2024 Letter from the APLA President

Dear APLA members and friends,

Writing to you on the eve of a hugely consequential election, I want to take a moment to tell you a bit about APLA’s program during AAA Annual Meetings in Tampa, Florida. We hope that there will be spaces for nurturing solidarity and finding ways to work together, whatever the result of this election.

Following AAA’s lead, we will have both an in-person and virtual presence at the meetings to include those who are boycotting or otherwise unable to attend.

In addition to our exciting scholarly program, organized by program chairs Negar Razavi and Anand Vaidya, APLA is hosting (as always) a series of special events. These will include an in-person lecture and discussion with Isaac Kamola from the American Association for University Professors (AAUP) as part of our Speaking Justice to Power series: Responding to Manufactured Backlash: How to Defend Academic Freedom in the Upcoming Legislative Cycle.

APLA’s wonderful graduate student representatives Ana Marrugo, Karime Parodi and SJ Dillon invite students and early career scholars to an in person, APLA-sponsored mixer: a chance to meet new colleagues and friends and unwind with some food and drink. They have also organized a virtual career panelfeaturing anthropologists offering a range of perspectives on the job market and careers trajectories.

With best wishes,

Heath Cabot (APLA president, 2024-2026)

November 4, 2024

Wednesday, 11/20

VIRTUAL
3779 – Virtual Job Market and Career Roundtable

Time: 12:45 PM – 2 PM

This virtual roundtable explores a range of key experiences / career tracks that anthropology PhDs have pursued. The event will feature speakers who will discuss their own career trajectories and will leave ample time for discussion with audience members. Topics discussed may include (but are not necessarily limited to): working in anthropology departments, working in non-anthropology departments or multiple departments (and law schools), working outside of traditional academia (and networking and modifying the CV for that search), entering and navigating American job markets as non-American citizens, finding work outside of the US, working in R1 institutions as well as liberal arts schools and community colleges. We may also discuss job markets from the perspective of hiring committees, of tenured professors, and of newly hired professors.

Join Zoom Meeting (recommended) [1]
https://uib.zoom.us/j/63646311077?pwd=f1ktZHvLe0A4iTfHb4bbtIkX4qBq3n.1

Meeting ID: 636 4631 1077
Password: Careers1

IN PERSON
3781 – Graduate Student and Early Career Mixer, sponsored by APLA (Association for Political and Legal Anthropology)

Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Location: The Pint and Brew, 200 N Tampa St g118, Tampa, FL 33602

Come and meet other grad student and early career anthropologists, break the ice, and hopefully relax a bit amidst the commotion of the conference. There will be food and drink and icebreakers with the goal of building new connections and opportunities for solidarity in the face of job market stress, precarity and the increasingly hostile climate faced by new and recent PhDs.

Thursday, 11/21

IN PERSON:
Speaking Justice to Power, 2024 Responding to Manufactured Backlash: How to Defend Academic Freedom in the Upcoming Legislative Cycle

Time: 7:00pm – 9:00 PM
Venue: Tampa Convention Center, Room 124

In response to the AAA theme of Praxis and calls for a more engaged response to the 2024 Florida location, APLA invites you to learn, connect and organize in a lecture/workshop event on promoting academic freedom and countering right wing attacks on higher education. Join APLA for a lecture by Isaac Kamola, a representative from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and then a workshop and brainstorming session. Isaac Kamola is an associate professor of political science at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. He is author of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (with Ralph Wilson, 2021) and Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (2019), along with dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He is currently the director of the Mellon-funded Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Friday, 11/22

VIRTUAL
3813 – APLA Business Meeting

Time: 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM

In order to make the APLA community as accessible as possible, we are hosting the APLA business meeting virtually this year. Please join us, from far and wide, for one hour of APLA-related activities and conversations. The winner of the 2024 APLA Book Prize in Critical Anthropology will be announced, as will the winner of the APLA Student Paper Prize. We will announce and welcome the new editor of PoLAR and new APLA officers, and we will celebrate the service of outgoing officers and editors. Finally, we will discuss how APLA, as the section devoted to the study of politics and law, can safeguard academic freedom in this moment when critical scholarship is deeply under threat.

Join Zoom Meeting (recommended) [2]
https://uib.zoom.us/j/64796997811?pwd=3qPSW0ckntofWSUWWcsJf6dIihc07b.1

Meeting ID: 647 9699 7811
Password: Business1