Royal Anthropological Institute Postgraduate Conference

The Royal Anthropological Institute organises annual postgraduate conference in coordination with an anthropology department in the UK.  These conferences are normally held in the autumn each year. 

2013 RAI Postgraduate Conference, University of Aberdeen

Ideas in movement: Addressing tensions in anthropology

Date: 28-29 October 2013

Deadline for submission: 31 May 2013

Plenary speakers: Tim Ingold and Rane Willerslev

The Scottish Training in Anthropological Research (STAR) is proud to announce the 2013 RAI Postgraduate conference at the University of Aberdeen. Established in 2006, STAR fosters collaborations between social anthropology staff and research students from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews.

Today, confronted with a world that appears more dynamic and rapidly changing, anthropologists are questioning some fundamental conceptions, arguing from different and often contradictory perspectives. As a guiding concept for this conference we have chosen the role of ‘tensions’ within the contemporary anthropological debate. Such tensions, flourishing all around the discipline, mark not only its conceptual history, but also its constant engagement with the constitutional concerns of our world. Among many, we might highlight tensions between the real and the imaginary, the fluid and the static, discourse and perception, nature and culture, purity and hybridity, the visible and invisible, ethnography and anthropology, discovery and construction, and so on.

Tensions have long been central to anthropological inquiries, and are still at the forefront of contemporary debates. As new ideas distance themselves from old ones, their resemblance seems paradoxical. Even as anthropologists bury the past trying to move beyond old tensions, they continually resurface in different forms. Having this in mind, important questions emerge: what does it mean to overcome old tensions? Do we really move beyond them? Are there alternatives to simply pushing against them? Moving away from naïve dualism and their simple dissolution, we invite postgraduate students and early career researchers from all sub-disciplines of anthropology and other related fields, to propose theoretical and ethnographic papers that engage with – but by no means should be limited to – some of these emerging and historical tensions.

Paper abstracts should be submitted by 31 May 2013, to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Submissions should include name, institution, a 300 characters short summary and a 250 words long abstract. Please include three or four keywords below the body of the abstract.

In order to showcase emerging anthropological research in Scotland, a selection of papers will be gathered in a panel at the ASA conference that will take place in Edinburgh in 2014, an event once again organized by the STAR consortium.

For more information, please visit our website www.raipgconference2013.com

Previous Conferences

RAI First Annual Postgraduate Conference - Durham University, 20 September 2011, a Special Edition of the Durham Anthropology Journal is dedicated to the conference. This can be read here.

RAI Second Annual Postgraduate Conference - University of Kent, 13 September 2012