CALL FOR PAPERS: American Anthropology Association Panel (16-20 November 2011)

The 110th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropology Association will be held in Montreal from 16-20 November. Its theme is ‘Traces, tidemarks and legacies’. The following call for a panel for the Meeting may be of interest:

Tracing Migration: Border-Crossings and the Legacies of Mobility

This panel embraces the 2011 AAA Meeting theme of Traces, Tidemarks, and Legacies by asking how migratory movements can create, sustain, and reformulate relationships across geographic, political, and cultural boundaries. We often think of immigration as a unidirectional movement from "homelands" to "hostlands," and we often study the ways in which immigrants must balance their "old" cultural practices while establishing communities in "new" places. This panel seeks to upend neat distinctions between homelands and hostlands, instead asking how population mobility creates and sustains complex engagements between places of origin and destinations, leaving cultural, linguistic, political, and economic traces that are multidirectional.

Migratory patterns often reflect and reconfigure historical engagements between places, reflecting events and processes like colonialism, war, and occupation. In other cases, migrations themselves establish legacies of second and third generations of migrants who trace the footsteps of previous immigrants from one place to another. Moreover, established routes of migration that cross prominent geopolitical borders, such as the U.S.-Mexico border, or the Mediterranean Sea, also reflect and create longstanding communication and mutual effects that cross borders and regions.

This panel seeks to bring together geographically diverse papers that explore the panel's theme through ethnographically grounded studies on topics including but not limited to:

Ø Migrations that, although moving in one direction, reflect long histories of entanglement between regions (e.g. postcolonial migrations from North Africa to Europe)

Ø Migrations that, through transborder movement, create and change ties between different places (e.g. seasonal labor migrations,)

Ø Migrations that involve the crossing of many different kinds of borders: national, social, ethnic, linguistic, which, accordingly, leave many different types of traces on the socio-cultural and geographic landscapes traversed.

Ø Return migration (what happens when emigrants return home, either permanently, seasonally, for ritual celebrations, or even for short, annual visits as "tourists?" How does this kind of movement reflect ambiguities between conceptions of homelands and hostlands?)

If you are interested in contributing a paper, please send an abstract of 250-300 words, your name, contact information, institutional affiliation and a very short author bio to Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar (mikaela.rogozen-soltar@yale.edu) and Elizabeth Falconi (elifalco@umich.edu) by MARCH 21st.