I am trying to write a paper for submission to a competition hosted by a conference I am attending at the end of March. Aside from the general impostor syndrome that paper writing always sparks, I'm feeling cranky about the conference theme and, more specifically, about buzzwords that don't actually mean anything when you poke at them even a little.

The theme of this conference is "Confluence," which is defined on the conference website as being about the, "concept of merging histories, identities, landscapes, theories, and techniques that together we use to better interpret our past." This... kind of means something, I guess, in that I know what all of those words mean individually and in this context and I can understand why someone grouped them together, but it's so vague that as a theme to write a paper around it's pretty useless.

The thing is, one of the trendy things to do in anthropology these days is to work collaboratively and incorporate a multitude of voices. This is good, in theory, since anthropology has a really dreadful history full of people doing the exact opposite of that. In practice there's an unfortunate amount of lip service without much behind it, which is what this conference theme honestly feels like. It's a lot of words that sound nice and on trend and that, when put together, don't amount to much.

I get, obviously, that conference themes are meant to be vague and all-encompassing, and it's an optional theme anyway, but it would be nice if it was crafted in such a way that I could actually tell if I was getting at it or not without just slapping the word "confluence" all over my manuscript.