Meet the Authors: 2025 SANA Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize
Friday, November 21, 1:45-2:45
Marriott Studio 5
Come celebrate the winners and honorable mentions of the Society for the Anthropology of North America’s 2025 Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize! SANA awards this year’s prize to Established Scholar Laurence Ralph for Sito: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him (Grand Central Publishing, 2024) and to Emerging Scholar Danya Fast for The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young (Rutgers U. Press, 2024). Honorable Mentions go to Carrie Lane in the Established Scholar category for More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working (U. Chicago Press, 2024) and to two authors in the Emerging Scholar category: Orisanmi Burton for Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (U. California Press, 2023) and Barbara Sostaita for Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert (Duke U. Press, 2024). Learn about the SANA’s selection process for this biannual prize, which considered books published in 2023 and 2024. Join us in celebrating the nominees, hear this year’s winners speak about their books, and bring your copy to have it signed by the author!
Celebrating SANA at 35: Insurgent Anthropologies Then and Now
Friday, November 21, 2:45-4:45
Marriott St. Charles (41st fl)
Thirty-five years ago, right here in New Orleans, near one hundred people crowded into a 1990 AAA Annual Meeting room to demand the creation of a new section that would recognize the existence of an anthropology of North America. Angry and frustrated that their ethnographic research here “at home” was deemed outside the purview of anthropology, limiting their access to grants, publication opportunities, jobs, and professional recognition, they began to organize for change. In 2025, facing challenges both familiar and distinct, a new generation of anthropologists seeks to learn from the strategic efforts of SANA’s past. How have SANA and its sister “insurgent sections” of the AAA shifted the intellectual and political landscape of the association, and of the discipline more broadly? What does SANA’s legacy mean for our next steps and for the future of critical insurgent anthropologies? Join this roundtable of longtime SANA founders and builders Lee D. Baker, Lindsay Bell, Sue Hyatt, Jeff Maskovsky, Ida Susser, and Maria Vesperi to root our ongoing struggles in our shared insurgent foundations.
SANA Graduate Student Social
Friday, November 21, 4:45-6:00
Marriott Hotel Lobby
Following our “Celebrating SANA at 35” roundtable, SANA graduate student representatives Isabel Abarca (UNC-CH) & Nicole Smith (UCLA) will host a graduate student social. This will be a great opportunity to meet fellow SANA student members and consider what we, as junior scholars, imagine for the future of SANA. With the celebration of 35 years of SANA, there is renewed interest in the section’s past and energy for intergenerational relationship-building looking toward the future. A SANA mentorship program is soon to launch and will be informally introduced during this social. We hope you can join us in guiding SANA to more meaningfully engage and support students!
Memory Work @ the John Thompson Legacy Center
Friday, November 21, 6:00-7:30
*Offsite* at the John Thompson Legacy Center, 1212 St. Bernard in the 7th Ward
This SANA + ABA Community Engagement workshop is about ways to protect the memories of people who have survived extreme carceral sentences, and those of their families and friends. We will discuss why memory work is important–and often difficult–and how it can contribute to the histories we share. We’ll explore materials like hard copy photos, handwritten letters, and drawings, and formats like digital images and AV artistic interpretations. Join us at the John Thompson Legacy Center to learn from and be in conversation with leaders from Freedom to Grow and The Visiting Room Project.
SANA Business Meeting
Saturday, November 22, 11:45-1:15
Sheraton Edgewood AB (4th fl)
The Society for the Anthropology of North America encourages all members and friends to attend our annual business meeting. Join us in celebrating Shannon Speed, recipient of the 2025 Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America! Additional topics include: SANA publishing futures; Building a SANA mentoring program; Planning the 2027 SANA Spring Meeting in Mexico City; Recognition of awardees and of all who labored this year for SANA; and Inaugurating new leadership. We will also open the floor for other member initiatives and concerns. New and seasoned members, and anyone who is SANA-curious, are welcome!