Simonelli awarded SAR/SfAA seminar grant

The School of Advance Research (SAR), Santa Fe and the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) have selected the proposal Artisan Production and the World Market: Collaborating in Theory, Methods, Practice for its 2012 biannual short seminar and SfAA’s 2013 Plenary Session.

Co-organized by Jeanne Simonelli (Wake Forest), June Nash (CUNY) and Katherine O’Donnell (Hartwick College), the goal of this two-day seminar is to provide anthropologists and scholars from related disciplines with the opportunity to address critical human problems and social issues through the application of anthropological insights and methods. The outcome of the seminar will be twofold: 1) a plenary session at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology and 2) an edited volume to be submitted to SAR Press for publication in its Advanced Seminar Series.

As designed by Simonelli, Nash and O’Donnell, “the seminar brings together an interdisciplinary, intercultural group of artisans and the scholars who work with them to discuss ongoing work in all areas intersecting with the production, marketing and consumption of crafts and boutique food products. We analyze learning as an interactive process functioning on three levels: providing practical marketing and business skills for small-scale producers; developing methodologies for understanding and enhancing networks of accompaniment; and evaluating the process, to enrich cultural and economic theory. Our seminar becomes the basis for wider discussion at SfAA, as well as the source of two publications.”

The international panel will also include Wake Forest’s Betsy Gatewood, and builds on work on collective entrepreneurship begun by Simonelli and Gatewood three years ago.