Registration for the 2022 Annual Meeting is a little different from past years. This year, you have a choice between “In-Person Attendee” and “Virtual Attendee”. “In-Person” means you will be joining us in Seattle and you’ll have access to all meeting events and activities taking place in Seattle and online. “Virtual” means you will have access to the virtual events, select events that will be live-streamed from Seattle, as well as later view-on-demand access to a library of recorded content.
The 2022 AAA Annual Meeting theme “Unsettling Landscapes” encourages anthropological discussion of past, present, and future unsettlings of the world – be it through environment, power, political economy or through the collective efforts of unsettling and disrupting oppressive structures while building worlds otherwise. While our worlds are defined by nothing if not change, the current unsettling of landscapes brings with it an urgency that demands conversations which may elicit feelings of discomfort and disturbance, but may also stoke hope and determination. This orientation towards unsettling pushes us beyond easy narratives and facile binaries into moments of transformation. In essence, this theme asks two questions: In what ways are we, and those we work with, unsettled? How are we also unsettling landscapes and to what end?
These two questions push us to carefully contemplate anthropology’s role as we work with communities that are severely impacted by dehumanizing policies and ideologies and the ways that these systems of oppression are accelerated through the surveillance of increasingly digitized lives. In light of this year’s meeting location in Seattle, WA (a technological epicenter in a state located on the lands of 29 federally-recognized Native Nations), we also call for contemplation on the ways that greater digital accessibility and circulation of our work are changing. How are we made accountable through this increased access that unsettles who the stakeholders of anthropology are beyond what some have previously imagined as our audiences and interlocutors (students, teachers, and colleagues)? How has our discipline theoretically and genealogically been unsettled because of this expansion of access to, and acknowledgement of, BIPOC1 authors’ legacies once minimized and hidden? Methodologically, while digital social ecologies have engendered emergent forms of sociality for decades, as anthropologists studying during COVID-19 assumptions about the physical nature of our work have also been unsettled as field sites have been radically altered. What kinds of long-term impacts might this greater centering of digital methodologies and analyses have on how we envision and enact anthropology (including, for instance, issues of ableism)?