CFP: Emerging and Current Events including, but not limited to, Invasion, War, and Resistance in Ukraine

In a new initiative this year, CASCA 2022 Regina, the annual conference hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Regina in Regina, Saskatchewan, invites individual papers or roundtable proposals that engage with its late-breaking theme: “Emerging and Current Events, including ,but not limited to, Invasion, War, and Resistance in Ukraine.”  The deadline for late-breaking proposal submission is March 15, 2022.

Under the theme of Open Spaces – Close Encounters, this call for round table items and individual papers is looking for anthropological insight on emerging and current human rights abuses, International Humanitarian Law violations, and forms of state-driven ethnic, cultural, and linguistic repression, with a special focus on the recent military invasion of Ukraine. It seeks to bring together anthropologists (and scholars of cognate disciplines) whose work is either affected by the events in Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and adjacent or related states, or who have experience from other regions with similar conflict zones and related issues. The organizers also welcome historical perspectives that help us better understand present situations, including our roles and responsibilities as anthropologists coming from diverse backgrounds.

Potential questions are:

• What are the ethical imperatives of the discipline?
• How do anthropologists navigate their many potential roles as victims, perpetrators, spies, resisters, bystanders, mediators, or advocates?
• What strategies best address the often conflicted and compromised actions/positions of anthropologists in zones of armed conflict?
• What are anthropologists learning about the ethics of ethnographic methods in conflict zones, especially as vulnerable and/or dangerous researchers?
• What can Canadian anthropologists do to support their International colleagues who are directly impacted by war and/or systematic repression?
• How should Western scholars approach their international colleagues whose work (and/or livelihood) is reliant on funding from a war-inflicting state?
• How can anthropologists engage in crisis situations, especially via collective professional petitions, without causing unnecessary risk to the existence of key organizations (archives, museums, institutes, etc.)?
• What lessons can be applied from previous dilemmas in which the discipline has found itself during times of war (and which ones do not apply today)?