Annual Meeting

Polycrisis refers to a situation of multiple, convergent crises that create conditions of profound instability. These intertwined crises affect the capacities of people to anticipate future conditions of change. They also generate significant harms that undermine the potential for human societies to flourish and ensure the well-being of constituents. We are all too familiar with the intersecting instabilities of pandemics, climate change, financial system contagion, warfare, extractivism, and supply chain squeezes.           

How might we understand our world through the lens of polycrisis? This conference invites anthropologists and non-anthropologists to explore the social, cultural, political, environmental, and historical conditions driving convergent crises of the present or the past. Polycrisis is not a new phenomenon. We welcome archaeologists and historians to consider how polycrises of the past may be quite different from those of the present.

This conference invites participants to explore the social, cultural, political, economic, historical, and/or environmental conditions facilitating these disruptive forces, as well as how they are affecting communities in the U.S. South and beyond.

The Southern Anthropological Society is a big-tent community that includes anthropologists in all subfields and non-anthropologists, practitioners and researchers, public-interest advocates and students. Our conferences are small and welcoming. We aim to foster scholarly exchange, provoke discussion on pressing social problems, and provide opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students to present original research. We welcome submissions focused on the U.S. South or any other region of the world on topics related or unrelated to the conference theme. We invite abstracts for individual papers, posters, panels or sessions, workshops, or special session papers.

The deadline to submit an abstract to the 2027 conference is December 15, 2026. This conference is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Mississippi.