Yes, life is unfair.  Some people have more money than others to go to
the Annual Meetings. But despite this, we should be fair and note that
the AAA has made some efforts. There are fee reductions already.
Membership> If you are a student or a low income member, the annual fee
is 60 dollars. For this you get access to a whole lot of online journals
and alot of other things. This is a good deal. Regular members, like
myself, pay over 200 dollars.
Conference registration> a student registration is 100 dollars. A low
income registration is 200 dollars, and a professional registration 238.
For that price, you get 5 days of anthropology, 1200 papers, 300 panels,
and alot of networking and jobhunting with thousands of anthropologists
in one place, the book exhibition, etc etc. For those of us coming from
smaller, isolated institutions far away, like I do, I think it's a good
deal. Or in any case, a reasonable deal between price and product.

Regarding travel, AAA moves around each year to give US participants
geographic equality and has even had its meetings in Canada and Mexico.
When the meetings are on the east coast,  hundreds of participants will
save on travel and perhaps one less night in a hotel. It is never held
in NYC because it is too expensive. Twenty percent of AAA members are
not US, so of course we who live outside the US pay more to come to the
conference, but then again, we have our own national anthropology
associations as well.

An AAA meeting now had 4000 or more participants.  It cannot be compared
with smaller conferences. You cannot have an AAA conference at a
university when you need 30 parallel panel rooms of different sizes, and
no university town has thousands of empty hotel rooms. That's why AAA
meetings can only be held in big cities that have giant hotels or which
have convention centers like Denver or Minneapolis. And never in NYC
because it's too expensive. To  have the conference on a univ. campus it
would have to be in the summer. The EASA is held at universities, but in
the summer.  But despite the summer venue, the EASA meetings in the end
cost about the same in registration and hotel as the AAA.
Since life is full of choices, one can choose to go to the smaller,
specialized gatherings where you meet fewer people, are closer to your
home, have fewer travel costs and you can present your work for more
than  the 15 minutes that AAA allows. We all make these choices.
Finally, if you want to save money, you can register early, get the
triple room hotel room option with others before it sells out, use
AirBnb or couchsurfing, or go to the conference without a name tag. If
you are without a name tag, you can still attend all the sessions, do
your networking, just not the book exhibition, and u cannot give a paper.
So in the end, large conferences that are far away cost money and you
have to find the cheapest option. Or you have to decide that smaller
gatherings closer to home are a better option.
Since the fees for the AAA membership and meeting are reasonable in my
opinion for low income people, and since the airfare costs vary so much,
the major cost of the meetings for most people over the 4 days is the
hotel. No one wants to spend up to 200 dollars a night.
I see three practical options that could be reaised for helping low
income participants attend the meetings>
1. Move the meetings to the summertime so that they are held on a univ.
campus, thus making it cheaper.
2. Force the AAA to offer not just reduced hotel rates, which they
already do, but  to organize some kind of student accommodation or
couchsurfing portal that can offer really cheap hotel space.
3. For those who cannot attend, perhaps some online/skype access to the
meetings, so people could see the plenary sessions thru a video feed
from their home computers. The EASA has done this with plenary sessions.
Like all of u reading this, I have 'attended' several conferences via
online viewing.
4. Encourage AAA to seek more external funding to fund low income attendees.

Steven Sampson
Lund


On 16-Apr-17 8:30 AM, Mariya Ivancheva wrote:
> Thanks, Anne for raising the issue, and Matan for suggesting the task
> force. I would gladly join.
>
> I am aware the question has been raised in the past by adjunct faculty
> members at American universities, but not sure to what result. It did not
> affect foreign favulculty, however, I believe... But does anyone involved
> remember/ can comment?
>
> As a Bulgarian early career anthropologist and before I got a job in "the
> West" I have used the non-membership option for a few meetings in order to
> attend without paying high membership fee (but the conference fee, overseas
> flights, hotel nights, subsistence because food is not provided etc) is
> still prohibitive, and I was lucky to have a fellowship which most PhDs
> these days dont have. Plus, opting out of membership one cannot participate
> in votes or even enter the members forum and raise the issue, so its a
> vicious circle...
>
> Asecond issue,I have rarely seen other Bulgarian and further "second speed
> Europe" (I am using this with irony) anthropologists at AAA conferences,
> unless they are also working at Western universities. This is also
> detrimental to the development of the discipline in countries like my one,
> where the only anthropology major has recently closed and there is little
> encouragement of the handful of traditional ethnology departments to engage
> with the broader discipline on international level. Respectively people
> with degrees from foreign universities like myself and many other
> colleagues end up being foreigners in their home country/academy. We are
> never recruited at these departments or even invited to give talks, making
> the students and academics at Bulgarian universitues and the broader public
> hardly aware of or exposed to the developments and knowledge produced in
> the discipline. So investment in new positions/programs of anthropology is
> never happening: another vicious circle.
>
> One more issue, I am sure other people here will recognize as well. Since I
> have finished my Phd and started my academic career, I have not been
> employed at departments of anthropology proper, but have been an
> anthropologist at departments of social policy and education. As a
> post-doc, I have not been able to convince my non-anthropologist PIs, that
> AAA is a context in which it is worth presenting the findings of our work.
> Even if I intrigued them, the money spent was prohibitive and they prefered
> to invest in similarly expensive conferences with "specialists" (e.g.
> education conferences, where people working on my subfield are a handful
> similarly as at AAA). This has meant, that I my projects never paid my AAA
> fees & expenses and while I got institutional funding once, that funding
> stream was subsequently cut, so last year I could not afford the flight, so
> did not attend despite having paid the membership and fee to register (and
> there was no way to claim these back either).
>
> Lastly, I believe beyond fee reduction for certain members categories,
> there should be points made about :
> - venues : to my mind (public) universities should host such conferences
> and benefit from the revenue and exposure if their students
> - fellowships and cost sharing: e.g. members fees should be able to support
> other memberships/conference fees
>
> Best,
> Mariya
>
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