Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

APLA at AAA San Francisco 2012

APLA is proud to sponsor or co-sponsor six invited sessions this year, as well as 42 other panels.  We are also hosting two special events aimed at career development for new PhDs, and holding five graduate workshops. 

Please join us for our annual business meeting on Saturday Nov 17th!  At our “more than a business meeting, we will award our student paper prize, conduct some additional APLA business, and will feature Catherine Besteman leading an informal discussion of the following questions:

• What forms can public anthropology take in the current political landscape?
• How can anthropology respond to public anxiety?
• What alternatives can anthropology suggest?

The APLA sessions and schedule can be found here at the main AAA page.  Please take special note of our workshops:

LAUNCHING A CAREER IN ACADEMIA (Friday, November 16, 2012 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM)

(joint panel with NAPA) PRACTICING ANTHROPOLOGY IN POLITICAL AND LEGAL CAREERS (on Saturday, November 17, 2012 6:15 PM – 7:30 PM).

We are currently filling up our graduate workshops. 

EMAIL Joshua Clark at clarkj1@uci.edu ASAP if you are interested in joining one of our five graduate workshops (descriptions below).

Graduate Workshops Introduction and Description: Each year during the AAA meetings, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) sponsors a series of special workshops in which small groups of graduate students and faculty convene around thematic conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues.  These workshops offer an intimate mentorship context in which students can engage in intensive discussions regarding specific problems in their anthropological research and writing.   Each workshop is limited to 4-5 students, who meet with 2 faculty facilitators at a café or restaurant near the AAA conference hotel.  This year’s workshop topics and facilitators are the following:

1. After “Studying Up”: Anthropologists and Elites, 40 Years Later
Faculty facilitators:  Douglas Holmes, SUNY-Binghamton; Tess Lea, University of Sydney

On the 40th anniversary of Laura Nader’s call to “up the anthropologist,” this workshop invites participants whose projects confront new and enduring methodological, conceptual, and ethical issues in anthropology’s engagement with elites. In this context, the term “elites” encompasses a variety of subjects – including policymakers and bureaucrats, technical experts, judges, and scientists – who in some way “are directing the everyday aspects of our lives.”  While Nader conceived of researching such subjects as “studying up,” this workshop encourages participants to explore how changing political, economic, and epistemic contexts create a multiplicity of ways for the anthropologist to approach and relate with elites.

2. Language and Linguistic Analysis in Political and Legal Anthropology
Faculty facilitators:  John Conley, University of North Carolina School of Law; TBD

Theories and techniques developed in linguistic anthropology have long informed political and legal anthropological research.  This workshop is intended for students interested in how to apply linguistic anthropology’s methods of data collection and/or analysis to research on law, policy, social movements, etc.  It invites participants working to refine research projects focused explicitly upon language, as well as those who are grappling with how to “take language seriously” in broader studies of legal and political phenomena.

3. Using Documents and Archives in Ethnographic Research
Faculty facilitators:  Jane K. Cowan, University of Sussex; Kregg Hetherington, Dalhousie University

This workshop invites students whose projects engage with contemporary or historical documents or other archival materials, whether as a supplement to, or an object of, ethnographic research. Participants will discuss how to understand and think critically about such documents’ roles as sources of data as well as “data points” in their research.  The workshop will therefore be a venue in which to engage questions at the intersection of historical anthropology and recent research by legal and political anthropologists on the document and archive as form.

4. Governance, Jurisdiction, and the Politics of Scale
Faculty facilitators:  Matthew Hull, University of Michigan; Annelise Riles, Cornell University

Recent anthropological scholarship on contemporary legal and regulatory formations demonstrates the significant analytical purchase of the concepts of governance, jurisdiction, and scale. This workshop invites students whose research engages with these concepts, and their relations to new and emergent legal subjectivities, objectifications, and forms of authority. This may include projects concerned with the proliferation and sub-division of legal regimes, the replication of governance practices across regulatory spaces, translations or transformations of governmental regimes across scales (e.g. “local,” “global,” “urban”), and the constitution of scales themselves.

5. Law, Property, and Infrastructure
Faculty facilitators:  Julian Brash, Montclair State University; Rosemary Coombe, York University

This workshop invites students whose research focuses on the intersection between law and property, and especially those interested in recent battles over so-called public and private infrastructures.  As various institutions and resources vital to the future of urban, agricultural, and “natural” environments are increasingly privatized, states can no longer be thought of as exclusive providers of “public goods.”  Workshop participants may consider how such reconfigurations alter our notions of property, the role of law in constituting boundaries between kinds of persons and things, and the distribution of rights and responsibilities.