Spring Meeting 2025 | Society for the Anthropology of North America

March 25-29

Hilton Portland Downtown

View the complete SANA Spring Meeting 2025 Program here!

Dear SANA Members and Friends,

We’re delighted to share with you the program for the upcoming SANA Spring Meeting, to be held March 25-29 in collaboration with the Society for Applied Anthropology in Portland, Oregon! In addition to a dozen inspiring sessions organized by SANA members, we have an exciting lineup of special events.

These include a keynote dialogue with Emily Yates-Doerr and Chelsey Carter on critical medical anthropology of North America; a free workshop on public-facing writing organized by SANA’s graduate student representatives; and a roundtable with leading North Americanists, including SANA founders and longtime contributors, who will help us take stock of and reflect upon SANA’s 30-year history. On this anniversary of our creation, we are considering ways to document our history as a section and create a SANA archive, and we welcome others interested in this project to join us.

We are also excited about our closing special event on Saturday morning, to which we invite all SANA members and friends to consider future directions for SANA. The SANA Futures visioning session will include empanadas, coffee, intentional relationship-building, and a celebration of this year’s Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America winner, longtime SANA member Dr. Sue Hyatt.

Please join us to kick off the spring meeting at our offsite Thursday evening reception (free food and drink!) with the collectively-organized Ground Score Association of informal recyclers, with an opportunity to view the Project Space Junk art installation by anthropologist Christine Hegel based on her fieldwork with NYC waste pickers. This event is not listed in the SfAA program, so please mark your calendars now (address below)!

Finally, SANA will have a dedicated book exhibit table at the meeting, where members who have released books in the past decade may exhibit a copy of their book and/or book flyers. If you would like to add your book to the table, please bring it to Portland!

In the SANA Spring Meeting 2025 Program, you’ll find more details about each of our special events, followed by a chronological listing of all SANA sessions. We hope you’ll be able to join us for as many of these as possible!

You can find individual paper titles, information on tours of Portland, workshops, and other sessions at the broader SfAA meeting, including a Traditional Foods Forum on Tuesday, in the SfAA Annual Meeting Program.

See you in Portland,

Claudia Strauss (SANA Spring Meeting Chair)

Angela Stuesse (SANA President)

View the complete SANA Spring Meeting 2025 Program, including members’ volunteered sessions, here!

Older News

The SANA Spring Meeting 2025 will be held in collaboration with the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Annual Meeting!

Deadline Extended for 2025 Spring Meeting!

Abstract submission deadline extended to October 31st.

The Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) will hold its spring meeting in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in Portland, OR from Tuesday, March 25 through Saturday, March 29, 2025 at the Hilton Portland Downtown.

We have been busy planning special SANA events and are excited to announce our two keynote speakers, Dr. Emily Yates-Doerr and Dr. Chelsey R. Carter! We are also planning a roundtable on what has inspired SANA’ s development from its founding to the present, a visioning session for the future, a two-part workshop focused on public writing and publication processes with insight from editors, and other events.

The theme for SfAA’s spring meeting is Revitalizing Applied Anthropology. Collaborating with the SfAA presents an opportunity for SANA members and others who work in North America to reflect on the potential contributions of our research. We do not need to do engaged or applied anthropology as usually understood for our research to contribute to a better world. We welcome papers on all of North America, including Mexico, the US, Canada, Indian nations, and US territories. SANA also encourages discussions of the transnational links between North America and the rest of the world.

The deadline for proposals is Thursday, October 31. Before you can submit a proposal, you need to register for the conference. SANA members can now register at the meeting cosponsor member rate. When submitting proposals, be sure to choose SANA as the reviewing section.

There are multiple format options for organized sessions, or you could submit an individual paper or poster proposal. Sessions can’t be hybrid, but a session with all pre-recorded talks is possible. We encourage you to use the general AAA or SANA-specific Community Hub to advertise your Call for Papers.

SANA will be accepting nominations for our annual travel grants early in the new year to support the travel of graduate students, independent scholars, and contingent faculty to attend the spring meeting. Stay tuned for that announcement!

Questions? Please reach out to the Chair of the SANA Spring Meeting Committee, Claudia Strauss.

Chelsey R. Carter, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Public Health with a secondary appointment in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She is a native of St. Louis and a Black feminist anthropologist with research interests in medicine, structural inequality, and the determinants of health for underserved communities. She is the Founder and Director of The LEITH (Lived Experiences Igniting Transformations in Health) Lab, a hub to address the invisibility and misdiagnosis of Black and Brown communities at the intersection of genomic research, ALS, and other rare neurodegenerative diseases, in honor of anthropologist Dr. Leith Mullings.

Emily Yates-Doerr is an associate professor of anthropology at Oregon State University. She has authored numerous publications on food and health inequity, most recently Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm (California Press), which is based on two decades of collaboration with the Guatemala-based Center for Sensory Impairment, Aging, and Metabolism. Her new research, carried out with support of archaeologists and cancer scientists, unearths memories of nuclear fallout and settler-colonialism in the US Midwest.

Past Meetings

SANA Beats Spring Series 2021

A big thank you to all those who attended our SANA Beats Spring Series throughout the month of April. You made this event a huge success and we look forward to our next conference.

You can see the panels and workshops below – stay tuned for more information!