The American Anthropological Association is holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia this week, and I’ll be there with bells on (maybe literally).
I realize that the last time I mentioned anything about academic conferences in one of my blog posts, the critical responses came fast and furious.
One of the consistent commenters for that posting was someone named goxewu, who kept asking me if I had to cancel any of my classes so that I could trot off to these “conferences.” Even though I answered the query a few different times, goxewu continued to push the point, even implying that I would probably have canceled my classes this semester if they were on Mondays and Fridays (instead of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays).
But goxewu’s major gripe wasn’t necessarily about those missed class sessions. One of goxewu’s final comments makes the argument plain: “Prof. Jackson may have done academe an unintended service with his post on conference-going, which unintentionally shone a light on the academic equivalent of Congressional junkets (which are also about a third legit, a third of marginal use, and a third paid vacations).” But are only a third of all academic conferences really legit?
Back when I was in graduate school, we used to read the yearly journalistic stories (some called them “attacks”) on the ostensibly bizarre themes found among offerings at academic conferences. And these stories were seemingly offered up with a similarly delegitimizing impulse at their core.
A Philadelphia Inquirer article on the 2004 Modern Language Association meetings started with the following line: “When a professor draws a parallel between Dumbo and Detective Monk, you just know you’re at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.”
The annual news stories about the AAA meetings often playfully invoke the tone and register of traditional ethnographic monographs, as does this Chicago Sun-Times piece from 1991: “Adorning themselves with jackets of tweed or gaily colored beads, puffing on elaborately carved pipes, ears pierced and decorated with rings, members of a national tribe are holding their annual potlatch in Chicago this week. They number some 3,700 [closer to 5,000 will attend this year]. But once here, they will break into smaller groups.”
In many ways, I am an advocate of the academic conference. And I don’t think that these venues are a waste of time, or a scam — or that they will be quickly/easily scrapped for cyber conferences in the not-too-distant future (another theory offered up after my last post). But I do sometimes mildly grumble about the fact that I can’t make all of the interesting ones that are relevant to my work. And new meetings seem to pop up every single day.
I’ll be blogging from the AAA conference all week, a conference that starts on Wednesday and ends on Sunday. I helped to organize the conference this year, so I’ll also be attending many of the evening sessions and special events.
For instance, on Wednesday night, E. Patrick Johnson is performing his electrifying one-man show, Pouring Tea, an adaptation of his powerful new book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, based on an extensive oral history project. On Thursday night, the AAA will host a book launch and reception for Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama, who died in 1995, before she could publish her dissertation. Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, will be present to offer remarks at the reception, which follows a panel about Dunham’s work. And the exhibit Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction, and Poverty in Urban America, opens on Saturday at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia (and runs through May 2010). The exhibit is based on ten years of ethnographic research by anthropologist Philippe Bourgois (my Penn colleague) and photographer-ethnographer Jeff Schonberg. They worked among a community of heroin injectors and crack smokers in San Francisco. The exhibit is based on their new book, also called Righteous Dopefiend. (A second Righteous Dopefiend exhibit is being presented in conjunction with the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street. It is a multimedia installation that will run from December 3 through 31.)
I’ll blog about these conference events — and many others — all week long.
5 Responses to Philly Becomes Anthrotropolis
goxewu - November 30, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Gee, billing near the top in one of Prof. Jackson’s posts! If I weren’t pseudonymous, this could be the start of a career of some sort.I do, however, want to correct a couple of possible impressions about my attitude toward conferences:a) My disdain for faculty tripping off to academic conferences isn’t limited to, or even primarily about, the annual meetings of the organizations which represent whole academic disciplines. I was speaking more about what I presumed to be the kind of smaller, topic-specific, more ad hoc, conferences contained in Prof. Jackson’s (I don’t have his original post from which to quote directly) particularly busy “stretch of conferences” that was coming up. They weren’t all annual national meetings, were they?b) I’m not a Roger-Kimballesque Know Nothing who thinks that the weird session/paper titles at conferences such as the MLA, CAA, AAA, etc. expose academics as pretentious bulls***ters. English lit, anthropology, art history, psychology, etc., are all entitled to some in-house esoterics that might seem silly to the general public. c) Most colleges will be in session this week and, doubtless, many, many professors attending it will be cancelling classes by the dozen–some with “while I’m away” assignments, some with TAs babysitting the classes, and some, probably a plurality, simply cancelled, period. I’m not saying this is bad across the board, only that, “Hey, I’m off to the AAA meeting in Philadelphia where I’m going to learn a lot” isn’t an across-the-board valid rationalization for missing classes, either.d) The menu of events described by Prof. Jackson sounds yummy. I just hope that the students in those classes cancelled by some of the professors attending them get some discernible benefit from it.e)”…someone named goxewu” sounds pretty silly, I admit. The name came about when I registered on “Brainstorm” and was asked to indentify the swirling letters in a box. The letters were “goxewu,” which seemed at the time to be as good a pseudonymn as any trying-to-be-clever one I could think up.
post_functional - November 30, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Wow, gox, you’re a star!
dank48 - December 1, 2009 at 8:33 am
And the fox said, “I am sure the grapes are sour.”
drgrieves - December 1, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I have attended a conference in Philadelphia that Carlin Romano made the stuff of lowbrow comedy; again, you just post the title and the masses giggle. (Cf. “He’s researching FRUIT FLIES. Can you believe it?”)At the same conference, however, I saw a room completely and obviously empty except for the presenters. The posted topic was both obscure and obnoxious. All the presenters were from the same mid-range university in South Carolina. At five minutes past the posted start time, they all exited the room and headed off to wherever.Nex year, the conference met in (I think) Toronto: same group of professors, similarly unappealing topic = no audience and, once more, early lunch.I asked around. It seems that these people had a habit of giving themselves a vacation each year. Earlier, they had actually written papers and delivered them and exited after the one session they had to attend since they were presenting. Now they did not even bother writing papers; all they had to do was come up with a terrible topic that would draw exactly no one and then guarantee the organizers that they would deliver a panel with four paid memberships attached.
goxewu - December 3, 2009 at 8:04 am
According the CHE’s online competitor, there’s big news about a major issue in anthropology at the AAA conference. It’s already Thursday, and no bulletins from Prof. Jackson, who said he’d be blogging about the meeting “all week long.”