Welcome to the next stage in the efforts of your ASA Secretariat to break free of old pre-digital inefficiencies in our operations – although some of the habits formed then may have seemed like ancient and honorable “traditions” to members encountering the new online process of preparing our Annual Meeting programs. As a former member of the ASA Board and treasurer of the Association (1986-93), I remember all too well how staff then struggled with the intricacies of assembling and balancing programs with 300 or more events and upwards of 700 individual participants. Watching the new online system work this year has impressed me with the precision with which that process can now operate – although I am sympathetic with the modest proportion of you who found its novelty challenging, even frustrating – particularly those who had not quite realized the importance of beginning the process of organizing and registering in time to have definitive arrangements made before the March 15 deadline. The lessons learned from this real-time shake-down cruise will be circulated to members well in advance of preparations for the San Francisco Annual Meeting in November 2006. The Board and the Secretariat will have thoroughly reviewed all comments (and complaints) received and will have worked to streamline the technical process accordingly with a particular eye to accommodating difficulties in transferring funds and improving communications between the ASA and its members. Thanks to all who contributed constructive suggestions or passed along helpful assessments of their personal experiences.
This screen will lead you to the work of the Program Committee, chaired efficiently and creatively by Elisha Renne, supported by sixteen of your colleagues serving as chairs of the thematic sections indicated. The Program Committee treated the official theme, as always, as suggestive rather than restrictive, and no proposals were evaluated for their relationship to it; all were assessed carefully in terms of the scholarly potential that they seemed to represent. It is the delegated responsibility of the Program Committee to constitute single-paper proposals into panels; they have worked wonders in terms of achieving coherence, given the multiple and often conflicting factors they must take into account, as they see the interests of the members of the Association as a whole. It is not their charge to accommodate personal preferences or convenience. With their carefully balanced work in evidence here, by Board policy the Secretariat will not be able to move papers from the positions given them in this Preliminary Program.
The same complexity of numerous and conflicting considerations has led to the distribution of panels through the eleven sessions as you will find them in the meeting program; this scheduling has already been reviewed for overall balance and revised by the Secretariat and by myself. The Committee and the Board regret the inevitable remaining competition between simultaneously scheduled events that will certainly appear to many, if not most, of our members, who come to these meetings to gain as wide an exposure as they can to new thinking across ranges of fields that the Committee could not possibly anticipate in all their idiosyncratic splendor. The Committee and the Board greatly appreciate your understanding of perennial failures to square this particular circle. Elisha Renne and her Committee have the entire confidence and appreciation of the Board, for their creative juggling of incompatibilities.
A further advantage of the new online system is its precision. What you will see in this Preliminary Program is based on what panel and roundtable organizers, roundtable participants, and paper proposers keyed into the database in March. The text contained a good many typographical errors, incomplete references to institutional affiliations, erratic formatting, and the like. But this is your (only) opportunity to correct inadvertent errors and omissions made when you submitted your proposal; please read your own portion of the Preliminary Program carefully and make corrections according to the procedures specified on the following page. The Secretariat will integrate your changes and standardize the format as they prepare the final version of the program.
The ASA thrives on the creativity and responsibility of its members; it cannot operate otherwise. The new online system effectively places first-line responsibility on the primary sources of energy in the Association, you its members, in ways that in the past we have not been able to tap. You have come through once again with what will certainly be a stimulating, diverse, and highly skilled program. Difficult as we all know it is to attempt to “herd” such lively “rabbits” as your submissions, the Program Committee and the Secretariat have channeled your energies into the format that follows below.
I look forward to enjoying with you the realization of all of these plans in Washington DC, November 17-20, 2005.
Joseph C. Miller, Chair, Annual Meeting Committee
Vice President, African Studies Association