Welcome to the inaugural issue of Practicing Anthropology with a new look and feel in 2024.
The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) is excited to update our two flagship journals, Practicing Anthropology and Human Organization, by moving them to a new platform with Taylor & Francis. The pages of Practicing Anthropology are designed to provide a home for new and ground-breaking social science insights from the field, creative work, timely reflections, and lessons learned related to the practice of social science. Our articles are shorter than traditional academic articles to make room for timely content from a wide range of authors. Our pages also offer a place for contributions that focus on engagement and justice. The editorial team encourages authors to consider questions of ethical co-authorship and engagement through companion articles (two or more articles authored by different people involved in the same project), policy briefs, creative reflections, and multimedia forms. We work closely with authors to provide mentorship and collaboration in publishing practical insights from the field, sometimes placing community members, youth activists, seasoned practitioners, and well-known emeritus professors side by side. We strive for connection between our editors and authors to be one of community and care, which is important to us as different kind of author experience, building capacity and learning together toward every issue you read.
Practicing Anthropology began decades ago as a platform to showcase the multiple forms of practice in social sciences. Like other disciplines, anthropology has long been mired in institutional violence of colonialism, gentrification, global extraction, and alliances with powerful entities. And yet, anthropologists sharpen tools of critique by creating fractures and disruptions that open the way toward new and different futures. This is the beauty of active anthropology. Our partnership with Taylor & Francis will bring your crucially important, active insights to wider audiences as we continue to transition the journal into the future in ways that are more accessible, readable, and public—changes that have been in the works for a long while.
We are also changing editorship at Practicing Anthropology next year. I have been deeply honored to serve as your editor-in-chief for nearly three terms, working alongside Lenore Manderson, the current editor of Human Organization, in the visualization and development of our new iteration in publishing with the SfAA. As I think about this transition, I reflect on what drew me to the SfAA years ago, and what I hope continues on. In the first days of my introduction to a vibrant society, I arrived with my then-MA cohort to the annual meetings in the Yucatán. We traveled first, stressed and tired of our thesis projects, ready for a break. We swam in bioluminescence and watched the moon rise over the sea. Then we proceeded to the meetings where we listened to thought-provoking panels on justice and social science during the day, and attended parties with spontaneous singing anthropologists by night. We playfully engaged with senior researchers and other students, connecting across hierarchies and boundaries of the discipline that are otherwise strictly observed. This was where we belonged.
Years have passed since that first experience. Most of my then-cohort stays in touch. Many of us now plan meetings, write books, serve as editors of journals, and run businesses. One of us, Michael Adair-Kriz, is now gone. We lost Michael [https://azdailysun.com/obituaries/michael-adair-kriz/article_b7d7791c-af40-11ee-8d85-3f510e4939ca.html], our dear, queer, ex-Mormon, artist, activist dreamer on December 2, 2023. Every day now I see my favorite photographs of Michael on that trip. In one, he is happily hugging a column at Tulum and in another we’re both sunburned and smiling as he reaches over to kiss me on the cheek. After more than 20 years, all of us who were there at the SfAA meetings that year are still close. We reach out to one another now in mourning, remembering Michael, and the connections we made.
Michael, like the rest of us, wanted to study anthropology to work toward just futures. At Rice University, Michael earned his Ph.D. with a focus on Chilean resistance through street art. Then, due to a series of health challenges, he left the field, though his work appeared in Practicing Anthropology a few years ago. Even with health challenges that prevented him from ongoing participation, Michael never stopped viewing the world with the instruments he found, including making films and joining movements in support of global Indigenous sovereignty and against hateful policies in the United States. Michael’s extraordinary life and these shared memories remind me that we may not have been the usual cohort of graduate students at that time. We were artists and writers and activists. We were in school to capture the tools and invoke creativity that could help us to make differences, driven by our desires to bear witness through stories and activism and our love of learning, growth, and change. We didn’t care that prestigious anthropology programs thought that we were scrappy and rough. It was never about academics for the sake of academia for us. It was about changing the world.
We were also inspired to tear down what we knew and build it back up, and tear it all down again in search of something better. These are the contributions that come from Indigenous, feminist, queer, and activist social science. In the space of collaboration and engagement, practice has become a welcome place for innovation and desire.
Reflecting now on Michael’s full and wonderful life, and the reasons why I fell in love with my cohort and the practice of anthropology, I imagine how we can hold on to these qualities of the SfAA in the journal. Some of the current trends in and beyond the discipline draw from strong roots. As we look toward the future, we wonder what will be next.
Let’s think and create together in three dimensional creative exploration, break the current expectations in our telling of stories, make the world better, even in the smallest of ways. These are the reasons that the pages of Practicing Anthropology continue to carry the tradition of running forward, lessons learned, critique, and exploration through closeups on textures and patterns and then a satellite view from above. We remain a home for a community of people who are out doing the work and reflecting and changing and doing it again. We are glad for submissions that push and untangle and change narratives and structures into something different and new.
Please enjoy this issue of Practicing Anthropology. In it, you will find writing by new and returning global social scientists training medical providers, making policy recommendations on healthcare and access, writing about organizations that support assisted suicide, playing with data and theater, and experimenting with knowledge in useful ways. You will also find poetry related to social science practice and knowledge and images from the field.
I invite you, the reader of this issue, to write, create, read, and experiment with us as we enter this new phase of publishing. Please join our community of authors.
Bring our pages to life.
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