Calls for Papers and Workshop Proposals for SfAA 2025, Portland, Oregon

As a co-sponsor of the SfAA  meetings in March, WAPA needs to submit at least five sessions (panels, roundtables) and participate with NAPA and the Anthropology Career Readiness Network (ACRN) in providing workshops.  Please consider contributing a proposal or participating in of the following activities being developed by WAPA members.  The deadline for submissions is October 15.  

Panel and Roundtable Proposals

If you are interested in any of these panels, please contact the organizers as soon as possible.

1. Proposed roundtable organized by Shirley Fiske (shirley.fiske@verizon.net) and Robert Winthrop (rwinthro@umd.edu) on climate mitigation. Pane abstract: For three decades natural scientists and economists defined the science shaping international policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonizing economies. The global failure to bend the carbon curve offers an opportunity for anthropologists to influence climate mitigation efforts. In this roundtable panelists will discuss promising approaches and consider what actions might speed their implementation. 

2. Proposed panel organized by Mark Edberg (medberg@gwu.edu) on anthropologists and community collaborative interventions in public health. Panel abstract: Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), community-engaged research, and other terms have been used to refer to a range of collaborative approaches to reducing and preventing health inequities. Domestic funding agencies (including the National Institutes of Health) and global funders have increasingly adopted, and even required this approach for a range of community-based interventions and research efforts. In this panel we present examples of anthropologists working on these kinds of projects and try to address the following questions: 1) What issues, populations and communities are involved? 2) How has an anthropological perspective supported the collaborations? 3) How have anthropological perspectives, theory, and methods facilitated the co-creation, development, implementation and evaluation of the projects?

3. Proposed panel organized by Richard Morris (MORRISCOUNTS@gmail.com) on scaling ethnographic research for policy and practice. Panel abstract: As it has done for centuries, ethnography continues to offer insights into culture, human behavior, and social systems. Yet, anthropologists often encounter barriers in getting their observations and insights translated into policy and practice. In contrast, other disciplines, such as engineering and medicine, have established processes for transferring know-how into practice. In this session, transferring ethnographic findings into practice will be treated as a problem of scaling to practice, i.e., either knowing or showing that what applies to one or a few may also apply to many. Session participants will collaborate to discern the value and best means for scaling ethnographic findings to practical application and/or adoption. This call invites papers that explore the successful methodologies and best practices that facilitate the translation and scaling of ethnographic insights for application in larger systems and structures. [Full abstract includes suggested topic areas.]

Workshop Proposals

We need a few workshops to present to NAPA as part of the WAPA co-sponsorship. At this time, there is one workshop proposal:

1. Key Skills for Community Collaboration (Mark Edberg). This workshop will review some of the key skills involved in equitable, participatory community collaborations for research and/or interventions.