Happy New Year all!
Thank you again to all of you who participated on the SOLGA Program in 2003. And an enormous thank you to David Valentine for all of the work and energy he has put in to the SOLGA program for the past three years!
For 2004, Jeff Maskovsky has joined me as Program co-editor, and we have already begun to mull over session ideas for next year. We have been contacted with some great ideas for invited sessions, so this is our first reminder … it is never too early to begin thinking about panels for San Francisco! This list is a great place to solicit fellow panelists and explore ideas for panels.
The official meeting theme for 2004 is “Magic, Science & Religion,” and any panels or papers that explicitly address the meeting theme are especially welcomed. We have been contacted by members of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (SAR) and the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) re: co-sponsoring sessions.
All panels/papers will be due on the AAA website by April 1, 2004 — though organizers should plan to submit well in advance of that date so that panelists will be able to add their paper abstracts accordingly. More information on the specifics of submitting panels/papers will be available on the AAA website shortly.
There have also been several changes within AAA regarding the Program. First, the AAA staff will no longer be requiring sections to submit Invited Sessions earlier than regular sessions (April 1). However, we will be reviewing sessions internally in advance of that date in attempts to secure co-sponsorship with other sections and maximize SOLGA’s visibility at the conference. If you have panel or roundtable ideas that you wish to submit for consideration as Invited Sessions, please be in contact with Jeff and me (Christa) ASAP.
A second change is that PowerPoint LCD projectors will be available next year.
As you may remember from previous years, SOLGA has 3.75 hours to offer as Invited Sessions. We can use this time in several ways. On our own, we can submit either two 1.75 hour sessions or one 3.75 hour session. With co-sponsorship with another section, a number of other possibilities exist for up to four SOLGA-sponsored sessions.
In addition to our 3.75 hours of invited time, we can also suggest as many panels to the AAA program committee as we receive for review. As a small section, we have a good chance of getting most or all of our sessions on the program.
If you don't want to organize a panel, you can also submit your paper proposal to the AAA as volunteered paper. If you list SOLGA as the section to review your paper, it will come to us, and we will do our best to fit you into a SOLGA panel.
You can contact us with questions or ideas at <christa.craven@verizon.net> and <jmask@CritPath.org>. Please address all correspondence about program issues to both Jeff and I.
Looking forward to a vibrant SOLGA presence in San Francisco!
Christa & Jeff
