UNTHINKABLE

Society for Cultural Anthropology + Anthropologgy and Environment Society Joint Meeting

March 18–20, 2027 in Las Vegas, Nevada

Call for Papers

The present teems with unthinkable harms: genocide, extinction, dismantling of voting and reproductive rights, climate catastrophe, mass shootings, global pandemics, surveillance states, forever chemicals, technological enclosure. It can be hard to think at all when weighed down by the labor of surviving. And yet this present also rests on and plays host to once unthinkable achievements—like transformative global solidarities, worker organizing in unlikely places, implausible ecological resistance, and struggles toward abolition—which remind us that to unthink also means to think against the grain. Unthinkable things are, in this way, both world-ending and world-making. They shock some, while they condition life for others. They live through the sensorium, affect, embodiment, atmosphere, and environment. They shape more-than-human life, homelands, imaginations, and relationships, transforming the political, social, and environmental grounds where they take root. Reckoning with these transformations demands that we think more—not less—about how once-unthinkable things become imagined, sensed, and lived. It also requires us to connect and analyze in other ways than thinking. And it obliges us to account for how such emergent conditions and events are routinized and performed as unremarkable, grapple with how and why so many feel enticed to cede thought to machines, and ask what it might take to engage in good, hard-thinking work together, in service of collective well-being

This spring, we invite anthropologists to think—and do—the unthinkable in care-ful community with one another. We hope to disrupt widespread conditions of being overwhelmed and those of isolation. We build labor into thought, rather than separating them. 

The urgency of this work comes at a time when sites of critical, collective thought—including educational institutions, student activism, academic freedom, and humanistic research—are profoundly threatened. These threats are unevenly distributed, but they leave very few of us untouched. This conference asks what kinds of scholarly practices can address the normalization of such threats, and what sorts of world-building collaboration remain unthinkable or under-thought within the discipline of anthropology.

We gather in Las Vegas, Nevada: a city long thought to symbolize the unthinkable, to be a simulacrum, to exist in an unthinkable relationship to environmental sustainability, to be built on (unthinking) luck, fortune, and flow, and to persist by unmaking Indigenous claims to lands and waters. It is a place that calls for thinking about the work—environmental, labor, legal, dispossessive, and otherwise—that goes into its own curation. And it is the home of an institution built on knowledge, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which will host our gathering.

Submission Guidelines

We invite proposals for roundtables, panels, mentoring workshops, and experimental sessions to think, unthink, and rethink in community. Our two sections—the Anthropology and Environment Society, and the Society for Cultural Anthropology—have collaborated in planning the gathering, and we aim for this spirit of collaboration to pervade it. We welcome sessions that include co-creation, conversation, listening, place-based learning, and other modes of collective engagement. We encourage submissions and modes of participation that center thinking or writing together and/or exploring the tensions and possibilities of collectivity.

You can propose a session inspired by one of the thematic suggestions below or dream up something entirely new. You may propose a closed session (with already identified persons who have agreed to participate in specific roles), or an open session (for which you will invite contributions through an open call during the conference planning process). Either way, sessions should be designed to be open to all—except in rare cases where organizers justify a need for limited numbers due to session logistics, finite materials, or the need for safe collaboration. No matter what you propose, please keep in mind that sessions should run between one and two hours long.

• Unthinkable worlds: Sharing research on how unthinkable human and earthly violences are visited and negotiated in worlds, including through works-in-progress panels, roundtables, collaborative sessions, and so on. 
• Unthinkable solidarities: Centering community efforts to build worlds otherwise amid the violences of the everyday, including work that joins thought, action, and anthropology, and/or centers the unthinkable (or unregisterable) work we do beyond writing.
• Unthinkable leadership: Inviting conversations around what a response to our moment in and beyond the institutional frames of the university, discipline, or academy might look like.  
• Unthinkable bodies/places: Exploring engagements with place and embodiment that connect beyond the thinkable, such as through movement, song, labor, or other not-too-heady modalities.

In addition to proposing panels and roundtables, please consider formats that include co-writing, mentoring, co-reading, sustainability, and collaboration. After the draft program is announced, attendees will have opportunities to join sessions and have their names included in the final program as participants.

Submit proposals through this link by December 1, 2026: [LINK TO FORM].

For more information, or to discuss what you have in mind, please reach out via unthinkableconference@gmail.com.

Conference Timeline

Session submission portal closes: December 1, 2026

Decisions shared: December 11, 2026 (closed panels should be complete; organizers of open panels will now be invited to begin soliciting contributions)

Sessions finalized: January 11, 2026 (organizers of open panels must decide upon participants and communicate that decision to the conference team)

Registration deadline: January 18, 2026

Tentative program released: TBD

Hotel deadline: TBD

Final program released: TBD

Conference takes place: March 18–20, 2026