CASCA 2025 – McGill, Montreal

"Montreal Sunset" by Michael Vesia is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

CASCA 2025 - McGill, Montreal

May 7 - May 10, 2025

Confluences

The 2025 conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society/La Société Canadienne d’Anthropologie inaugurates the association’s second half century by inviting reflections on confluences. Confluences at once intimate the location of the meeting in Montreal, where waters, languages and peoples have long met, and the conditions and aims of anthropology as a discipline concerned with relations between persons, other-than-human beings, and their environments. Our current conjuncture is characterized by divisiveness and war, by “echo-chambers” and ecological crisis. However, in this conjuncture we are also witness to new waves of social and political mobilization and renewed efforts to fight inequalities, establish coalitions, and mitigate the deleterious effects of climate change. Our conference invites reflection on anthropology in this conjuncture, with particular attention to anthropologists’ ability to observe, analyze and interpret the relations between local realities and larger processes. How do anthropologists navigate shared and contested presents and the possible futures that might arise? Just as sharing is never a foregone conclusion but rather the outcome of material and imaginative labour, so too contestation is not only a negative act but carries within it the potential for movement in different directions. Confluences may be about convergence but they can also indicate points of solidarity that ignite productive disruption.

The conference invites contributions, in the form of research papers, panels and roundtables that together give us a picture of where anthropology is and where it is headed. What are the confluences—of history, material conditions, individual and collective choices—that constitute anthropology’s present, and what are the confluences anthropologists seek in the future? Bringing together emerging and established scholars, researchers working within interdisciplinary teams, anthropologists working in academia and in other areas, on theoretical and applied projects, and in a range of media, the conference hopes to continue building Canadian anthropology as vibrant, diverse and collaborative.