The ↑12th EASA Biennial Conference will take place in Nanterre, France (near Paris) from 10th through 13th July 2012. The overall theme is “↑Uncertainty and disquiet.” The ↑list of workshops is set and the ↑call for papers open—the latter will be closed on 28th November 2011. You can only give one presentation, so you have to skim through the vast list and make up your mind to which workshop you want to submit a paper. If this one submission is rejected, you save a lot of money, ’cause it’s of no use to journey to a conference without presenting something there. Here are the workshops which caught my eye, and, from the top of my head, notes on what I might submit:
    ↑Standards and the quest for technocratic certainty—as the talk is about organization/s and bureaucracies something on the out-of-the shadows prevalence of the discourse cybernetics might be (bene)fitting.
    ↑Certainties and uncertainties of the armed fighter—dunno, just struck my fancy.
    ↑Contemporary hybrids in visual anthropology—machinima in particular and computer generated imagery in general anyone? Computer games set in ‘classic’ fields of anthropology, e.g. ↵Far Cry 2 (much uncertainty and disquiet in that story). Computer games produced in the ‘classic’ fields of anthropology.
    ↑Thinking with Latour—one of my top favorites at the moment (the workshop, not Latour ;-). Might be a chance to rant about how Latour’s concepts and “tools” are subject to the heritage of cybernetics.
    ↑Trickster anthropology: theorizing ontological ambiguity, transgression and transformation—ahhh, Trickster, ↓my old specialty.
    ↑The visual in times of uncertainty: experience lived/experience recorded—listed here more out of interest. But then again the members of ‘my online tribes’ are particularly fond of the history of their own communities. This history is stored and redistributed by a plethora of digital means, visual ones naturally, too. This already begins with screenshots of shared gaming experiences, and so on, and so on.
    ↑Theorising media and social change—my pal ↑John Postill‘s workshop who in the end brought me to EASA. I got several vague ideas, but have to think further first, as the questions raised in the workshop’s abstract are quite deep-probing—see e.g. ↑John’s latest on this.
    ↑Strategies of resistance? The role of alternative urban and virtual markets in neoliberal economies—shadow economies stemming from online games turned business models.
    ↑The anthropology of security—cyberpunk galore. Security I take to be great topic for anthropology, especially after I heard ↑Thomas Kirsch ↑talk on the semiotics employed by the private security industry in South Africa.
    ↑Signifying blood: illness, technologies, and interpretations—body-invasive technologies, cyberpunk, cybernetic notions fusing with rituals and symbols.