AAA Elections are upon us again (online ballot goes live at 9 AM in some unspecified time zone), and as usual most people will probably either ignore the election altogether, or simply vote for (or perhaps against) their friends and colleagues. I am so far outside AAA politics that I probably couldn’t identify half the names, and as far as I know nobody is required to submit a platform so there isn’t any information about the candidates available online (other than their faculty web pages). So this post is basically an open thread, in the hope of sparking some discussion or perhaps even inspiring some of the candidates to use this space to express their views.
Do the AAA elections matter to you? Tell us why!
UPDATE: I got this via an e-mail from the AAA, -but the link doesn’t work for me-:
Please note that information about each candidate and each ballot initiative is available through links on the online ballots. In addition, the aggregate of all the information about the candidates and the ballot initiatives is available as a single file at www.aaanet.org/eballot (note this is a large PDF file).
However, if you login you can read some information about each candidate online.
UPDATE: Link fixed. It doesn’t go to the PDF directly, but to a page where you can download it. The pdf is here.
UPDATE: Note: Voting Ends at 5:00 PM ET, May 15th, 2007. So there is still time for some discussion.
that should be aaanet.org/ballot -R
There are good reasons to vote and some good people to vote for. Of the people that I know, I would suggest Molly Doane, Rob O’Brien, and Steve Striffler. There are some others on section elections, but those are a couple on the main exec. It’s hard making a decision from the little information that is provided and the AAA is a very big organization. However, as the referendum questions on Iraq and torture show, there are some potential progressive actions that can be taken.
Bye for now,
Charles
I aimed to vote for people based on creating a diverse group, but my final call would come down for the most recent PhD in the hopes that they would bring an understanding of how the discipline looks to most of us currently as opposed to 1978.