April AN Now Online

April AN commentaries addressing visual ethics and multisensory/multimedia anthropology, are now available as featured articles on our website. Want to access articles that appeared in other sections of AN? The complete April issue is now available through AnthroSource. Simply visit www.aaanet.org, click on “Member/AnthroSource Login,” submit your login info, then click “Use it now!”

To view full color images from our April photo essays, plus additional photos, visit our Flickr page. And remember, AN always welcomes letters to the editor (up to 400 words), so please send you thoughts on our April issue to dwinnick@aaanet.org for possible publication.

Proposal Deadline Approaching: Visual Ethics and Multisensory Anthro

The proposal submission deadline for the Anthropology News series on (1) “Visual Ethics” and (2) “Multisensory Anthropology across Media” is approaching. If you are interested in contributing an In Focus commentary, Teaching Strategies piece, Field Notes article, photo essay, news story or interview on these topics, be sure to submit your proposal by Monday, December 15.

To participate, email a 300-word proposal and 50-100-word author bio to Anthropology News editor Dinah Winnick. Proposals for photo essays should also include five high resolution photographs, each with a caption and credit. Selected authors will be asked to submit final articles of 1000-1400 words for commentaries and 300-1000 words for other article types. Please spread the word about this opportunity among your colleagues and students. For additional info and guidelines, see our website.

Call for Proposals: Deadline Extended

Anthropology News is pleased to extend the proposal deadline for our upcoming series on Multisensory Anthropology across Media and Visual Ethics. The new proposal deadline is Dec 15, 2008. For more information see the below call for proposals or our website.

See you all at the AAA Annual Meeting.

New AN CFP: Ethnography across Media

Proposal submission deadline: December 1, 2008.

Anthropology News seeks contributions for two series that explore how ethnographic work is produced through diverse media. The below prompts are meant to inspire and we welcome additional topics related to these general themes.

Multisensory Anthropology across Media
More than just ways of thinking and being, cultures are also fields of sensation, experience and sentiment. Indeed fieldwork remains the sine qua non of ethnographic understanding precisely in so far as both cultural transmission and cultural understanding depend on experiential engagement. Recognizing this, many contemporary anthropologists seek to explore the variety of media—including video, music, photography, digital ethnography and creative writing—through which such multisensory experiences and knowledges can be communicated. Drawing from diverse modes of creative expression, from traditional forms of ethnographic writing to work that makes use of performance or new technologies, submissions should focus on how media can be harnessed to ethnographically convey different kinds of information.

Visual Ethics
As access to digital media increases, discussions of “visual ethics”—ethical considerations regarding the collection and dissemination of visual data—become ever-more incumbent on anthropologists using this data. This conversation is framed by the varying, sometimes conflicting needs and interests of those who produce and consume visual data, including research communities and anthropologists across all subfields. This series seeks to explore the following issue: (1) negotiating representational authority; (2) control in the circulation of images; (3) displaying images in different contexts, including textbooks, conferences and film festivals; (4) relations with and responsibilities toward research subjects and communities; (5) balancing rights to privacy and knowledge circulation; and (6) the collection and dissemination of visual materials within the context of globally expanding use of and access to digital media.

For guidelines see our website.