2021 Annual Meeting

PLANNING IS UNDERWAY FOR THE 2021 ANNUAL MEETING!

Mark Edberg

The 2021 annual meeting, to be held March 23-27 in Norfolk, VA, is emerging as a very important meeting for a number of reasons. Because of the cancellation of the in-person meeting in Albuquerque, there will be some efforts to celebrate awardees from the 2020 meeting in conjunction with awardees for 2021 (see the Awards section of the Newsletter). The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a generational crisis, and there are likely to be more than a few special sessions around that issue and its implications from the perspective of applied social science. 

As a meeting site, Norfolk itself represents multiple issues that are central to the concerns of our disciplines – climate change and its impact on local communities as well as local/regional economies, cultural preservation in a rapidly changing region, globalization and its cascading ramifications, discourses of race and ethnicity, health disparities, the consequences of military involvement on the health of veterans and their families, and much more. Norfolk is situated in the complex Tidewater cultural and ecological region, and is home to a major shipyard, shipping industries, two large military bases, tourist sites, a renowned historically black university, several Native American communities, and colonial history centers.  

The 2021 meeting theme is “Linking Social, Cultural and Physical Ecologies.” The Program Chair is Mark Edberg, PhD, MA, who is on the faculty at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, with secondary appointments in the Department of Anthropology and Elliott School of International Affairs. He directs two centers that link academic and applied anthropology through public health-related research and interventions. 

Stay tuned for more updates on Norfolk 2021!