American Anthropological Association

2026 SACC Pacific Northwest Regional Meeting
2026-04-11 09:00 - 2026-04-12 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Engaging Communities and Collaborating Across Disciplines: Anthropology in the Community College and Beyond
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Society for American Archaeology 91st Annual Meeting
2026-04-29 - 2026-05-03 | Hilton San Francisco Union Square
Consistent with its mission to advance archaeology, preservation, and practices, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) organizes the largest gathering of archaeologists in the Americas.
Join the community at the SAA 91st Annual Meeting, taking place April 29–May 3, 2026, at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square in San Francisco, California.
This premier event offers an unparalleled opportunity to

Share groundbreaking work
Engage in dynamic discussions
Build lasting professional connections
Get the latest research, newest ideas and best practices

What to expect:

Networking with archaeologists from across the United States and more than 45 countries worldwide
Hundreds of general sessions, symposia, forums, lightning rounds, and posters
Excursions, receptions, and career-development events like the CRM Expo and workshops
Nearly 100 exhibitors showcasing the latest publications, tools, and products

Whether a student, early-career professional, or seasoned scholar, the Annual Meeting is where the field comes together to learn, connect, and inspire the future of archaeology.
Join the SAA
Members receive a discounted meeting registration rate and can present on the program. Join today to participate in the robust conversations at the annual meeting, in publications, and among the SAA committees and task forces.
Questions? Email meetings@saa.org

2026 Spring Conference of the American Ethnological Society
2026-05-01 - 2026-05-03 | The University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Rd, Victoria, British Columbia, BC V8P 5C2, Canada
The 2026 Spring Conference of the American Ethnological Society,
will be held at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia from May 1-3, 2026 and is hosted by the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives.

The 2026 conference will be hosted in person at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The conference will take place May 1-3. An interactive map of campus can be found HERE.

Experiment as test or as exploration: modes of agency in the face of subjection

The Chinese language distinguishes two types of experiment: 试验 (shìyàn) and 实验 (shíyàn). The first, 试验, is a controlled test that typically takes place in a laboratory. The second, 实验, refers to open-ended trial-and-error in the real world. The actor in 试 验 (experiment as test) has full control over the subject matter, but the actor in 实验 (experiment as exploration) is part of the trial and is ready to be transformed. Socialism, as the slogan goes, is a great 实验 in the real world. The two types of experiment represent distinct modes of agency. While tests demand discipline, vigilance and willpower, exploration requires attentiveness to the multiple, potential alternatives that already exist and an openness to adjust oneself to them.
Individual willingness to maximize economic benefits through hard work has been indispensable to China’s post-1980 economic development. However, this developmental model appears to have reached its endpoint. This has precipitated a widespread sense of subjection, especially among contemporary university students and young professionals (20- to 40-year-olds) who will shape China’s future. They are eager to free themselves from a life dominated by the single-minded pursuit of development yet find it difficult to imagine a meaningful life undefined by economic goals. They feel powerless because their desire for alternatives has yet to find an effective mode of agency that makes concrete changes. My ethnographic inquiry, facilitated through public conversations and social art activities, suggests that members of this cohort are embracing experiment-as-exploration in their lives. This may suggest an emerging counter movement to both neoliberal economy and authoritarian governance.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Xiang Biao

Xiang Biao is the Director of the Department of the Anthropology of Economic Experimentation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Previously, he was a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has worked on migration and social change in China, India, and other parts of Asia. He is now exploring a “common concerns” approach in social research. His book Global Body Shopping was awarded the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize by the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational Anthropology (SUNTA). Biao Xiang studied sociology at Beijing University and received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK.

The Future of Anthropology Departments: Enrollment, AI & Building Sustainability
2026-06-16 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | https://americananthro.org/event/the-future-of-anthropology-departments-enrollment-ai-building-sustainability/
The Future of Anthropology Departments: Enrollment, AI, and Building Sustainability webinar will provide AAA members with an opportunity to hear directly from the authors of The Academic Humanities Today: Opportunities & Challenges—Findings from Conversations with Department Chairs about the report’s key findings and implications for humanities and social science disciplines in higher education. The session will also create space for members to discuss how the report’s themes intersect with challenges facing anthropology departments and programs.
REGISTER HERE
Speakers

Dr. Chelsea McCracken
Dr. Claire Baytas

The report is based on focus groups with 30 humanities department chairs and identifies major concerns and responses related to:

declining enrollments and majors
administrative pressures and budget models
faculty burnout and staffing challenges
public perceptions of the humanities
interdisciplinarity and recruitment strategies
AI and changing pedagogies
the need for stronger public-facing advocacy and marketing for the humanities

The webinar will consist of

30-minute presentation by the report authors
30-minute moderated Q&A and discussion with members

Speaker Bios
Claire Baytas is a Senior Analyst at Ithaka S+R, a division of the non-profit ITHAKA that does research and strategic consulting related to higher education. At Ithaka S+R, Claire’s work has spanned across various topics related to teaching, learning, and research at academic institutions, such as generative AI’s impact on the education and the status of the humanities. Prior to joining Ithaka S+R, Claire completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Chelsea McCracken is a researcher at Ithaka S+R, where her focus of study is the academic research enterprise. In addition to the Academic Humanities Today report, her recent publications cover the topics of open source research software, academic freedom, research data services, and AI in biomedical research. Her prior work experience includes roles in academic libraries, healthcare market research, education and child welfare policy, and as a tenure-track professor of interdisciplinary studies at Utah Tech University. She holds a PhD in linguistics from Rice University and a BA in French and mathematics from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
REGISTER HERE

2026 Work and Family Researchers Network Conference
2026-06-17 - 2026-06-20 | Concordia University, 1450 Guy Street, Montreal, Quebec, H3H 0A1, Canada
Work and Family Researchers Network next conference will be June 17-20, 2026 at Concordia University in Montreal Canada. The WFRN will host preconference events on June 17, including Predoctoral Workshops and Early Career Fellowship Workshops. Information on applying to participate in preconference events is presented below. The main conference of presentations and plenaries will take place June 18-20.
Concordia University is located at 1450 Guy Street Montreal, Quebec Canada. Registration is in the John Molson School of Business (JMSB) also known as the “MB building”.
The 2026 conference theme is Centering Care Across the Life Course.
Care is foundational to human well-being and to the functioning of our workplaces, families, and societies, yet it remains chronically undervalued. The 2026 WFRN Conference theme “Centering Care across the Life Course,” will explore how we can place care at the core of work, family, and policy conversation, ensuring that care and caregiving responsibilities are supported equitably.
This theme emphasizes care not only as caregiving responsibilities (for children, elders, and others with needs across the life course), but also as relational labor that sustains healthy families, workplaces, and communities. Whether expressed through care work in families, professional care work, informal caregiving, or relationship-building at work, care deeply shapes individual trajectories and well-being, workplace experiences, and organizational cultures.
Achieving a care-centered society requires both structural reforms and cultural shifts, ensuring policies reflect the needs of diverse caregivers while also building public and political support for care as a shared societal responsibility. This conference invites scholars, practitioners, policymakers, journalists and other stakeholders to explore solutions that prioritize care, in all its forms.

SANA Mentoring Workshop: Tips and Tricks for Conducting Research at Home
2026-07-29 14:00 - 15:30 (America/New_York)
The Society for the Anthropology of North America’s (SANA) 2nd Mentoring Workshop
Join SANA for conversation and Q&A about conducting research at “home” (in North American).
SANA’s new mentorship program aims to provide academic and professional support catered specifically to those who work in North America.
This workshop will be held next week on Wednesday, July 29th from 2:00-3:30PM EST on Zoom. Registration is required.
REGISTER HERE
Panelists:

Clara Han of John Hopkins University

Professor of Anthropology: Co-Director of Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Author of Life in Debt (2012), Seeing Like a Child (2021), and Echoes of a Death: Police Vioence and the Singularity of a Life (forthcoming 2026)

Catherine Fennell of Columbia University

Association Professor of Anthropology
Author of Last Project Standing: Civis and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago (2015)

REGISTER HERE

Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA) Fall Conference 2026
2026-10-02 11:00 - 2026-10-03 21:00 (America/New_York) | The Clemente Space (Latea Theater), 107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY, 10002, United States
Choosing Each Other
Multimodal Ethnographies of Friendship as Community Care
What does it mean to choose one another? In times of uncertainty and disconnection, friendship offers a vital yet underexplored domain for anthropological inquiry. This two-day conference invites anthropologists and allied scholars to explore friendship as a generative force—a voluntary bond that fosters belonging, sustains communities, and nurtures forms of care that enrich civic and educational life.
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2026 AAA Annual Meeting - On the Verge
2026-11-18 08:00 - 2026-11-22 15:00 (America/New_York)
We will convene the 2026 AAA Annual meeting November 18-22 in Saint Louis, MO with the theme “On the Verge,”
an intentionally capacious theme that speaks to this moment and its many problems—the climate crisis and its tipping points, encroaching authoritarianism, the transmutations of racial biopolitics, the fate of neoliberalism, the development and spread of artificial intelligence, teetering institutions, to name a few—while also provoking reflection on what is left behind and what is up ahead. “On the verge” draws attention to both endings and beginnings, while inhabiting the space in between.

A verge is a threshold between one thing and another that calls to mind edges, borders, brinks, and boundaries of all sorts and types: material, epistemological, moral, political, temporal, epochal, conceptual, structural, systemic and so on. But, more than that, to be on the verge is to be located somewhere specific within a transformational space. “On the verge” therefore has an energetic quality. It is an anticipatory—even suspenseful—state of heightened attunement, whether tied to reflection and diagnosis, or to action, engagement, and intervention.
“The verge” can be a generative place of invention, discovery, new ideas, new practices, new publics, new alliances, and new collectivities. Yet, when it comes to the new and emergent, “on the verge” suggests the tentative and preliminary more than the fully baked. It prompts us to look for nascent potential and to be courageously experimental.
“On the verge” speaks to some features of anthropology, too. That’s because anthropology, as a discipline, seems constitutionally “on the verge.” One of the lessons of interpretive anthropology is that cultural understanding is something to be striven towards in spite of the fact that it inevitably falls short. Thus, striving to understand the perspectives of others—their lived experiences and forms of life—or to glimpse possible futures is always an exercise in being on the verge, and anthropology has long been committed to the view that “the verge” is worth the effort. Similarly, practicing anthropologists make a profession of speaking from and across boundaries of all sorts, working on the verge of epistemic communities and institutions, with their practical demands for knowledge, while reflecting on the terms of response to urgent demands for justice. Anthropology is therefore perennially on the verge, inviting us to consider what it means when the verge turns out to be an enduring place.
Relatedly, “on the verge” directs attention towards critical junctures. But what if change comes without a decisive and identifiable inflection point? The sense of being on the verge can therefore be misleading, masking transformations that are well underway. Such a perspective therefore prompts us to scrutinize our own assessments, intuitions, and positioning, and ask, can the sense of being on the verge be illusory? In other words, are we still (or were we ever) on the verge?
Participants are encouraged to respond to this call with papers, panels, posters, and creative presentations that engage with “verges” of all sorts. Our hope is that participants will tinker with this theme and make it their own, bringing the full breadth of anthropological knowledge and research to share, and creating a dynamic conference. We look forward to seeing you in St. Louis!
REGISTER TODAY

African Critical Inquiry Program Workshop and Awards
2027-03-01 - 2027-05-03
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2027 ACIP Workshop will be African Pedagogies of Restitution: Return, Repair, Rehumanisation.
The project was proposed by organisers Koni Benson, Aidan Erasmus, Robyn Humphreys, Asher Gamedze, and Bianca van Laun, all based in the Department of Historical Studies at University of the Western Cape. African Pedagogies of Restitution will be hosted at the Iyatsiba Lab of the Centre for Humanities Research in Cape Town, South Africa in March 2027.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS TO ORGANIZE A WORKSHOP
Closing Date: May 3, 2027
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: IVAN KARP DOCTORAL RESEARCH AWARDS
For African students enrolled in South African Ph.D. programs
Closing Date: May 3, 202
The African Critical Inquiry Program (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles of public cultural domains and institutions in shaping identities and society in South Africa after colonialism and apartheid. The program has two components:

The first, an annual ACIP Workshop in South Africa, provides interdisciplinary, cross-institutional contexts to address issues central to such debate and to develop comparative, critical frameworks that can yield fresh insights, innovative and informed practice, and lively interchange for those working in and on institutions of public culture in Africa.
The second component, the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, fosters work by the next generation of scholar-practitioners.

In these ways, ACIP strengthens public scholarship and institutions of public culture in South Africa and enhances our understanding of these vital sites of cultural production and social action. Details about the workshops and research awards will be posted as they become available.

Information about applying to organize the 2028 ACIP workshop and for the 2027 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards will be available in November 2026. The deadline for both workshop applications and student applications is 3 May 2027.

For further information, see https://gs.emory.edu/guides/students/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.

Society for Medical Anthropology Conference 2027: The Grey Zones
2027-03-03 - 2027-03-05 | Georgetown Capital Campus
The Society for Medical Anthropology will hold a Spring Conference on March 3-5, 2027, co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
The SMA invites anthropologists and allied scholars and practitioners in healthcare and health policy to dwell within “the grey zones” of their research and practice. Grey zones are characterized by confusion and ambiguity; sites of thinking in which the sharp edges of concepts dissolve. In a world marked by wars, volatility, precarity, misinformation, data manipulation and emergent pressures and promises from AI, grey zones challenge the stable oppositions and binary thinking that wash out all complexity and indeterminacy in the experiences of disease and suffering, in knowledge production, in institutional practices and in the discourses surrounding technological innovations. What does it take to dwell within the grey zones? What implications do the grey zones have for our picture of thinking and for our practice on the ground? Do the grey zones demand of us a renewed attention to the concrete and the particular as generative of theory? What new collaborations among disciplines emerge in the grey zones?
In this conference, we seek to move thinking in medical anthropology from overused concepts built on stable oppositions — such as public and private, spectacular and chronic violence, crisis and routine, apocalypse and miracle, frozen renderings of either suffering or flourishing, the a priori consolidated “we” and the “they” — to attend to the genuine difficulties and possibilities faced by people as they live and work in concrete conditions marked by vulnerability and uncertainty.

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Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival (SVAFMF)
2027-03-19 - 2027-03-21
The Society for Visual Anthropology screens the best of ethnographic ﬁlm at the annual SVA Film & Media Festival. The next festival will be held in Baltimore March 2027.
SVA members’ short films selected for the festival will be considered for a special showcase at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in St. Louis, MO November 2026.
Ethnographic ﬁlm and media can be deﬁned broadly as works that emerge through ethnographic ﬁeldwork or that use, are informed by, illustrate, or evoke concepts and principles of anthropological theory, methods, or practice.
For more information, please visit:
SVA Film & Media Festival: svafilmandmediafestival.org
2027 SVA Film & Media Festival Directors:
Anna Neumann
Mariam Abazeri

Awards & Prizes

The Jean Rouch Award recognizes films that make exemplary use of ethnofiction techniques or that are produced in a collaborative manner embodying the spirit of Rouch’s “anthropologie partagée” (shared anthropology).
The Best Feature award recognizes the film longer than 45 minutes that best embodies the ethnographic inquiry and cinematic craft celebrated through the Festival.
The Best Short award recognizes the film shorter than 45 minutes that best embodies the ethnographic inquiry and cinematic craft celebrated through the Festival.
The Best Student Film award recognizes the most outstanding film made by a student enrolled in an accredited educational institution.
In some years, Special Mentions may be awarded in each category to recognize the merit of exceptional work that advances visual anthropology and ethnographic ﬁlmmaking.

Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial Meeting 2027
2027-05-13 - 2027-05-16 | The Chelsea Hotel, 33 Gerrard Street West, Tortonto, Ontario, M5G 1Z4, Canada
SAVE THE DATE – May 13-16, 2027
The meeting theme is “Crisis” and the venue is set at the Chelsea Hotel in Toronto, Canada.
Take a Virtual Hotel Tour of the venue here.
More information coming soon.
