Dear Steven
"AAA membership and meeting are reasonable in my opinion for low income
people"
An academic salary in Bulgaria is around 300€. Rent of a flat in Sofia
comes at around that much, and prices of raising children, transport, food
are not low either. I dont even speak of how much adjuncts there get - I
got 75€ for the whole length 8 credit course that meant teaching 4h a week.
And Bulgaria is a EU country, if the poorest. Am afraid to think how much
colleagues in other low income countries receive.
Even with the reductions you mention, a return flight Sofia-New York is
over 700€ and you pay extra to go beyond NYC. Even if you take a hostel, 4
nights are 25x4=100€, and similar for subsistence a day. Visas also cost
60€-100€. Add the average of low income fee and conference registration,
and you get a few monthly salaries expense.
So when speaking of low income colleagues, could you please take into
account that low income Swedes and Americans are still not low incomr as
seen from the 'rest of the world'..
Lastly, I really resent hearing 'life is unfair' as fait accompli from a
fellow anthropologist. I would have thought our discipline is set to
challenge this. Though as Fraternel points out, the divisions between us
persist in mighty ways.
Mariya
On 16 Apr 2017 10:15, "Steven Sampson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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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