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Since its founding in 1961, the NEAA has evolved into a vibrant community of scholars and professionals and students who enjoy our annual meeting as a wonderful chance to meet, talk, and exchange views.
NEAA President’s Message
Welcome to the NEAA website!
The NEAA is excited to announce our 2027 conference will return to Rhode Island College in Providence, Rhode Island on April 16-17. We are so excited to have a new university get involved in the NEAA and look forward to seeing many new faces at the conference in 2027.
The NEAA Conference welcomes scholars, students and practitioners in all subfields of anthropology (cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology, as well as archaeology) and related disciplines. The NEAA annual meeting is a rewarding experience for everyone sharing their work, for students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, and all scholars doing ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative research, along with creative approaches in research methodology and reporting. Attendees from all walks of life learn and experience so much at the conference, and leave it loving anthropology even more.
Since its founding in 1961, the NEAA has evolved into a vibrant community of scholars and professionals and students who enjoy our annual meeting as a wonderful chance to meet, talk, and exchange views. As always, our conference is an intimate setting for sharing work and engaging in the kinds of networking opportunities only a small, regional organization can offer. If you are a faculty member thinking of bringing your students to present or to just see what it is all about, we welcome you. If you are a student coming to present for the first time, we promise this will be a supportive place for your presentation. If you are a seasoned veteran, welcome back! We welcome your involvement
As an organization, we welcome students and scholars of anthropology of any age with a passion for the study of human beings. We love our discipline, and we think that an anthropology toolkit is valuable in many walks of life.
In addition, you will see below this message our organization’s action plan committing to diversity, equity, and inclusion within the NEAA and our home institutions, as well as a land acknowledgment on the NEAA webpage indicating not just our acknowledgment of stolen land, but our efforts to go beyond that acknowledgement in real, tangible ways that recognize the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous peoples everywhere.
Welcome to the NEAA, and thank you for joining us!
Michael Zimmerman
NEAA President
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Action Plan
The NEAA Board is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion work as an ongoing dialogue and evolving plan of action. We are strongly aware that these efforts are more complex than simply writing a statement, so we commit to an action plan for creating sustainable practices to ensure the NEAA is accountable to DEI work now and in the future.
Objectives:
Examine and acknowledge our own individual pasts and privileges along with those in the discipline of anthropology. All our work has been and will continue to be seated in those pasts.
Encourage all members of the NEAA, if applicable, to re-examine their own work and how it intersects with others, especially in the classroom, and how we can be DEI change agents and disruptors of the exclusionary systems and practices with which we engage.
Craft conferences that are increasingly inclusive of all people interested in anthropology, and which center on the tenets of Universal Design.
First Actions:
We will continue to acknowledge the Indigenous land that the NEAA occupies at our conferences and the Indigenous land of the institutions that participate in the NEAA while also working to support the participation of Indigenous scholars.
We plan to review our membership through the lens of DEI and examine how we maintain and seek out new members to expand the inclusion of students, researchers, and practitioners who have been historically marginalized in the discipline.
We will maintain a supportive environment at our conference for students and faculty to try out new ideas as a starting point for creating more inclusive spaces for dialogue.
At our annual conference, we will seek out and make space for awareness and support for DEI work in anthropology and other disciplines through teaching, scholarship, and research, beginning with emphasizing the importance of universal design for presentations.
The NEAA Board understands that while work is currently being done at multiple levels in all disciplines, many anthropologists have been doing forms of this work for decades. It is those anthropologists we wish to emulate, while also acknowledging the harm our field has caused. We acknowledge that dismantling systems of white supremacy, ableism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, especially within our own communities, disciplines and institutions, is a never-ending process, and, above all, one that must result in tangible change.
We are in the process of developing one-, three-, five- and ten-year plans to move this commitment forward, fully realizing the work will have to be deliberate, consistent, flexible, and responsive.
Sincerely,
NEAA Executive Board