-read professional and semi-professional
journalists, to political activists, ethno-national groups, sexual
minorities, patient advocacy communities, and "ordinary people". In
keeping with this year's AAA theme of "Bringing the Past into the
Present", this panel seeks to explore the ways in which "traditional"
or paradigmatic anthropological methods and theorizing can be
fruitfully applied to these increasingly prevalent online writing and
reading practices, as well as the ways in which the communities formed
here can complicate traditional theorizing about culture and
community.

As "cyberethnographers", how must we adapt anthropological paradigms
in order to understand the self-representation practices of
hyperliterate subjects? What are the limits of the anthropological
gaze in its engagement with weblogging as practice? How can we
encourage people to "think more anthropologically" about cyberspaces
and weblogging? How do we construct our identity through the use of a
variety of social media? How are the boundaries of communities,
cultures, and subcultures shifting, partial, and complex as a result
of these changing identities, and how does this enrich our
understanding of more traditional fieldsites? How do fieldsites and
issues in offline space connect to virtual emotive links? How does
cyberspace as an expressive medium lead us to question both visual and
textual paradigms of culture, and enrich our understanding of
technology, archiving, and copyright?

This is an arena where many anthropologists can learn from their
students. Involvement in weblogging (and cyber-sociality and
hyperliterate practices in general) is increasingly a feature of
campus life. Not only doing research among new populations,
cyberliterate students are finding new strategies to use weblogs for
fieldnotes, sharing ideas with our study population, and networking
and exchanging ideas with other anthropologists, all through our
online presence. With the development of AnthroSource and
AnthroCommons in our professional arena, and the increased
globalization and networking occurring in many of our fieldsites, it
is important for all anthropologists to think critically about what
methods we can use to bring anthropological theory of the past to bear
on analysis of these emerging sites of culture.

Panelists:

Lina Dib, Universite de Montreal (Fall: Rice University) - Technology
and the self, archiving and memory, weblogging

Kathy Mancuso, University of South Carolina (Fall: Emory University) -
Language games, metadiscourse, community and identity through
practice, participatory ethnomethodology, LiveJournal

Noah Porter, University of South Florida - Boasian rethinking of the "culture concept" in relation to "cyberculture"

Barbara Andersen, Simon Fraser University - Meme ethics, gift exchange,
"advocacy practices," biosociality/online patient communities

Erin Finley, Emory University – weblogging and PTSD among soldiers
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan