An Update from the Interim President, Sue Hyatt

Greetings to our SANA membership! Welcome to our updated website and many thanks to our webmaster, Ryan Logan, for his work on this project.  I am pleased to be serving this short interval as the interim president of SANA.  By a vote of the SANA Board, I was asked to serve as interim president of the section when the previous president was compelled to step down due to personal and professional pressures.  I took up this role this past January and will continue until the next meeting of the AAA in November in Toronto, when Angela Stuesse will take over.  Also as of November, our next president-elect is Ana Croegaert.  Thank you to these two extraordinary scholars and activists for their service to the section and for their support to me as I navigate the current challenges facing SANA and the AAA more broadly. 

These are challenging and parlous times in North America and there has never been a more pressing time for SANA, with its history of linking scholarship to progressive activism, to take a significant role in instigating and leading organizational responses to the challenges facing us, ranging from the impacts of climate change to the one-year anniversary of the end of Roe v. Wade and its deleterious consequences for women’s health.  Restraints on the exercise of affirmative action in universities, a ruling that allows for discrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the overturning of plans to alleviate crippling student debt are among the decisions issued by the Supreme Court this season that pose a direct challenge to the values of SANA and its membership.  Canada, where our next AAA meeting will be taking place, is currently struggling with the effects of record-setting wildfires and dealing with the horror of ongoing discoveries of the remains of indigenous children on the grounds of Canadian boarding schools; additionally, the failure of our governmental institutions to develop a humanitarian policy response to migration continues to promote unbridled cruelty at our southern border.  And there are so many more issues we could mention.

It’s a lot to deal with for sure.  Nevertheless, I look forward to working with SANA and its membership to revitalize our section in my capacity as interim president during these next few months and to continuing to support oppositional movements intended to ameliorate these injurious circumstances and others.

You may be familiar with the AAA feature, Weekend Reads, which is emailed to the en