Western Anthropology 6th Annual Graduate Student Conference

Anthropology has always been faced with a thorny problem: how to approach the idea of boundaries. As a means of reifying differences between peoples, spaces, and places, the idea of a “boundary” has served as a tool for various lines of anthropological inquiry. Their contemporary application, however, is often challenged, as boundaries in many forms represent an inherent limitation on fluidity and free movement; even in the pursuit of shifting or demolishing these barriers altogether, scholars have often produced new ones.

Now, in a time when we are acutely aware of the permeability and complexity of the world and those who inhabit it, we as emerging researchers are called upon to find ways to re-imagine how boundaries are created, re/de-constructed, or overcome in thought and in practice.

The Western Anthropology Graduate Society (WAGS) would like to invite you to participate in our 6th Annual Graduate Student Conference, wherein we will hear from student researchers on any and all aspects related to a “boundless” anthropology; this includes all current graduate and undergraduate research (both anthropological, and from beyond this discipline’s own "boundaries") on topics such as: societal change, interdisciplinarity and community collaboration, migration and displacement, human/non-human relationships, technologies and communication, academic activism, boundaries in theory and in practice, decolonizing thought, material entanglements and permeable boundaries, ethical, legal, moral and bureaucratic boundaries.

Dr. Karen McGarry (McMaster University), and Dr. Christopher Watts (University of Waterloo) will be the keynote speakers for the graduate and undergraduate panel respectively.

Funding for this conference provided by Research Western, SOGS and SGPS through the Joint Fund.