Caribbean Studies Association
Miami, Florida

Dear Colleague:

I am pleased to invite you to CSA2002--the 27th Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA), which will be held in Nassau, The Bahamas May27 - June 1, 2002 under the theme "Coping with Challenge, Contending with Change."

Challenge and change in the Caribbean are not new, of course. They have been constants of the Caribbean experience ever since Columbus encountered the region in the fifteenth century. Yet, the challenge and change elements have metamorphosed over the centuries since the arrival of Columbus, assuming newuand often dangerous--elements and acute features in recent time, precipitated or accentuated by transformative dynamics in polity, economy, and environment.

The region's challenges and changes and their transformative dynamics are both amenable to and worthy of description and analysis in a variety of scholarly arenas. Hence, there is understandable expectation that CSA2002 will witness intellectual interchange in a multiplicity of disciplines. Mine is, therefore, both an invitation and a challenge. Let us extend the disciplinary perimeters of probing the region's challenges and changes beyond the Social Sciences and Humanities, traditionally the arenas of major focus at CSA conferences.

Let us probe in arenas of law, environmental studies, medicine, architecture, engineering, biological sciences, geology, and other disciplines that feature minimally, if at all, at CSA conferences.

Explorations will be both theoretical and empirical, single discipline as well as cross- and inter-discipline, and are welcome at all levels of analysisuunit, group, national, regional, and international systemic. Moreover, we celebrate methodological and linguistic variety and are not bound by any predetermined intellectual orthodoxy. We insist, though, that conference deadlines and guidelines be observed; that professionalism guide the preparation of papers; and that civility define the discourse at the conference.

Thus, I invite you to submit panel and paper proposals. The conference web site www.rcamultimedia.com/csa2002 you provides full details. I look forward to a splendid intellectual interchange in the Bahamas as we examine the nature and implications of the various ways the Caribbean is coping with challenge and contending with change, and is likely to continue doing so. Some 400 scholars and graduate students are expected to be part of the interchange. Join us and be part of it!

Please share this letter with your faculty and graduate students.

Sincerely,

Ivelaw L. Griffith
President