SANA 2007 Conference
Call for Papers
"Unnatural
Disasters"
April 19-21, 2007
University of New Orleans Downtown
Conference Center
New Orleans, Louisiana
Deadline for Paper and
Session Submission:
February 14, 2007
Instructions for paper and session proposals
The Society for the Anthropology of North
America invites participants to join a
discussion about the unnatural disasters
unfolding around us, in North America and
beyond. This conference, located in a city
and region that has recently experienced one
of the most dramatic unnatural disasters to
occur in North America in decades, will
provide an unusual blend of scholarly
discussion and opportunities to directly
observe the impact of that ongoing disaster.
We at SANA feel it particularly important
to host our annual conference in New Orleans
this year. The floods that followed
hurricane Katrina in New Orleans killed over
1500 people, destroyed thousands of homes,
and shattered the city’s social fabric. It
made explicit many of the contradictions and
conflicts that simmer beneath the surface
much of the time. Katrina makes visible what
is often taken-for-granted or overlooked in
everyday life. Recognizing widespread
interest in what is happening in
post-Katrina New Orleans, this conference
will go beyond those typical academic
conferences that are housed in conference
centers and hotels in stark isolation from
the locales where they take place. In
addition to research presentations, we will
organize a series of events and activities
where conference participants will be able
to visit different neighborhoods, learn
about grassroots efforts to rebuild the
city, and engage in dialogue with activists
and others who are fighting against the
displacement, poverty, and racism that have
sadly become the hallmarks of New Orleans's
post-Katrina economic recovery.
For this conference, we seek papers that
analyze the genesis, meaning and
consequences of unnatural disasters. We
juxtapose these terms precisely to encourage
participants to raise questions about the
processes of naturalization—and
normalization—through which human agency is
rendered visible and invisible first in
naming some events as disasters, in deeming
disasters as worthy of both prevention and
remediation, and in defining other events as
not disastrous or even viewing them as
serendipitous. From this stance disasters
can include large scale environmental
events, such as floods, hurricanes, oil
spills and earthquakes; the everyday
struggles of ordinary people in marginalized
communities; ongoing disasters such as AIDS
and illiteracy. What, exactly, constitutes a
disaster has become one of the central
questions raised by recent events in the
Gulf South, the Middle East, and elsewhere.
Indeed, Katrina, like many other ‘natural’
catastrophes, put poverty, racism, and the
lengths many women must go to care for their
families into the public eye. It highlighted
the terrible consequences of inadequate
investments in public infrastructure and
services in one US city. And it is already
clear that the response to Katrina—a mixture
of failed efforts to help evacuees and
successful creation of crony capitalist
opportunities for business—has remade the
political, social, economic and cultural
landscape of an iconic city.
Large scale disasters often lead to calls
for fundamental social and cultural change,
but even more often they seem to result in
the reaffirmation of the previous social
order. This conference will occur at a
moment when the calls for change at the site
of recent disasters have not (yet) ceded to
the return of “order” and thus provides a
useful context to examine what disasters
reveal about our understandings of the
personal and the political, the public and
the private, the distant or remote and the
intimate, the natural and the cultural, the
innocent and the guilty, the inevitable and
the avoidable. In the wake of recent
disasters, it seems that a great deal more
than simply rebuilding homes and businesses
is at stake. Papers at this conference might
raise questions about the relationship
between disasters of all sorts and the
privatization of government services,
disinvestment in infrastructure, increasing
inequality, environmental degradation, the
undermining of democratic institutions,
racism and heightened ethnic tensions.
Research that focuses on the role of
academe, the social sciences and
anthropology in the context of disasters
will also be welcome. By confronting our own
research with the reality of a city in the
midst of recovery, we will be able to
consider whether or not the unnatural
disaster in New Orleans represents the
future of North America.
Topics and geographic areas for panels
are open, however, here are some possible
themes for panels and papers:
Disaster cultures: How do
communities and governments define, prepare
for…or ignore disasters? What kinds of
conflicts are there over who and what should
be protected?
Natural/Unnatural Disasters: How
do disasters force people to reconsider
divisions between nature and culture? Who or
what is held responsible for disaster?
Disaster and human rights: What
happens to the rule of law in emergency
situations? What do violations human
rights—often by the people charged with
enforcing the law—indicate about deeper
conflicts in society?
Race/Class/Gender disasters: What
do disasters reveal about ongoing
inequalities and conflicts rooted in race,
class and gender?
Imprisoning disaster: What is the
relationship between the policing of
society, justice and the prison-industrial
complex? How has the privatization of
security services in American cities
challenged fundamental ideas of justice?
What are the consequences of the
militarization of justice in the context of
disaster?
Disaster Education: What
constitutes a disaster in education?
Privatization? Neglect of children and
public services? Floods and earthquakes?
Producing/Mediating Disaster: What
role does the media play in making a
disaster? How have local groups and
activists used new media to challenge
dominant views of disaster?
Disaster and migration: How does
the arrival of new immigrants—rescue and
relief workers, construction workers, new
residents—transform a community?
Disaster diaspora: Do exiled
residents become a diaspora after a diaspora?
What do terms like “refugee,” “exile,”
“displaced person,” etc. mean in the context
of diaspora? What becomes of culture in
exile?
Economies of Disaster: How does
disaster allow business and government to
reconfigure the economy of a region? What
are the consequences of disaster for
affordable housing, jobs, wages, worker
safety, etc.? What gets rebuilt and what
gets redeveloped in the wake of disaster?
Governmentality and disaster: How
do governments and leaders understand all
kinds of disasters? Who do they see and who
is invisible? How does government
reconstruct population in the wake of
disaster? How can activists and residents
remake government?
Please direct all
inquiries or questions to: SANA2007NOLA@gmail.com
Instructions for paper and session proposals
The 2007 SANA meeting will be organized
in an unconventional manner, combining
traditional paper presentations with several
sessions organized with local and national
activists and scholars whose work focuses on
“Unnatural Disasters.”
We encourage you to think about creative
as well as traditional formats for
presenting your work. Guidelines are below.
1. Sessions will generally be scheduled
for 1.5 hours (1 hour and 30 minutes), which
allows time for 5 fifteen minute paper
presentations and a discussant or
discussion.
2. Paper presentations should be prepared
with a fifteen minute time limit in mind.
3. Organized session submissions are
encouraged, but individual papers are also
welcome. Individually volunteered papers
will be organized into sessions by the
program committee according to theme. All
paper proposals, whether submitted
individually or as part of an organized
session, will be evaluated individually.
4. Roundtable discussions can be a useful
alternative to traditional sessions. Instead
of formal paper presentations, these involve
informal discussion of a theme. Participants
would be encouraged to circulate papers
prior to the conference and to make copies
available either at the meetings or on-line
for others to read. Roundtable discussions
have the potential to include more
participants than traditional sessions,
although they would be limited to the same
1.5 hours.
5. Other types of sessions are also
possible, including poster sessions and
workshops. Contact conference organizers if
you wish to submit proposals for these or
other types of sessions.
6. Video screenings. If there is interest
and time, we are happy to screen
ethnographic films. Please contact
conference organizers to discuss
arrangements.
Proposals may be related to the
conference theme, but we
welcome proposals on other topics as well.
1. For papers, please use the form below.
Fill out the form completely and be sure to
include an abstract. If your paper is part
of an organized session, please list the
title for that session.
Download Paper Submission Form (html)
Download Paper Submission form (Word)
2. For sessions, including panels,
workshops, roundtables, etc., please use the
form below. Note that individual
participants will need to fill out the paper
submission form as well.
Download Session Submission Form (html)
Download Session Submission Form (Word)
3. All forms, including abstracts, should
be sent by email as attachments no later
than February 14, 2007, to David Beriss, 2007
SANA conference chair, at
sana2007nola@gmail.com
4. All participants may register
online for the
conference until the conference date. Use the form
below and mail your payment to UNO
conference services.
Questions? Contact David Beriss, at
sana2007nola@gmail.com or by phone at
(504) 280-6306.
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