Dear Colleagues, 

As President of CALACS, it is a pleasure for me to wish you and your families great health and happiness for 2021.

While we won’t be able to meet in person due to the pandemic, I am excited that we’ll be holding our Congress 2021 entirely online August 23-25 2021. The deadline for panel and paper proposals is January 22. We also encourage the submission of films, documentaries and other media made by our members. We are looking forward to discussing with you all your fascinating research topics. 

Before today I haven’t said much about the financial consequences the cancelled 2020 conference has had for CALACS. Our organization is largely supported by membership fees. Unfortunately, our membership numbers have declined and we are concerned about the implications of this for CALACS. I thus encourage you to renew your membership to support our Association.

Despite the pandemic and our canceled conference, I am heartened that CALACS has been able to continue many of its activities, including the publication of the Journal, and engage in new ones, such a series of COVID roundtables that we hosted between the spring and the fall. We need your support through membership fees to continue this work.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Aída Hernández Castillo, from CIESAS-México, will deliver the keynote lecture of our congress entitled “Violencias Estructurales y Violencias Extremas: Reflexiones desde el Feminismo Descolonial”. The Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios en Antropología Social (CIESAS) is a key partner of CALACS and we are honored to welcome Dr. Hernández Castillo as our keynote speaker. 

We continue to celebrate our members and their work in many ways. Nominations are currently open for our Distinguished Fellow, as well as for our awards for the best book, the best thesis, the best article by an emerging scholar and best graduate student essay.  Our student outreach committee is working on ways to expand the membership of graduate students and to offer opportunities for virtual social networking.

Our online events, be they roundtables, virtual forums or the ongoing activities of our various research groups, continue and you are all welcome to contribute and participate.  Do not hesitate to join us! 

We look forward to meeting and talking with you often throughout the year. Please support our association and its activities by becoming a member for 2021. 

Please visit our website for more information. 

Julián Durazo Herrmann