November 11, 2013

Dear Colleagues:

We write to draw your attention to the recently circulated Call for Papers for the 2014 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Convention, to be held in San Antonio, Texas, on November 20-23, 2014. For the first time in a number of years, the convention will not take place on the same weekend as the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and we are hopeful that a much larger number of anthropologists will be able to attend than has been the case in recent years.

Planning for the 2014 San Antonio Convention is already well underway, and includes a number of initiatives that will feature anthropologists’ many contributions to the conversations that ASEEES aims to foster. We hope that the convention theme, “25 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Historical Legacies and New Beginnings,” also appeals to anthropologists.

Soyuz, the Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies, will be organizing a series of discussions to commemorate its twentieth anniversary. In addition, a number of colleagues have already indicated their plans to organize panels and roundtables, including:

• Serguei Oushakine on Soviet commodities

• Elizabeth Dunn on spatiality, temporality, and humanity

• Maria Sidorkina and Fabrizio Fenghi on the making of contemporary Russian publics

• Bruce Grant on anthropology in/of the Caucasus

• Kimberly Powers on the materiality of post-Soviet archives

• Michael Bobick on Eurasianism/Europeanization

• Aina Begim on ethnographies of entrepreneurship

• Melissa Caldwell on food and ethics

• Emanuela Grama on memory, property, and materiality 

• Michelle Rivkin-Fish and Julie Hemment on the politics of gender

These sessions, many of which will be interdisciplinary, represent only a small fraction of the topics on which anthropologists of the region are currently working. We therefore encourage you to consider submitting your own individual papers, panels, or roundtables for the San Antonio convention by the upcoming submission deadlines [individual paper submission deadline: Dec. 20, 2013; panel/roundtable submission deadline: Jan. 15, 2014]. We are especially hopeful that graduate students will attend and present papers on their dissertation research, as many have not yet had the opportunity to participate in an ASEEES convention. Soyuz will be organizing some networking opportunities designed with graduate students in mind, and graduate students should also take note of the availability of limited financial support from the Kathryn W. Davis fund for travel to the conference.

Anthropology is important to the future of ASEEES and to the goals of its annual convention. The Board of Directors and ASEEES professional staff have been working to ensure that overlaps between the AAA and ASEEES meetings will be much rarer in the future than they have been in the past few years. For the moment, we hope to see you in San Antonio!

Stephen Hanson
President, ASEEES

Douglas Rogers
AAA Representative, ASEEES Board of Directors

Lynda Park
Executive Director, ASEEES