Restorative Relations: An Unconference

The 2025 SCA Biennial

May 8-11, 2025

Stony Point Center; Stony Point, New York

Submissions have been extended; due by Friday, December 13, 2024

Restorative relations is a reimagining of the traditional academic conference for these exhausting times. After leaving large traditional conferences, we are usually depleted and more intellectually drained than inspired. In addition, the experiences that stay with us, expand our thinking, and reignite our relationship to our research are often those informal gatherings and unexpected conversations outside of the official panel sessions or keynotes. For the 2025 Biennial, the SCA is experimenting with new formats for our coming together that foreground and center the generative nature of thinking together, in the moment. These formats should also catalyze the restorative effects of being in relationship as a communal investment in our creative and scholarly practices.

The historical moment seems to demand this. As the routine of our daily lives was interrupted by mandates to stay indoors, we had to develop a new relationship to both labor and community. In the process, many of us rejected the artificial separation of work, creativity, sociality, inspiration, renewal, and rest as siloed experiences. Indeed, we can find rest and rejuvenation through, rather than outside of, what we might call work, whether that be teaching, mentoring and supervising, or review, research, publication, and dissemination. This is what we mean and propose to do by holding our upcoming unconference at a retreat center in the Hudson River Valley.

Our biennial meetings are a chance to focus attention on the work of our society and our members. They are also a chance to showcase the way that our creative and experimental ethos extends to the most basic ways in which we practice anthropology. The past three biennial conferences were experiments in gathering—locally and globally, physically and virtually—that took advantage of the affordances of digital infrastructure (and before such virtual or hybrid gathering became routine!).

This year, we propose our first non-virtual, in-person gathering since 2016 as an opportunity to think and work against the productivism that lends so much unhealthy pressure to the academic vocation. The proposed location, setting, formats, and sessions all facilitate the space (geographical, social, mental, and otherwise) for us to get together differently. Can we imagine a conference beyond 20-minute paper presentations, endless parallel sessions, elevator pitches, and stares at name tags? Can we design a gathering that includes sharing, listening, co-creating, commenting, trying things out, and reviewing—that is both revitalizing and restful, generous and rigorous? What would it mean to center physical, mental, and emotional restoration so that our “work” and “projects” do not become burdens or objects for consumption, but instead, align more seamlessly with our larger life-affirming passions and commitments? And, how can we practice this restorative approach in community as a collective endeavor?

To “unconference” in this way means operating in ways that are not always outcome based and transactional, like so much academic work. It means creating unprogrammed time and space for quiet reflection, relaxation, and informal conversation. At the same time, we are not interested in only creating an “exceptional space” for just a few days. Rather, we want to experiment with ways of doing anthropology otherwise that could have value for our discipline more broadly, and for our younger and more marginal colleagues in particular. Our work, and our community, would benefit from finding ways to attend more honestly to our humanity, and the toll of ongoing violence, genocide, anti-intellectualism, and austerity, while showing that another way of working and being is possible. A central ethos of Restorative Relations is renewing our relationships with ourselves, our academic lives, and one another.

Held at the Stony Point retreat center in upstate New York, where participants will be accommodated (more details to follow), Restorative Relations will integrate the familiar and unfamiliar, and what might be considered the experimental and the traditional. Members of the SCA board will organize sessions that will be open to all, but we also invite proposals for sessions conceptualized by SCA members. For examples of how we are imagining new ways to be together, see below.

If You Would Like to Propose a Session:

You can propose a session inspired by one of the bulleted thematic suggestions below or propose something entirely new. Just like a traditional conference session, it should be designed to be open to whomever wants to attend, although you can designate different roles for some participants. No matter what you propose, please include the following in your submission and keep in mind session durations should be between one and two hours.

Submit ideas at this link by Friday, December 6, 2024: https://forms.gle/p1TkEHJtJKsRjqcEA

For more information, or to discuss what you have in mind, please reach out via [email protected]

Possible Session Formats

• Co-writing communities: With pens, papers, crayons, create a co-writing space that invites participants to respond to, come up with, or engage with writing prompts and exercises within and beyond anthropology. You could propose anything, from writing your worst fieldwork nightmares to designing your dream ethnographic project (that you never got to do). Space could also be made for “tenure books” in progress and the R&R article you’ve been postponing for months.

• Co-reading communities: These sessions can constitute co-reading (and discussing) texts that go beyond those usually included in a traditional conference, from dispatches from field-notes, excerpts from favorite texts, biographies, or timely writing that you want to think about with inspiring company.

• Method & Practice workshops: We invite you to brainstorm and think about that which we have not been taught in methodology classes. Think scribbling, doodling, drawing, co-curating, letter-writing, creative writing prompts, podcasting, walking, choreography, and other methodologies that you would like to experiment with in community. How can we differently define in practice what it means to engage in research communication, animate focus groups, observe, witness, and participate?

• Wellness and Sustainability practices: Here you might propose short meditations, writing letters to your younger (ethnographic) self, free writing, cooking, shadow-field-notes, along with some surprises. Be prepared to think about what makes you feel well—in the classroom, in the field, in writing, while thinking.

• Works in progress: Propose a session that focuses on a work-in-progress, invite a set of discussants to offer feedback, but organize it in a way that other participants can also engage with the process. Again, this could include works not usually included in a traditional conference: a photo essay, a project/funding proposal, an exhibit catalog, a game design, a script for a comic or ethnography-inspired performance, rough cut of a podcast, or (of course) a book chapter, dissertation excerpt, or article draft. They could be zero, first, and last versions of a work.

• Collaborative research workshops: Here you can propose ways for anthropologists to work, think, write, and make with each other and with curators, artists, interlocutors, friends, parents, illustrators.

• Teaching and Learning Pods : Here the focus could be on ways of thinking about the different hats we wear as teachers and students. How do we carry ourselves as mentors, teachers, collaborators? What are some tools and resources we need to share more generously to make educational institutions more inclusive, welcoming, and human? Think anything from sharing funding resources to parenting challenges, exercise tips and tricks, and favorite no-bake recipes for procrastination.

• Research Presentations: Amid the push to experiment, we also realize that sometimes more traditional formats may be the most appropriate or compelling for sharing research and inviting engagement. Feel free to propose a more recognizable roundtable discussion or set of research presentations.

There will of course be opportunities to explore the grounds of the Stony Point retreat center on your own to imagine and practice more restorative relationships with yourself, your work, and your colleagues. You might convene a tour around the grounds where a walking meditation with your peers provides an opportunity to talk through your next book idea, course proposal, or new way to find balance in your life. Encounters with people you meet on site can transform into an intimate mini symposium under a tree. Unconference organizers will also hold space in between the more structured sessions for guided group meditations and easeful movement. We are here to practice being with rather than performing for one another.