THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Find Chicago at the 2025 AAA meeting
Find our faculty, students, and alumni at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, November 19-23, 2025.
Curated by Dominic Boyer and Craig Campbell, Spectral Remix will feature multimedia works that resonate with anthropological theory and history, and that experiment with new ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking through the spectral dimensions of contemporary life.
From 12:00 p.m. on November 19 through 8:00 p.m. on November 22
Location: Merchant Hall
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8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Theory in Residence
Constantine V. Nakassis: Roundtable participant
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Studio 10 (2nd floor)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Moving Beyond Ghosting and Gaslighting: Anthropological Histories That Matter
Rick Feinberg: Chair
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Edgewood A/B (4th floor)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Spirits of the 20th Century Symbol: The Human Search for Symbolic Cognition among Non-humans
E. Summerson Carr: Panelist
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Mardi Gras Ballroom, Salon F/G (3rd floor)
10:15 - 11:45 a.m.
It’s Never Too Late (or Too Early) to Write Memoirs: The Association of Senior Anthropologists’ Autoethnohistory Project
Rick Feinberg: Participant
Jim Weil: Chair
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Edgewood A/B (4th floor)
12:45 - 2:15 p.m.
Without, Beyond, or After China?: The (Geo)Politics of Ethnographic Research in China
Britta Ingebretson: Roundtable co-organizer
Heangjin Park: Roundtable co-organizer and presenter
Xiaobo Yuan: Presenter
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Napoleon Ballroom, D1 (3rd floor)
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
General Anthropology Division Flash Session #2
Sam Robson: “Beyond the ‘Friendship Grind’: Developing Affection for Fictional Characters in Stardew Valley”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Balcony J (4th floor)
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
The Various Anthropologists of Robert Brightman: A Roundtable
Pauline Strong: Roundtable participant
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Studio 7 (2nd floor)
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
The Privileges and Privations of Precarity
Wee Yang Soh: Roundtable participant
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Galerie 6 (2nd floor)
7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Music as a Centerpiece of Culture and Society
Rick Feinberg: Organizer
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Lafayette (41st Floor)
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8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
What Remains? Legacies of the Anthropological Skeleton
Matthew Rossi (Organizer): “Forensic Intimacies: On the Treatment of Bones in the Bass Archive”
Iris Clever: “Fordisc and Historical Insights into Race, Statistics, and Ancestry Estimation in Anthropology”
Han Jiang: “Reconceptualizing Ambiguities in Sex Estimation: A Case Study of Presentation Trends at the Society for American Archaeology Annual Meetings”
Megan van den Berg: “‘Bones that Belong’: NAGPRA in the Medicolegal System”
Isis Dwyer: “‘Bones’ as a Social Construct: Instantiating Images of Social Bodies in Bioarchaeology”
Discussants: María Cecilia Lozada and Arielle Reich
Moderator: Anna-Marie Sprenger
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Continuity, Collapse or Sublation? Thinking Change When the Old Becomes New
Sarah Luna: “The Intimacies of Violence for Mexico City Transfeminista Activists”
Sean Mitchell: “Political Antagonism and Sublation: An Ethnographic Theory of the Brazilian Popular Right”
Gregory Duff Morton: “Refusing to Fear: When US Immigration Policy Changes, What Remains?”
LaShandra Sullivan: “Throuple Trouble: Racialized Regimes of Property and Sex in the New South”
Lisa Simeone (Organizer): “Jackson’s Commons: Sublating Violence at the Burundi-Congo Border”
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Estherwood (4th floor)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Framing Climate through Black Geographic Ancestral, Spiritual, and Religious Invocations
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour: “Remaking Sacred Geographies: Spirits, Ghosts and God in Zimbabwe’s Landscapes”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Mardi Gras Ballroom, Salon D (3rd floor)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
In Memory of Development: Orienting Ethnographies of Climate Adaptation and Energy Transition Infrastructure in Anthropology (Part one of two)
Mallory James: Co-organizer and Chair
Asmus Rungby: Co-organizer
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Mardi Gras Ballroom, Salon E (3rd floor)
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Ancestral Ghosts and Ghostly Ancestors in Contemporary China
Hanna Pickwell: “Ghostly Paths of Secondhand Things: The Powers and Potentials of Object Biographies in Beijing”
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Napoleon Ballroom, C1 (3rd floor)
10:15 - 11:45 a.m.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot in the World Economy: Peasants and Capital, Revisited
Ryan Cecil Jobson: Roundtable participant
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Maurepas (3rd floor)
10:15 - 11:45 a.m.
Political Life in the Middle East across the Revolution or Reformation of Tradition
Myungji Lee: “The Gendered Reform of the State Fatwa in Turkey’s Authoritarian Trajectories”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Galerie 6 (2nd floor)
10:15 - 11:45 a.m.
(Un-)black-boxing AI Agencies: Ghostly and Ghosted Machines
Wee Yang Soh: “Human After All: AI, Idol Labor, and the Ghost Work of Virtual K-pop”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Studio 9 (2nd floor)
12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Founded in 1959, Anthropological Linguistics is a forum for outstanding scholarship on language and culture. On behalf of the journal’s new home at Indiana University, editors David Tavárez, Stacie King, and Jeffrey Heath invite you to enjoy some refreshments and celebrate the 66th year of Anthropological Linguistics.
Location: The University of Nebraska Press Booth, Exhibit Hall
12:45 - 2:15 p.m.
In Memory of Development: Orienting Ethnographies of Climate Adaptation and Energy Transition Infrastructure in Anthropology (Part two of two)
Mallory James (Co-organizer): “Completing Technology with Stories: Attaching Socioeconomic Value to Australian Carbon Management”
Asmus Rungby: Co-organizer
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Mardi Gras Ballroom, Salon E (3rd floor)
12:45 - 2:15 p.m.
Writing into Ordinary Ghosts: Papers Honoring the Work of Kathleen Stewart
William T. S. Mazzarella: Chair
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Studio 10 (2nd floor)
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Development as a ghost: Anthropology of becoming in the age of global decoupling
Heangjin Park: Discussant
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Napoleon Ballroom, D2 (3rd floor)
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Language, Environment, and Changing Climates: New Approaches to Language Reclamation
David Tavárez: “Revitalization, knowledge and self-determination in the Zapotec diaspora”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Galerie 2 (2nd floor)
4:15 - 5:45 p.m.
Compelling Forms, or, ‘What Kind of Instrument Am I?’
William T. S. Mazzarella: Discussant
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Napoleon Ballroom, B1 (3rd floor)
7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
The Patty Jo Watson Distinguished Lecture
Shannon Lee Dawdy: “Recruiting Ghosts for the Revolution”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Riverview II (41st floor)
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12:45 - 2:15 p.m.
Currency, Climate Change and a New Carbon Commons: Turning to Anthropology for Environmental Policy Solutions
Gustav Peebles: Author of The First and Last Bank: Climate Change, Currency, and a New Carbon Commons
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Grand Ballroom, D (5th floor)
2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Ghosts of Reason: Anthropology’s Enlightenment Conundrum
William T. S. Mazzarella: Roundtable participant
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Studio 7 (2nd floor)
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
A Sonic Experiment: How Militarization and War Bring Ecologies into Relation
Hannah Eisler Burnett: Panelist
Curated by Bridget Guarasci and Eleana Kim, in partnership with the Rivers Institute as part of the Ecologies of War initiative
With sonic works by Alia Farid, Ryan C. Clarke, Imani Jacqueline Brown, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Location: Marigny Opera House
6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Haunted by the Market: New Risks and New Gambles Amid Financial Uncertainty (Part Two)
Qicheng Yao: “Heat and sentiment: affective alignments in Chinese NFT WeChat groups”
Location: New Orleans Marriott, Studio 6 (2nd floor)
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10:15 - 11:45 a.m.
Locating American ‘Waters’: Forms, Forces, and Flows of Empire
Hannah Eisler Burnett & Talia Gordon (session organizers) with presentations from Hunter Kennedy, Damien Bright, Teresa Montoya, Ayasha Guerin, Amara Abdal Figueroa, and Alejandro Garcia Lozano
Discussants: Jessica Cattelino and Andrea Ballestero
Location: Sheraton New Orleans, Napoleon Ballroom, C2 (3rd floor)
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