By Andrew Tartar
[andrew.tartar@ufl.edu]
Chair, Student Committee

The Student Committee is taking a break from our normal column of student micro-essays this month; we’ve been incredibly busy preparing for a range of student events at the upcoming meetings, judging the submissions for the Student Endowment Award for travel to the conference, and judging the submissions for our newly created—and not yet named—Student Paper Prize.

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By Emilie Springer
[esspringer@alaska.edu]
University of Alaska Fairbanks
SfAA Student Editor

For the November issue, we solicited micro-essays about revolutions in progress; revolutions that are occurring in a present sense. We are interested in how these current events shape topics of interest to our student anthropologists. We welcomed submissions of all persuasions, loosely tethered to the theme of current revolutions. For this newsletter we sought submissions related to the theme of revolutions in a contemporary, current sense. Ryan Peseckas presents a micro-essay on the role of newly accessible electronic hyper-connections in Fiji and Tanja Ahlin offers the successful, inspiring role of creative arts and writing as tool for vocalization to the challenging political transitions in Slovenia. Both of these essays are somewhat open ended—what happens next? The lifestyle of transition leads to a sense of uncertainty but the uncertainty can be refined as we track the revolutionary potentials. Thank you to both students for providing an interesting perspective on diverse topics of revolution and another opportunity to demonstrate motivated research in applied anthropology.

Please also note the announcement for the details of a new student paper prize and the opportunity to serve on the SFAA student committee.

Happy fall!

By Tanja Ahlin
[tanja.ahlin@gmail.com]
Heidelberg University
South Asia Institute

Tanja Ahlin

While news of suicides due to dire financial problems in Greece, Italy and Spain has plagued the European Union, no similar reports have come Slovenia. This is surprising: the young country of roughly 2 million citizens has a notoriously high rate of suicide. So what ishappening? Slovenians often see themselves as a nation that is too passive to voice dissatisfaction and is historically inclined to adopt a submissive position. Instead of aggression, many Slovenians are using poetry, prose, drama and music to express dissatisfaction with their current political situation.

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By Ryan Peseckas
[ryanpeseckas@hotmail.com]
University of Florida
Department of Anthropology

Ryan Peseckas

Researchers and policymakers have marveled throughout the past decade as use of mobile phones spread across the developing world. As Horst and Miller expressed in their 2006 study of mobile phones in Jamaica, “the cell phone mushrooms up from inside mud-brick shacks and under corrugated iron sheet roofing to become an insistent and active presence…” The rapidity of the mobile revolution can to a degree be credited to legislative action by governments to deregulate monopolistic telecommunications markets, a legacy from colonial times. The island countries of Oceania were some of the last bastions of telecom monopolies, but starting in 2006 several governments invited in new competition, notably from Digicel, which now operates in Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and Nauru. Prices have plummeted, mobile phone towers have sprouted like weeds, and phone ownership rates have skyrocketed across the region.

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The Student Committee (SC) of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) is happy to announce a new student paper prize competition. Just as the winner of the Peter K. New Award student paper competition (overseen by the SfAA Executive Board) has the opportunity to publish in Human Organization, the winner of the new student paper prize competition (overseen by the SC) will work with the editor of Practicing Anthropology for the publication of their paper. We expect the winning paper will be published in early 2013.

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