[URBANTH-L]2007 Spring Meeting in Tampa

[David W. Haines]

To: SUNTA members

Re: SUNTA in Tampa

From: David Haines, Program Chair

SUNTA is now actively planning a role as co-sponsor of the
Spring 2007 meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology.
We have now had both preliminary discussions with SfAA and
a general planning meeting among interested SUNTA members
at the last SfAA meeting in Vancouver earlier this month.

The following is a brief update. If you have thoughts or comments,
please let me know. The deadline for proposals will probably be
in October so this is a good time to start considering involvement
--the more innovative the better.

The meeting itself will be held in Tampa at the Hyatt Regency
Downtown. The dates are March 27 through April 1, 2007.
Although there are some formal negotiations still to take
place, the general expectation is that SUNTA members will
be able to register at the regular SfAA member rate and that
we will have full control over the review and scheduling of
SUNTA sessions.

In terms of program planning, our initial discussions in Vancouver
suggest interest in using the Tampa meeting for a variety of
different kinds of session. For example:

1. Plenary. After discussing various options, SUNTA members
at Vancouver seemed most interested in doing a plenary of
former SUNTA chairs as a sort of historical review.

2. Regular paper-oriented sessions (similar to AAA format).

3. More informal round tables of various kinds (e.g., interlocutor
type formats with local practitioners).

4. Sessions that are more technically oriented--edging perhaps
toward workshops (e.g., new technologies available for fieldwork
and teaching, such as GIS).

Format aside, there was strong interest in: (a) making these
sessions useful for students both intellectually and practically
(e.g., cheap housing); (b) using this as a spur to expand the
book exhibits (e.g., SUNTA members putting some pressure
on their publishers to display at the Tampa meeting); and (c)
utilizing the scheduling opportunities to create more focused
sequences of panels (e.g., theory to practice links).

As a set of initial panel proposals from the planning meeting, we
had:

1. SUNTA Presidential Plenary

2. Principles of Disaster and Displacement

3. Disaster/Displacement: Case Studies

4. Homelessness and the Role of Faith-Based NGO's

5. Gentrification

6. New Technology in Fieldwork (especially Visual Anthropology)

7. Anthropology, Urban Planning, and Sustainable Cities

8. Migration and Health

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Questions or comments to: dhaines1 at gmu.edu

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