The 2020 conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie (CASCA) will be held at Western University, London Ontario, May 30 - June 2.
This meeting - in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanitites and Social Sciences - will offer many opportunities for interdisciplinary conversations, access to professional development activities, reconciliation programming and a wide range of academic and cultural events.
We live in dark times. Populations around the world must now confront the ravages of a planetary climate crisis, a resurgence of global fascism, and the austere violence of neoliberalism. It is all too easy to feel stuck in a crsis that never ends. Yet, time and again, anthropology has shown, with its fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility and its care and commmitment to life as it is really lived, that people rarely give up and are never as powerless as those in power would have them believe. Anthropology's method and approach can help us think of the present as an ongoing process, from which we, and those with whom we work, critically reflect not only on the present but also on the past and on possible futures. What, then, can we say is really happening now, in these dark times? How are people struggling to live amidst the danger and damage of escalating caststrophes? How are they working to rebuild and repair their social, political and economic systems? How are they rethinking the past, reimaging the future, and remaking the world in the present? And what light can anthropology bring to these questions?
The 2020 CASCA conference invites us all to reflect on doing and undoing in many registers. The pair of terms we have chosen as the theme brings to mind questions of the past (how we might undo past wrongs) and the future (how our actions work to bring about certain futures). Yet we would like to encourage proposals that are also firmly situated in the ongoing present. In short, we ask anthropologists to reflect more on how the present moment might be understood as a time and place of action (or inaction), as the site of many doings and undoings. For it is ultimately in the now that we all dwell, even as we work to do something different, to make something happen, or to undo powerful systems of oppression and injustice. How might we make the present, as a site of practice and praxis, available to us ethnographically?
For more information see the CASCA 2020 website, including specific pages for information on Proposal Submission and Registration.
Email contact address is casca2020@uwo.ca.