There are many ways to get involved with the AAA meeting and to present original research through a presentation or poster. Students may submit session, paper or poster proposals to any section of the AAA, including NASA, through the AAA meeting page.
Submitting a Paper/Poster Individually or as a Part of a Session
Students can submit a paper or poster independent of a session and will be organized with similar papers for sessions at the AAA if selected. Additionally, students can watch the NASA listerv for CFPs (Calls for Proposals) for sessions that may fit with their research interests, an submit their papers for consideration in an organized session.
Organizing a Session or Roundtable
We warmly invite you to submit proposals for panel submissions to the National Association of Student Anthropologists (NASA) section, for the AAA Annual Meetings.
As students, we are able to organize our own sessions at the AAA meetings just as established scholars are, and through the NASA section, all student members are welcome make submissions. It will help you gain experience in organizing a panel of paper presentations on a topic of your research interests. To organize your own panel, you could take the following recommended steps:
1. Think of your primary research interest
2. Use that interest to develop it into a theme that fits the meeting’s theme and would be of interest to many people
3. Partner with a peer or graduate student with similar interests
4. Together, develop a proposal of a student panel to submit to the AAA website, for the NASA section to review
5. The proposal can include things such as: a brief description of the theme, posing questions that could pique peer scholars to be interested in presenting in your panel, close the proposal with an invitation for submissions to your peers
6. Finally, you could ask a mentor/professor/advisor to review and edit your panel proposal for input before submitting to the AAA website
7. Remember: You will be responsible for that session and for recruiting panel presenters.
Organizers must submit an abstract (of no more than 500 words), keywords, length of session, anticipated attendance, presenters names and roles. This means you must recruit paper presenters before the deadline. In the near future we will have an online forum for you to coordinate with your peers, but in the meanwhile we highly recommend using our Facebook page and Listserv to find others to work with.
In order to submit you must be a current member of the AAA and the NASA section and have registered for the Annual Meeting. All the presenters and discussants on your panel must also be registered for the Annual Meeting.
This is due no later than March 15th annually if you are submitting for “Invited Sessions.” You can submit panel proposals later, but for consideration of “Volunteered Sessions,” by April 15th. The definitions of “Invited Status” and “Volunteered Status” can be found on the AAA website.
Graduate students are especially encouraged to submit for papers and undergraduates are encouraged to submit for posters. Your submissions should be uploaded at the AAA website meetings page.
Another Option: Students are also invited to organize Roundtable sessions. Roundtables are discussion-based sessions, focus on a particular topic of interest and provide a space for deeper peer discussion than do paper panels. The topics may include (but not limited to) current anthropological research trends, methods, theoretical discussions, current events, and topics generally related to student concerns (in the case of our section). Roundtable participants do not submit abstracts or present papers, but they do commit to and come prepared with discussion topics, themes, and points of interest.
The NASA Programming Committee may be contacted directly by email to ask questions regarding submissions for panels or roundtables: students.anthropology@gmail.com