The AES 2019 spring conference will be co-sponsored by Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists (ALLA) and Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA). It will be held at Washington University in St Louis (MO) from Thursday, March 14th to Saturday, March 16th.

Ethnographic Futures

We are not in normal times. At least according to some. For others, the perverse assaults against bodies, land, science, and justice have merely become more visible and contestable. At a minimum, people around the world and in the United States are experiencing uncertainty, violations, and anxieties. How are anthropologists strategically positioned to reflect on and theorize this uncertainty and ab-normalcy while bringing to the foreground local articulations of hope, emancipatory politics, and meaning-making? For our Spring 2019 meeting, we invite anthropologists and other scholars and activists to join the American Ethnological Society (AES), the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists (ALLA), and the Association for Black Anthropologists (ABA) in St. Louis to consider possible unfoldings of the future in specific locales, worlds, and lifeways. Five years after protests in Ferguson around racialized police brutality, Ethnographic Futures will convene in nearby St. Louis to explore how people with whom we study and collaborate imagine, create, participate, and refuse. This includes possibilities for mobilizing and challenging dominant structures but also the quotidian practices of caring, laboring, and celebrating. As some blur lines between the academy and activism, while others push back on disruptions of traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries, we invite reflections on the future and the ethnographic. Both a method of knowing and a practice of representation (texts, photography, documentaries, teaching), ethnography is itself part of and a challenge to certain futures.

Registration and submission details coming soon! Questions? Contact aes.alla.aba.2019@gmail.com