The Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia invites applications for up to 15 Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows, to begin 1 July 2010. These positions enable innovative and collaborative teaching between Fellows and outstanding UBC professors.  The program will help to launch the careers of new scholars showing early promise as excellent university teachers and researchers. Each Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow will have opportunities to interact with UBC colleagues on teaching and research, as well as to be part of a cohort of early-career scholars sharing methods and exchanging ideas for excellent teaching.

One of the new Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow positions has been allocated to the UBC Department of Anthropology, which has strengths in a broad range of areas in anthropological archaeology; sociocultural anthropology (including medical and linguistic anthropology); and museum and visual anthropology (see http://www.anth.ubc.ca ). We invite applications from outstanding candidates in the areas of museum and/or visual anthropology. Depending on their area of specialization, the successful candidate will have access to the collections and research facilities of the new Centre for Cultural Research at the Museum of Anthropology (http://www.moa.ubc.ca ) and/or the Ethnographic Film Unit within the Department of Anthropology ( http://anthfilm.anth.ubc.ca/ ). (more…)

The deadline for consideration as a SVA invited session is coming up! Invited paper/poster session proposals must be submitted by email to the SVA Program Chairs by March 1, 2010.

2010 SVA Program Chairs:
Jenny Chio (Jenny.Chio@uts.edu.au)
Stephanie Takaragawa (takaraga@chapman.edu)

The benefits of invited status include: 1) guaranteed acceptance into the program (no waiting until August!); 2) priority consideration for the more “desirable” time slots during the meeting; and 3) promotion within the program as an invited session. (more…)

We are seeking papers for an interdisciplinary panel on “Aesthetic Representations of Political Violence” to be presented at the 2010 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans, Nov. 17-21, 2010.

Representations of political violence are often created and resurrected in various aesthetic forms to further particular social, political or economic across times and place. For example, theatrical performances or artistic creations romanticizing past violence can be used to normalize certain types of violent displays within the viewing community. The aesthetic forms that these representations take are often essential to creating an emotionally compelling narrative to galvanize the audience to adopt a particular perspective relating to local, national, or global issues. These representations also allow viewers a space to negotiate alternative interpretations of the depicted violence and its current relevance.

Please submit an abstract by March 10, 2010, to Jennifer Schlegel (jschlege@kutztown.edu) or Kim Shively (shively@kutztown.edu). (more…)

New Orleans, November 17-21, 2010

Dear Society for Visual Anthropology members,

As your program chairs for the 2010 Annual Meeting, we’d like to
remind you of the following upcoming deadlines and encourage everyone
to submit!  We are here to answer questions and provide advice on the
process, as necessary, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch
(Jenny.Chio@uts.edu.au and takaraga@chapman.edu). (more…)

New Orleans has inspired the theme of the 2010 AAA Annual Meetings: “Circulation.” This theme is meant to encourage us to think about what happens when movement is the organizing trope of our questions, methodologies, analyses and accounts. We can think in terms of circulation across time as well as space, through different organizing principles, and in a variety of shapes and forms, inviting us to consider what triggers, facilitates, constrains, disrupts or stops flows; what is at stake in these processes and for whom.

The SVA always has a significant presence at the Annual Meeting, and 2010 will be no different. We encourage anthropologists of all ranks and with interests in visual research to contribute proposals. Deadlines for the submission of executive, invited and volunteered sessions are coming up, so please feel free to contact the SVA program committee with your questions, ideas, and submissions well before the deadlines below so that we can address any concerns and help build the strongest possible SVA program for this year.

The 2010 SVA Program Committee consists of Stephanie Takaragawa (takaraga@chapman.edu) and Jenny Chio (Jenny.Chio@uts.edu.au). (more…)

The Society for Visual Anthropology’s web committee is pleased to announce the launch of a searchable directory of international programs in visual anthropology on our website. This project was undertaken in response to a clear need for a comprehensive directory of programs and organizations that offer training in visual anthropology and related fields. Programs are listed alphabetically, but results can be filtered according to categories such as Graduate Program, Certificate Program, and so on. The directory can also be searched by country or academic institution for more specific results. Perhaps most significantly, the directory includes an electronic submission form that invites users to contribute information about programs that are not yet included in the directory. We encourage you to visit the directory, add to our listings, and help us to build a rich and current inventory of the many exciting international opportunities for the study and practice of visual anthropology. Visit us also at the AAA in Philadelphia in the Exhibition Hall, Friday December 4th, 3:00-5:00 PM, to to make you contribution to the directory, or to discuss this and other SVA initiatives. societyforvisualanthropology.org/directory

~Craig Campbell and Kate Hennessy, SVA Web Committee

Exhibition Opening Reception
& Shindig 4 Dec. 2009 7-10.00pm

The Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts will feature an innovative group exhibition entitled Ethnographic Terminalia from December 2-20, 2009. Scheduled to coincide with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, this year in Philadelphia, the curators have brought together an international group of artists and ethnographers who are actively engaged in experimental and emergent cultural forms.  Visitors are invited to join in a multisensorial happening that challenges the boundaries and borders that demarcate the margins of ethnographic, anthropological, and art practices. A diverse group of artists and anthropologists present boundary troubling works in eleven separate installations; each installation project in Ethnographic Terminalia offers a thought provoking and playful (or agitating) alternative to considering what lies both beyond and within imagined and constructed boundaries of the skilled practices of artists and ethnographers.

This exhibition features original works by: Trudi-Lynn Smith; Erica Lehrer and Hannah Smotrich; Kate Hennessy and Oliver Neumann; Marko and Gordana Zivkovic; Chris Fletcher; Roderick Coover; Jayasinhji Jhala; Craig Campbell; Mike Evans and Stephen Foster; Stephanie Spray; and Scott and Jen Webel. While these works are deployed within the rubric of anthropology they answer visual and aesthetic questions in unique and particular fashion, decentering the priviledged categories of both ethnography and art through various mediums.
(more…)

While the details are still being worked out, I am pleased to announce the inaugural SVA-run digital photo exhibit at the upcoming 2009 AAA meetings. One of the things we’d like to display this year are “favorite” field images, whether already in print or “new.” If you are interested in contributing an image to this category of the exhibit please forward your top one or two favorite field images as computer/projection quality JPEGs (72-96dpi), along with image title, date, caption, and any pertinent publication information to Jonathan S. Marion (jsmarion@gmail.com) as soon as possible, and before Thanksgiving at the very latest.

The SVA program of AAA events for the 2009 Philadelphia meeting is now available for download
here: sva2009aaaprogram. Many thanks to Program Editors Aaron Glass and Nancy Marie Mithlo.

The Society for Visual Anthropology is happy to announce newly elected board members:

• 3-year term: Craig Campbell, Jenny Chio, John Bishop, and Karen Nakamura
• 2-year term: Andrea Heckman, and Cynthia Close.