Conversations in the Lobby 2016

Conversations in the Lobby 2016: On engagement with peers’ work

SALSA X Sesquiannual Conference (New Orleans)

Organizer: Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin (University of Regina)

Saturday January 9, 2016

The Conversations in the Lobby event was established in memory of Steve Rubenstein, a colleague brimming with generous advice for young colleagues and peers. On the occasion of the X Sesquiannual Conference of SALSA, Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin organized the second iteration of Conversations in the Lobby 2016, by broaching the matter of anthropologists’ engagement with peers’ work, when they anonymously review manuscripts, tenure applications, and grant proposals, or when they sustain vigorous academic exchanges with colleagues via email, letters, and blogs. Londoño Sulkin will address the importance of such engagement, its forms, and its political, institutional, and personal entailments, proffer some advice, and then open the floor for discussion.

Prof. Londoño Sulkin is fascinated by people’s moral and aesthetic evaluations: their talk and other expressions concerning what they esteem or despise in human subjectivity and action. In his research and writing he addresses how social life shapes individuals’ moralities and understandings of selfhood, and in turn how individuals interacting with each other create social life and reproduce and transform these moralities and understandings of selfhood. I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon) since 1993 (I was still an undergrad at the time!), mainly with Muinane-speaking clans.

–Jonathan Hill (SALSA President), Laura Zanotti (SALSA 2016 Academic Program Chair), Jeremy Campbell (SALSA Secretary-Treasurer-Webmaster), and Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin (SALSA President-Elect)