United States

Organized by the CAE Graduate Student Representative, this mentoring event will be of interest to students of color and LGBTQ students in the academy. We will discuss the challenges, past experiences and struggles as emerging minoritized scholars. The aim is to provide spaces of ongoing support for thriving in academia and life.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Students of Color/LGBTQ Mentoring Session

advising/mentoring

underrepresented students

education

### Welcome to the 2023 Understanding Interventions/NSF CREST Annual Conference
Welcome to our annual conference, a gathering where the knowledge of our scientific communities share what they have researched since we last met. If it is your first time attending, then thank you for stepping into our world! If you are a returning guest, then thank you for coming back! Whether you are attending for the first or the fourteenth, we treasure your trust in what we have to offer. We promise to make it worth your while.

As in years past, we have put together an energetic collection of seminars, deeper dives, speeches, posters, and workshops to whet your appetite for learning. 

We are delighted that you have chosen to attend the 2023 Annual Understanding Interventions (UI) Conference, in partnership with the NSF Centers for Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) Program. 

### About the Conference 
This conference was established to facilitate dissemination and exchange of hypothesis-based research on interventions and initiatives that broaden participation in science and engineering research careers. The conference is designed to create a dialogue among behavioral/social science and education researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields who participate in intervention programs. Workshops, sessions, and posters will communicate effective strategies from successful STEM intervention programs, present results from empirical research studies, and synthesize the translation of research findings into practice on STEM learning, undergraduate research, graduate education, and student retention.

Thank you again, and welcome! 
**[Download Program Agenda](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rTKTrWC2DOqnIF06po5xo4buAL3mPTqZ/view?usp=sharing)**

15th Conference on Understanding Interventions 2023 

This conference was established to facilitate dissemination and exchange of hypothesis-based research on interventions and initiatives that broaden participation in science and engineering research careers. The conference is designed to create a dialogue among behavioral/social science and education researchers, evaluators, and faculty in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields who participate in intervention programs.

live discussion

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Panel: Rethinking the Definitions and Locations of Youth Politics in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa Chairs: Gözde Burcu Ege & Kyle Benedict Craig  The Arab uprisings of 2010-2011 compelled scholars to a radical rethinking of politics in general and youth politics in particular. One thing the uprisings underscored was that young people are not merely trapped in a liminal space while waiting to enter mainstream society in adulthood; rather they are themselves key sociopolitical actors. One reason the uprisings seemed to come “out of nowhere” for some scholars and other observers was because underexplored were the everyday contexts where Middle East and North Africa (MENA) youth were forming a complex array of responses to a region undergoing increasing class inequality from decades of neoliberal “reforms,” as well as various imperial and regional conflicts. This panel therefore comprises papers that ethnographically examine MENA youth as an analytical category through a range of experiences including “overt” political movements as well as youths’ own personal lives and seemingly mundane practices as an area of politics in the years since late 2010-2011.  Two of the papers on this panel explore how state, educational, activist or international or local humanitarian/charitable projects position youth as vanguards of a utopian future, of a modern pious subjectivity, as objects of anxiety and suspicion, or a unique and paradoxical intersection of these ideological formations. By considering these projects modes of governance, the panel addresses how and to what extent youth subjectivities form in relation to these projects as well as what other discourses might inform their subjectivities and life-worlds.  The events of 2010-2011 engendered a heightened interest in the ways MENA youth construct and mobilize politics through their engagements with cultural and artistic production and popular culture. This is in large part due to the prominent role various artistic media such as hip-hop, poetry, and graffiti played in the uprisings. Building off and at the same time pivoting from scholarly conversations around MENA youth cultural production during the past decade, this panel includes two papers that examine how everyday politics constitute and are constituted through aesthetic and artistic practices that are not always explicitly revolutionary.  The panelists are also collectively interested in the nexus between youth politics and temporalities; how imagining or predicting the future is often a near-constant pastime in the lives of young people. How, for example, does the future’s relation to sentiments such as optimism, hope, hopelessness, boredom, or liminality shape forms of youth sociability in the present? Similarly, how do youths’ experiences in contemporary MENA societies inform theories and practices around morality or the good life? Furthermore, building off studies that complicate strict teleological conceptions of youth, and rather examine claims to “youthfullness” (Bayat 2013), this panel offers ethnographic cases exploring phenomena that expand who counts as a youth.

Rethinking the Definitions and Locations of Youth Politics in the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa

ājil: Palestine 2021 and New Political Aesthetics in Amman's Street Art Scene

Negotiating Charity and Humanitarianism in the Youth Volunteers' Practices in the Palestinian Refugee Camps of Jordan

Rethinking Gender, Youth and Politics: Young Feminists in Turkey

Towards a "habitable chronotope": hearing non-violent futurity in Lebanese alternative music

As a result of the impact of historical trauma and other cultural-historical forces, Indigenous people of North America are more susceptible to a constellation of psychosocial, behavioral, and physiological risk factors that have contributed, in contemporary times, to a higher rate of morbidity across psychological, cardiometabolic, and functional domains. Prior to these traumatic episodes, Indigenous people were guided by a worldview grounded in a sacred epistemology of ritual and spiritual practices that defined inner identity with a Sacred Wisdom that provided a sense of wholeness, balance, harmony, hope, positive health and healing. This presentation will focus on the utilization of Sacred Wisdom as a psychology to promote general wellness and resilience. It is founded upon an understanding of the Diné (Navajo) epistemology of Sa’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon, the pathway to a life of Hózhó, the Diné sense of internal beauty, harmony, and balance with the natural and social environments. The Beauty Way and Protection Way form the core for this balanced life and universal harmony. From this perspective, all parts of the Earth are powerfully charged and alive, as the Holy Wind provides the life force for all elements. Disease and dysfunction grow from an imbalance of universal harmony. As we gradually move out of a global pandemic and look to face the challenges of climate change, Sacred Wisdom provides a guide for a future full of hope, balance and resilience. Dr. Tommy K. Begay is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Arizona.

Sacred Wisdom: The Path to Hope, Balance, and Resilience

The year 2017 stands in the memory of many people of the Caribbean as the moment when the effects of anthropogenic climate change became painfully tangible. In Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the two non-state U.S. territories in the Caribbean, the double impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria less than two weeks apart gave many residents a sense of what the Anthropocene’s new normal may be: a barrage of relentless powerful storms that, when combined with a lengthy history of colonial domination, post-colonial abandonment, neoliberal extractive capitalism, and rigid and culturally distant bureaucracies of US federal “relief” agencies, precipitated a catastrophe that seems to have no recovery in sight. Intertwined with all of this, the residents of these US Territories have, in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria contended with a proliferating discourse of resilience on the part of Federal disaster response institutions that routinely de-historicizes and de-politicizes conditions of disaster risk, bureaucracies that systematically exclude the most socio-economically marginalized residents of the islands, and gentrification on the part of affluent opportunistic investors and “expats” from the US mainland. Engaging the conference theme of Truth and Responsibility, this panel explores the role of anthropology in illuminating the unfolding history of slavery, extractive plantation economies, colonial and post-colonial abandonment, American imperialism, and neoliberal capitalism that have, on the one hand, made the US Caribbean territories a place of strategic enrichment for colonial settlers and capitalist investors while, on the other, systematically abandoning and excluding ancestral afro-descendant and working class Hispanic populations. We mobilize new ethnographic data from this post-disaster moment to reflect on the forms of subaltern sociality, livelihood, and community organizing that the people of these US Territories have devised over five centuries and the possibilities that these practices and their accompanying discourses present for imagining the future of the region in a time when the future itself is considered highly uncertain. We hope to mobilize our ethnographic data as a means of imagining another Caribbean, one that is not plagued by abandonment and neoliberal necropolitics, and we also hope that such an imaginary helps us ruminate on ways of re-imagining resilience in the Anthropocenic post-colony.

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