What follows is an overview of sessions and other events organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the 2025 American Anthropological Association annual meeting. Please see the AAA program for more details.

Special programs and events

Weds, November 19 – Sat, November 22 | Merchant Hall Gallery, 1152 Magazine St
Hours TBA
Spectral Remix Exhibition

Thurs, November 20 | offsite
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Joint Section Reception @ Spectral Remix

Sat, November 22 | Marriott – Balcony M and on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/91071621682 (hybrid)
11:45 AM – 12:45 AM
SCA Business Meeting

Sat, November 22 | Sheraton – Orpheus (8th fl) (access via elevator only)
4 PM – 5 PM
Culture@Large: Spectral City—Walking New Orleans through Slavery’s Present Pasts with Rashauna Johnson

Invited Sessions

4362 Haunting Atmospheres (co-sponsored with the Association of Black Anthropologists)
5371 Panel 1 - Habitable Air: Urban Inequality in the Time of Climate Change (co-sponsored with the Anthropology and Environment Section)
5053 Race, Caste, and the Global Rightward Turn (co-sponsored with the American Ethnological Society)
2776 Race Elsewhere (co-sponsored with the American Ethnological Society) 
8050 Ethnography, Voice, and the Question of Violence in Anthropology Today (co-sponsored with the Society for Medical Anthropology)
3458 Analyzing the Intangible in Tourism and Beyond: Metaphorical Hauntings and Sensorial Experiences of Intangible Cultural Heritage (co-sponsored with the Council on Heritage and the Anthropology of Tourism)

Flash sessions

Thurs, November 20 | Marriott – Balcony J
#1 10:15 AM – 11:45 AM

• Forging an identity in the present with the past: A case study of a Chinese couturière
• In the Shadow of Ghosts: Recovery, Identity and the Catastrophic Injury Industry
• Nuclear Systems Literacies as a Non-Goal-Oriented Goal: Context-Centered Pedagogy for Collaborative Siting
• Rites of False Passage: a ritual critique of MIT Media Lab’s Food Computer project
• What Makes Cross-Gender Performance in Chinese Opera Possible: An Ethnomusicological Study on Theatricality, Conventionalization, and Codified System

Thurs, November 20 | Marriott – Balcony J
#2 12:45 PM – 2:15 PM

• The Wargaming Encounter: Simulation and Dissimulation in Rio de Janeiro
• Afterlives of high water: Hurricane Helene and experiences of displacement in Western North Carolina
• Agency of Unburied: Haunting, Spectrality and Impossible in (Post) Soviet Border Imagination
• Appeasing the souls of the violently deceased and those who survived through contemporary arts
• Diasporic Specters in a Life Story: Tracing Romani trajectories in the Americas
• Echoes: Ghosts, Repetition, and Remix in Detroit Hip-Hop
• Performing Perspectives: A Semiotic Analysis of Stand-up Comedy
• Residual data, student data, and the university

Fri, November 21 | Marriott – Balcony J
#3 12:45 PM – 2:15 PM

• “Like a tree without roots”: Belarusian women’s communities of care and resistance in exile
• Artificial Intelligence as a Mass Medium
• Domesticating Chinggis Khan: Political Belonging and Historical Engagement of Mongolians with the Statue of Chinggis Khan
• Getting Lost, Navigation and Spatial Precarity: The case of Bangladeshi women in Buffalo, NY
• Ghosting the Family Home: Ethnographic Reflections on Heritage, Ruin, and My Family’s Return to Vietnam
• Great Expectations: Global Chinatowns, Cultural Transformation and China’s Soft Power
• Specters of Coal: Haunted Cultural Landscapes in West Virginian Mining Towns
• Staging Cinema in Assam: Ethnographic Encounters with Regional Film Production and Infrastructure

Fri, November 21 | Marriott – Balcony J
#4 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM

• Art and Memory Activism in Bali, Indonesia
• Cultural Crossroads: Expressions of Identity, Resistance and Belonging on the Texas-Mexico Border
• Digital Hantulogi: Ritual Innovation and Spectral Bricolage in Indonesian YouTube Horror Communities
• Ghosts in Motion: Rhythm, Trauma, and Collective Liberation
• Ghosts in the Freezer: Zombie Meat and the Embodied Nostalgia in Post-Socialist Urban China
• Myths as Maps toward an Ecological Otherwise
• The Shadows of ‘Becoming Independent:’ Aspirations and Sexuality among North Indian Youth
• To Be a Young Ximi in Beijing: Sonic Subcultures and Ideological Fashioning among China’s Urban Youth

Sat, November 22 | Marriott – Balcony J
#5 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM

• Formations of feminist “thalaimurai”: intergenerationality, memory and care in Tamil political life
• From Radio to Internet: The Communication Shift for the Mebêngôkre-Kayapó
• Machines for the Movement: AI Chatbots, Alt-Tech Platforms, and the Discursive Production of White Nationalism
• Mongol Shobhajatra: An Archival Research and Visual Taxonomy Analysis of its evolution
• Once Upon a Town: The Power of Origin Stories in Media, History, Heritage, Identity and Political Economy in St. Petersburg, Florida
• The Ghosts of Sonic Activism: Sounds that populate the researcher’s body

Sat, November 22 | Marriott – Bonaparte
#6 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM

• Alma-Grad: Mobilizing Kinship for Care, Welfare, and Development in Kyrgyzstan
• From Shelf to Self: How Collectibles Contribute to Nerd Identity and Belongingness
• Ghosts in the World of Academia
• Look Who’s Walking: Diversifying Walking Methodologies from the Ground Up
• Nostalgic Imaginaries: How Constructed Memories of Indigenous Canadian Rangers Shapes Current Military Dialogue Around Arctic Sovereignty
• The Bell Witch, Jim Crow, and the Haunting of African American History
• The many lives of recorded magnetic tape. Grassroots cultural preservation and selective memory in Argentina’s independent music scenes

Sessions

2785 The Dread Heights: Anthropology and Theology in Sites of Refuge and Relief 
3491 Theory in Residence 
4962 Haunted Infrastructures - Infrastructural Haunting: Part 1
4652 Embodied Hauntings: Reimagining the Human Condition Through Sport 
3628 Ghostwriters: The Limn Roundtable
5008 The Anthropology of Engineering, Authoritarianism, and Nationalism: US Institutions Shift, but We Have Been Here Before 
5006 Haunted Infrastructures - Infrastructural Hauntings: Part 2 
8103 Sonic Traces of Possibility and Peril 
7269 Resistance and solidarity ‘from the South’ 
5074 The future is a foreign country: Operationalizing and acting on the world to come (Part 1) 
8152 Digging: Socialities, Affects, and Epistemologies of the Underground 
4968 Life in Morocco: Helping Hidden Voices be Heard 
2446 Haunted Resilience: Negotiating the Ghosts of Appalachia’s Past Through Community-Engaged Ethnography
4314 Ethnographic Vignettes and the Writing Self 
3787 From Bodies to Objects with/out Value 
5092 The future is a foreign country: Operationalizing and acting on the world to come (Part 2) 
5107 Specters of Failure: The Futures Past of Technoscience 
2740 Toward an Anthropology of Architecture
6375 Ectoplasmic Traces: Symbolic Regimes and Alternate Imaginaries
1883 Teaching Anthropology by Doing Anthropology: Pedagogy, the Ethnographer’s Magic, and Learning Beyond the Classroom 
2778 There is a House: Untimely Dwellings 
2529 Re-incarnation: The Afterlives of Past Events in Present Bodies
1942 From Refusal to Repair: Global Ethnographic Perspectives
7827 Empire and its Haunts 
7100 Haunted Futures: Relationships, Collectives and Places
7355 Contours of Ghosts: Recognizing the Past and Creating Old Futures
3224 Sonic Infrastructures and the Materiality of Power 
5143 Imaginations and Temporalities of Belonging and Enclosures
5049 The Politics of Lingering Part One: The preservation, adaptation, and application of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing 
7643 Reconceptualizing Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Material, Spiritual, Religious and Cultural Layers of Experiencing and Perceiving in Türkiye 
7948 Ghostly Informatics of Cringe: A Discussion on the Somatic Representations of Haunting Awkwardness 
2709 Being “at Home”: Constructing Belonging in Settled Worlds 
1990 When the Past Collides with the Present: Historical Legacies, Cultural-Ecological Landscapes and the Spirit(s) of Resistance
2850 Histories Haunting Industrial Cultures
7727 Spectral Subjects: Conjuring Spirited Anthropologies
7174 Debris of Futurity: Unfinished Makings of Our Pasts and Futures
4148 Inhabiting Conditions of Violence: Seeing Anew through Cultural Horizons
5649 Diagrams in anthropology: haunting the canon? Exploring critiques and possibilities of diagrammatic work
8161 Immaterial Entanglements and Spectral Presences in Agrarian Transformations
2549 Anthropology of/and Universalism(s)
2926 Writing Into Ordinary Ghosts: Papers Honoring the Work of Kathleen Stewart
1897 Gesture: Citations, resuscitations, and excitations
7188 Dead Souls: Temporality and Narrative in the Production of Multiple Selves
8110 The Politics of Lingering Part Two: How Indigenous lives and practices persist in colonial contexts that disrupt or disregard them
7857 What Haunts the House: Chronotopes, Capital, and the Unruly (After)lives of Place
7033 Interrogating Indigeneity: Deconstructing a Haunted Concept
2946 Doubles and Troubles
2394 The Ghosts of Analyses Past
3461 Beyond the Colonial Specter: Haunting, Memory, and the Persistence of Black and Indigenous Worlds
7904 Katrina’s Ghost’s
7376 Between Remains and Aspirations: A Spectral Imagination of Everyday Democracy in India
2959 Contested Grounds: Land, Rent and the Politics of Distribution
2886 The Journal’s Ghosts: Nonjournal Digital Publishing and the Politics of Adjacency
2699 Getting the Ghost on the Page: Writing about Spectral Encounters
2502 (De)composing Durability
6342 Compelling Forms, or, “What kind of instrument am ‘I’?”
7571 Ghosts in the Fieldnotes: Conversations with the Past and the Obligations of Ethnographic Practice
7094 Reflections on the Ethnographic Image
5419 The Ocean Multiple: Spectralities of Oceans Otherwise
8376 “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday”: New Orleans Brass Bands, Grief Work, and the Afterlives of Sound
5328 After Theft
2590 Beyond War and Conflict: Exploring Lives and Worlds in Contested Spaces
2541 Being Curious: The Art of the Question
3795 The Art of Haunting: Spectral Legacies behind the Creative Economies
4052 How it lingers: the cultural adoption of disaster aesthetics
4130 Listening to Future Ghosts: Towards a Universally Haunted Anthropology
7723 Nationalism and its Discontents: A Conversation on Studying Majoritarian Victimhood
4134 Feeling in Illiberal Times
3617 Haunting Materialities in States of Extraction
3827 Calling It Failure: Ethnographies of Unfulfilled Plans and Failed Projects
4540 “Honoring Ethnographic Relationships “After” the Field”
2569 Murders and Ghosts: State Cruelty and the Haunting of History
3619 Specters of Technology
4016 In Excess: Ghosts, Accidents and the Forces Beyond the Plan
4350 From “Vibes” to Vibratory Specialists
4160 Summoning and Haunting: The Afterlives of Empire
2506 Suspicion, Conspiracy Theory, and Authority
2756 The Spectrality of Borders: The Image of the Frontier and its Phantoms
3876 The Book’s Spectral Futures: Academic Writing in the Age of Public Anthropology
1881 Cultivating Space for the Experimental
3471 Haunted Ethics: Memory and Marginality in Modern Medical Care
3290 Toward an Anthropology of the Contraption
4631 Ethnographic Lack: Studying Ghosts, Lacunae, and Absences
4979 Experimental Science of Body Habitation
3775 Time of Monsters 2
8252 Anthropology and the Specters of Science 1
5487 Haunted Pedagogy: Confronting our Ghostly Moments, Students, and Histories
7830 “The Intimacy of Difference: Transformations and Continuities”
6938 Negotiating Masculinities: The Rationality-Religiosity Dichotomy in Turkish TV Series
7596 The Planetary Milieu: Equipping Life for a Transformed Environment
3367 Uncanny Ecologies and Spectral Politics in India
7072 Inscription, Sedimentation, and Counter-Memorialization: Contemporary Artistic Engagements with Endurance and Fracture
7879 Sonic Specters: Cross-Cultural Hauntings, Collective Grief, and Musicking Trauma
7819 Mediations Between Water and Land: Encounter, Transformation, and Collaboration
3334 When the Void Speaks: Ghostlining and Historical Justice
6950 Questioning Everyday Consumerism of Popular Series and Their Reflections on Socio-Cultural Values in Turkey
7514 Everyday Adjustments: Remaking Relationships through Inconveniencing and Accommodating Others
3479 Recurating Historical Presence: Tinkering with Time, Tradition, and Trauma