AES 2026 Spring Conference Registration
Dec 15
Register for the 2026 American Ethnological Spring Conference to take place May 1 – 3 at the University of Victoria, British Columbia Canada.
Registration and Submissions due December 15, 2025.
Forty years ago, George Marcus and Michael Fischer declared the 1980s an “experimental moment in the human sciences,” urging anthropologists and other human scientists to rethink ethnography as a site not only of representation but of intervention, invention, and critique. Today, in the context of ecological crisis, political rupture, technological transformation, and epistemic reordering, we ask: what does experiment mean today?
This conference invites scholars to reflect on experiment as both object and mode of anthropological inquiry. How do anthropologists collaborate, compose, and critique in experimental ways? What does it mean to “experiment” with form, with method, with theory, or with the infrastructures of scholarly work? And how might experiment be situated—ethically, politically, historically—in relation to those whose lives and knowledge we engage?
We welcome proposals that explore (but are not limited to) the following themes:
- Experimental ethnography: form, aesthetics, genre
- Collaborative and co-creative fieldwork practices
- Indigenous experimentation
- Speculative anthropology and future-oriented inquiry
- Archives, objects, and materiality as sites of experiment
- Multispecies and more-than-human experimentation
- Interdisciplinary knowledge creation and experiments across disciplinary boundaries
- Experimental publics: art, activism, and engaged scholarship
- Technologies and infrastructures of knowledge production
- Risks, failures, and ethical entanglements of ethnographic practice
- Experiments in pedagogy and teaching anthropology
We encourage contributions in diverse formats, including academic papers, roundtables, and workshops.
Join us as we ask: What does it mean to experiment in and with anthropology today?
Registration & Submission Guidelines
To register and submit proposals for the conference, the following steps need to be taken prior to the submission deadline: December 15, 2025
- Register for the AES Spring 2026 Conference. You need to register for the conference before submitting your abstract.
- Once you register, you will receive a link to the submission form in your confirmation email. The submission form should only be completed by:
- an individual proposing a paper presentation
- the organizer of a panel, roundtable, author-meets-critic, or other organized panel structure. Panel participants do not need to fill out the submission form.
- Initial acceptance decisions will be communicated by February 1, 2026, and the program will be released closer to the conference date.
For inquiries, contact AES.
