The Board of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) wants to support all APLA members in deciding how, and whether, to participate in the 2024 AAA Annual Meetings in Tampa, Florida. As such, APLA is taking the following steps.
- APLA will hold its official business online – the annual business meeting and annual board meeting.
- We further urge the AAA program committee to allow flexibility in format for its invited and reviewed sessions.
- We will sponsor both virtual and in-person panels and events.
- We plan to hold virtual mentoring workshops to ensure that all APLA members are able to build networks and share and receive support (particularly early career scholars).
- We aim to organize in-person events that showcase the perspectives of people within Florida fighting for safety in an increasingly polarized and inhospitable political climate that targets marginalized groups.
APLA once again calls upon the AAA for transparency and meaningful member deliberation and participation in collective decision-making processes (in keeping with our call from January 2023). While we are sensitive to the challenges that new AAA leaders face, we want to underline the difficulties caused by delayed responses to calls for engagement and information, and by seemingly unilateral decision-making. We hope that the following reflections will be helpful going forward in cultivating relationships of mutual trust and respect among AAA members, and between AAA leadership and sections.
In Toronto (November 2023) the AAA Executive Board and staff made commitments to hold listening sessions and solicit members for feedback regarding the Tampa meetings. Yet there were delays and a prolonged silence from AAA leadership as deadlines neared, and as discussions regarding Tampa intensified. Ultimately, AAA leadership issued a decision to hold the meetings in Tampa — a decision that came before materializing the promised spaces for input from members. Sections, meanwhile, were left to fill this gap in democratic spaces for deliberation and debate, and they responded by organizing their own listening sessions, polling section members, and seeking to collaborate outside of official channels.
APLA applauds the survey that the AAA sent out regarding future annual meetings, as well as the Town Hall held at the end of February 2024. Town hall meetings, listening sessions, and member surveys are all helpful instruments for hearing and engaging AAA members. But In the future, it is important that the AAA make use of such tools in a timely fashion–particularly when promises to create spaces of engagement have already been made. In this case, the lack of visible engagement of membership before the decision to go to Florida led to a deepening of rifts within AAA and section memberships.
Debates about how to respond to the planned meetings pitted two marginalized groups against one another: calls for a boycott were framed by some as being at odds with the needs of groups in Florida, and of Florida-based anthropologists. This divisive discourse alienated some of those seeking to organize direct action against the Tampa meetings (particularly transgender anthropologists and allies). Meanwhile, some Florida-based anthropologists have expressed a sense of erasure and silencing at calls for a boycott.
Our decision to take part both virtually and in-person in the 2024 meetings is our small attempt to meet the needs of multiple injured parties, and to contribute to making the meetings safe and vitalizing for all participants. We must safeguard the well-being of students and colleagues whose very existence is called into question by Florida’s repressive legal system and political climate. We must also show solidarity with those who call Florida home, and who, nonetheless, live every day with forms of repression that are becoming more and more widespread throughout the United States. These are not oppositional goals. Just as these forms of repression animate from the same exclusionary political forces, we must work against binary and divisive logics. We must work to make our meetings – and our association–truly inclusive.
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology 