AAA Summary

As I suspected Montreal was far too busy for updating my blog. Walked around the old town a bit, went to Schwartz, and many good laughs were had. Besides this, and the main reason for the trip, the AAA conference was a wonderful experience.

I went to a number of sessions that dealt with museums, heritage, memory, collections, and tourism—all of which had something that will prove useful when it comes time to do research for my MA thesis. I was able attend the following sessions at least in part:

– 3-0225: Tours and Traces: Breaking New Ground in the Anthropology of Tourism and Heritage- Papers in Honor of Nelson Graburn
– 3-0685: Unruly Things: Museums and the Co-Production of Knowledge
– 3-0810: Querying “Art”, “Tradition”, Museums, and Heritage- Papers in Honor of Nelson Graburn
– 4-0235: The Rhetoric of Heritage
– 4-1065: Living Collections: Social Networks of Space, Place, and Materiality
– 5-0215: Museums and Communities
– 5-0620: Re-Activating the Legacy: Current Research on Museum Collections (Poster Session)

I took a lot of notes that I am going to need to go through in order to synthesize all the information I received, but I can say that I have a list of new authors to look into, while other that were already on my list were confirmed (i.e. Nina Simon).

One of the other highlights was getting to see Gabriel Moshenska speak after his work on the archaeology of bombing sites played so heavily into our readings about memory in Archaeological Theory a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed his talk and was glad that he touched on his excavations of neighbourhoods destroyed during WWII air raids in Britain.

On Saturday I went Exhibit Hall (had stopped by earlier in the week but finally had some time to devote to exploring on Saturday), under the advisement of M I picked up a book for my Political Economy class next semester. I was also able to grab a bunch of order forms from printing companies that service the discipline, and may be able to order a number of my books for next semester at a discount for having attended the AAAs—bonus! I also picked up some information about Documentary Educational Resources, a bookmark with a link to the archive collection at the Smithsonian, and a card for the Human Relations Area Files. To top it all off I received a free book from Vanderbilt University Press, and a glasses cleaner from Duke University Press for being a follower on Twitter. All in all a good Exhibit Hall experience.

Finally, I would like to take a moment to thank Naomi Leite, Jennifer Wagelie, and Emily Stokes-Rees for taking the time to speak with me; Olivia Littles Erickson for her advice about word clouds/wordles; and Bill Wood, and Larry Zimmerman for all their advice about research to look into.