What follows is an overview of sessions and other events organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the 2026 American Anthropological Association annual meeting. Please see the AAA program for more details.
Special Programs and Events
Culture@Large
Date: Thursday (11/19)
Time: 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Location: Conference Center, Room 262
We are excited to host a featured talk by St. Louis-based journalist and bestselling author Sarah Kendzior
Business Meeting and Awards Ceremony
Date: Saturday (11/21)
Time: 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Location: Marriott, Pershing Room
Come for prize announcements, celebration of Cultural Anthropology at 40, discussion of the future of publishing, and the announcement of new initiatives
Joint Reception with the Anthropology & Environment Society
Date: Saturday (11/21)
Time: 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Location: Kre8 Space, 2035 Washington Ave, St. Louis, MO 63103
Come to our party at the AAA meetings to meet or catch up with folks who like the SCA and the Anthropology & Environment Society
Places Haunted, Hauntings Placed: Acoustemology and the Politics of Temporality
Date: Thursday (11/19) through Saturday (11/21)
Time: 7:30 AM – 10:30 PM
Location: Conference Center, First Floor, Hallway/Foyer outside room 106, across from Exhibit Hall Entrance
An immersive electroacoustic performance combining materials from Mount Vernon and Little Saigon to explore lingering sonic traces of colonial violence, displacement, and collective trauma
Sponsored Sessions
Activating the Archives: Investigative Theatre and Embodied Knowledge
Date: Wednesday (11/18)
Time: 12:45 PM – 4:45 PM
Location: Conference Center, Room 220
Climate Emotions: Anthropological Perspectives (Part Two)
Date: Thursday (11/19)
Time: 10:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Location: Marriot, Gateway A
Co-sponsored with the Society for Psychological Anthropology
Writing Culture in the Age of AI: Celebrating 40 Years of the Journal Cultural Anthropology
Date: Thursday (11/19)
Time: 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Location: Conference Center, Room 132
At World’s End
Date: Saturday (11/21)
Time: 2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Location: Conference Center, Room 101
Co-sponsored with the Anthropology & Environment Society
Sessions
Thursday (11/19)
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Automating Relationality: Ethnographic Insights on Technological Mediation of Networks across the Neonatal Intensive Unit, the Convenience Store, Religious Automation Technology, and Networks of Care for Opioid Use | CC, Room 266
Creating a Medical Commons: On the Verge of Biotech and Chemical Frontiers | CC, Room 264
Living with Incomplete Projects: Identities in the Making | Location: CC, Room 227
On the Verge of the Good: Anthropological Theories of Wellbeing, Flourishing, and Moral Life | CC, Room 226
Querying More-than-Human Indigeneity: ‘Can God Be Indigenous?’ | CC, Room 228
10:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Christian (Trans-)Nationalisms and Emerging Conceptions of Race, Identity, and Belonging | CC, Room 125
Irresolution | CC, Room 264
Microbes on the Verge | CC, Room 105
Politics of Disposability: Racial Capitalism and Migrant Life | CC, Room 267
12:45 PM – 2:15 PM
Global China in Motion | CC, Room 261
Life in the Wake of Order: Abandonment, Non-Response, and the Politics of Withdrawal | CC, Room 105
On the Verge of a New Marxist Anthropology? | CC, Room 229
Pedagogical States | CC, Room 100
When Death is Coming | CC, Room 275
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Marxism in Anthropology: In Intergenerational Dialogue | CC, Room 123
4:15 PM – 5:45 PM
Anthropological Fieldsites on the Verge of Change | CC, Room 228
Beyond Critique: Towards a Politics of Grafting | CC, Room 125
Beyond the Verge: Rethinking Migration Through a Non-Border Lens | CC, Room 103
Material Thresholds | CC, Room 226
On the Verge of Access, for Whom? Theorizing Emerging Technologies from and Through Disability | CC, Room 120
When Death is Coming (Part Two) | CC, Room 275
Friday (11/20)
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
“Studying Up” Methods, Ethics, and Theories in Changing Political Times | CC, Room 230
Failure: Exploring the Generative Possibilities and Limitations of Faults, Flaws, and Flops | CC, Room 240
Falsehoods, Manipulation, and Cultures of Artifice: Anthropology on the Verge of Truth? | CC, Room 261
Making Sense of the Sense of Being on the Verge | CC, Room 241
Verging on Collaboration in Applied Research: On the Politics and Perils of Working Together | CC, Room 266
Writing With(in) the Void: Fiction, Truth, and Language in Anthropology | CC, Room 126
10:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Archive of One | CC, Room 265
Coordination in Transitional Spaces: Everyday Experiments with Transitional Objects and Forms | CC, Room 266
Living with Incomplete Projects: Infrastructural Labors | CC, Room 223
Multispecies on the Verge | Marriott, Missouri
On and Off the Record: Immigration Courts on the Verge of Collapse | CC, Room 242
Self and Other in the Age of AI | Marriott, Kingsbury
State Temporalities: Preparation, Governance, and Conflicts of Time | CC, Room 241
Style on the Verge: Forms and Transformation in the Digital and AI Economy | CC, Room 222
12:45 PM – 2:15 PM
Anthropology in Times of War | Marriott, Gateway B
Cultures of Expertise in the Thrall of AI: Epistemic Transformations of Anthropological Knowledge and Method | CC, Room 226
Heritage Politics in Unstable Times | Marriott, Gateway A
Living in Diaspora | Marriott, Kingsbury
Models: On the Verge of Making and Destroying Worlds | CC, Room 230
Rents: Resources, Real Estate, Reproduction | CC, Room 264
The Linked Rupture (Part One): Anthropology, Science, and Reflexivity Between Covid and Trump II | CC, Room 274
Traces and Hauntings in the Archives | Marriott, Lindell
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
“On the Verge” of a Non-Commercial Journal Portfolio? Exploring Mutuality, Labor, Publicity and Infrastructure in AAA Journal Publishing | CC, Room 222
Borders, Thresholds and Frontiers | Marriott, Pershing
Complicating Destruction | CC, Room 231
Crafting Words and Worlds | Marriott, Lindell
Debt, Theft, Gift | CC, Room 264
Diagram as Method | CC, Room 132
Ethnographies of the Otherworldly | Marriott, Missouri
Expanding Subjects, Sites, and Methods: Embracing the Digital in 21st-Century Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology | CC, Room 263
The Linked Rupture (Part Two): Anthropology, Science, and Reflexivity Between Covid and Trump II | CC, Room 274
Saturday (11/20)
10:15 AM – 11:45 AM
A Path Forward? Energy Transition Futures in/from Colombia | CC, Room 261
Affect as Cultural Critique: Methods for Ethnographic Uncovering Beyond the Disciplinary/Discursive Edge | CC, Room 232
Afterlives of Anthropology: Ethnographic Production Outside of the Anthropology Department | CC, Room 230
Beyond and Beside the State | Marriott, Pershing
Humanitarian Technologies and Infrastructures | CC, Room 265
Making and Unmaking Mobility: Empire, Enclosure, and Ecological Modernity at the Frontier | CC, Room 226
On the Verge of Ethnographic Breakdown: Reflections on Rupture in the Field | CC, Room 228
On the Verge… of a Second Book (?) in Extreme Times | CC, Room 266
Patchwork Ethnography: A Methodological Guide | CC, Room 260
Platformed Intimacy and Its Limits: Participation, Visibility, and Affective Overflow in China | CC, Room 223
Play to Think, Humor to Subvert: Deborah Poole’s Legacy for Ethnography | CC, Room 222
2:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Contesting Home (Part One): Unearthing the Foundations of Belonging | CC, Room 262
Digital Worlds | Marriott, Gateway A
Inviting Hijinks and Making Installations That Don’t Suck: A Sideways Approach to Anthropological Knowledge Production | CC, Room 121
Making and Governing Selves | CC, Room 240
Spoilers, Speculations, and Other Challenges of Working with Archives on the Verge | CC, Room 223
Studying Up Today: Reflections on Ethical and Methodological Challenges (Part One) | CC, Room 231
The Limn Roundtable: Platforms & the Great Offshore | CC, Room 130
Vestiges of Theft: A Roundtable Discussion of Sandra Rozental’s The Absent Stone | CC, Room 265
4:15 PM – 5:45 PM
Bodies, Care, and Moral Worlds | Marriott, Gateway B
Care, Knowledge, and Materiality: Constructing Knowledge through Preservation | CC, Room 228
Dwelling Otherworldly: Reorienting Human-Technology-Space Intimacies in Urban China | CC, Room 222
Making Gender, Making Kin | Marriott, Kingsbury
Margins and Materialities | CC, Room 232
Performance and the Politics of Aesthetics | Marriott, Gateway A
Precarious Mobilities | Marriott, Missouri
Studying Up Today: Reflections on Ethical and Methodological Challenges (Part Two) | CC, Room 231
The Political Economy of Subjectivity: Subjects on the Verge of Changing World Orders | CC, Room 226
Sunday (11/21)
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Contesting Home (Part Two): Dwelling in the Politics of Interiority | CC, Room 261
Resistance on the Verge: Alternative Temporalities of Activism | CC, Room 226
Rethinking the Korean Wave: Circuits, Conduits, and the Politics of Value in Creative Industries | CC, Room 265
Teaching Tools: Pedagogy for the Moment | CC, Room 227
Uncertainty/Belief/Knowledge on the Verge | CC, Room 102
Unruly Archives: Shielding Memory in a Time of Uncertainty, Erasure, and Revisionism | CC, Room 232
10:15 AM – 11:45 AM
Contesting Home (Part Three): Excavating Material Culture and Memory | CC, Room 261
Methodologies in the Meantime: Waiting with the Trouble and the Trouble with the Waiting | CC, Room 262
Multimodal Methodologies: Collaborations, Collectivities and Distributed Practices of Anthropology | CC, Room 226
Temporalities of the End: Living on the Edge of Time in an Era of Polycrisis | CC, Room 240