Society for Medical Anthropology: program report 2004
Society for Medical Anthropology
Program Report
November 19, 2004
Submitted by Carolyn Sargent and Lesley Sharp, Program Chairs
According to the AAA 2004 Annual Meeting guidelines, the SMA was allocated 7.50 hours (450 minutes) for Invited Sessions and 16 poster presentations. We received 95 individual paper submissions and 32 organized session submissions. We organized nine sessions thematically from individual volunteered papers. We selected five of the organized session submissions as invited sessions:
Elisa Sobo and Maria Tapia, Intergenerational Implications of Child Health and Illness
Amy Ninetto and Sarah Phillips, Bodies, Selves and Nation-States: Imagining the Postsocialist “Transition” as Biopolitical Discourse
Diane Tober and Debra Budiani, Islam, Health and the Body (co-sponsored by the Middle East Section)
Sharon Kaufman and Mary-Jo Good, Magic, Science and Belief in Medicine: New Critical Ethnography In and Out of the Clinic
Janis Hutchinson and Craig Janes, Exploring the Intersection of Race, Human Variation, and Health
Of the total submissions, the AAA program committee ultimately accepted 27 sessions, including the invited sessions, and rejected 21. Five of the sessions composed of individually volunteered papers and organized by the SMA program chairs were accepted. Of the 16 posters submitted, we rejected four and accepted 12, which we organized in a poster session entitled “Representations of Health and Human Suffering.”
According to the AAA program committee, because of an unusually large number of submissions, approximately 30% were rejected. This high rejection rate resulted in the loss of a number of highly ranked SMA organized and volunteered sessions. Late in the process (August 27), we were informed that the SMA had been allotted an additional two sessions. We added two that had been highly ranked and rejected; these are counted among the 27 sessions accepted. A message to the AAA section leadership from Tanya Luhrmann reports on meeting scheduling, the reasons for the rejections, and the necessity for scheduling more sessions on Wednesday and Sunday. Large sections such as the SMA were assigned especially numerous sessions at these less popular times.
In contrast to 2004, in 2003 there were 29 SMA sessions submitted and 25 accepted. There were 106 individually volunteered papers organized into eight paper sessions and one poster session.
The process of creating volunteered sessions composed of individual paper submissions seems inherently problematic. This year, the procedures involved first grading the individual papers, then compiling them in sessions by theme, and finally, grading the sessions. This process results in sessions comprising papers with a range of grades; one “A” paper might be thematically placed in a session with four “C” papers. The session would then not be ranked highly enough to be accepted. When I raised this issue with Lucille Horn at the AAA office, she suggested organized the volunteered papers by quality, rather than by theme. Attendance would then be based on individual papers, rather than by session topic. No sections seem to have adopted this approach, which would make it difficult for meeting participants to select a session to attend.This issue merits discussion by the SMA Board to determine whether we can suggest a more equitable process for placing individual submissions in sessions.
I do want to thank those presenters who agreed to chair the volunteered sessions we organized. A number of these assigned chairs took on the responsibility of contacting the participants in their sessions when the meeting was moved from San Francisco to Atlanta and took the initiative to transfer their session to the SfAA when it became evident that their panelists were unable to attend the Atlanta meeting.