Submit your Workshop Proposal here!
    Submission Deadline: March 31st 2021

    MAYS Workshop Series 2021

    We are announcing a call for convenors for our first Workshops Series. The Workshops Series will aim to provide spaces for learning, discussion, structured debate, knowledge-sharing and mutual support leading up to our next 12th Annual MAYS Annual Meeting in Warsaw in August.

    Why an online Workshop Series? It seems more important than ever before to stay connected, and to make available the spaces for discussion, collaboration and debate that may have been difficult to find for many of us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Workshops can be on any topic and in any form of your choosing; they can be open or closed, structured or unstructured, requiring or not requiring readings or submissions. We encourage conveners to choose formats that facilitate discussion, collaboration and fellowship, such as the one we propose below.

    Potential Workshop Formats

    • Discussions. Discussion workshops are encouraged to be in open formats, with minimal requirements for participation (e.g. short contributions around a theme). They can revolve around a set of readings to tackle a specific theme or topic, or draw from individual experiences, such as discussing questions related to reflexivity, positionality and the archetypes of fieldwork. We encourage discussion workshops to focus around a specific question, topic or concern.  
    • Debates. Debate workshops have, as their main aim, to put two or more competing or conflicting positions–whether theoretical, methodological, or disciplinary–in conversation with each other. We encourage proposals for debate workshops that revolve around key and emerging areas of contention in anthropology and ethnography. Conveners opting for debate workshops will be asked to ensure fairness of representation and that space for opposing and minority opinions be provided and encouraged.  
    • Presentations and trainings. Presentation and/or training workshops are those that seek to propose and discuss new and innovative tools, methods, softwares, or approaches to ethnography. Such workshops may include a presentation by a speaker followed by a discussion. 
    • Forum. The intention behind a forum workshop is not to discuss the content of anthropology or ethnography, but the experiences of anthropologists and ethnographers. They can revolve around such topics as the growing precarity in academia for young scholars, the ethics of academic research, or working through particular difficulties (thesis writing, fieldwork during covid-19, etc.). A forum workshop is expected to be a stock-taking of experiences; potential leading to identifying avenues for some form of collective action.  
    • Writing workshops. Writing workshops also revolve around a specific topic or theme; they will, however, be more-so geared towards providing mutual support on various types of writing projects. Members may opt to require that participants share writings ahead of time, and set up a format and structure that encourages feedback, advice, peer-review and discussion. 

    Guidelines

    • We will support 4-6 workshops in this workshop series, which will run from April till August 2021. We will promote the workshops and assist with their organization. 
    • Workshops may only be individual sessions of up to 3 hours.
    • Workshops must be held virtually; MAYS will provide a Zoom platform.
    • Though workshops can be convened by one person, we encourage co-convened workshops by no more than two persons. 
    • Workshops will need to culminate in a short summary of proceedings or a similar output, to be published on the MAYS website or elsewhere.
    • We are working on finding ways to compensate workshop conveners in-kind, wish us luck!

    Process

    Submission HERE

    Deadline for Workshop Proposal Submission: March 31st, 2021
    Notification of Acceptance: April 5th, 2021

    MAYS Coordinators (mays.easa@gmail.com)

    Magdalena Góralska, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw

    Anthony Rizk, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Graduate Institute Geneva

    Published by MAYS