The Virtual Otherwise

The Virtual Otherwise is right around the corner! Mark your schedule for our biennial online anthropology conference and film festival happening online and maybe near you (check out our local nodes!) June 2nd-June 4th (or starting afternoon June 1st if you are tuning in from Los Angeles, ending June 5th in Melbourne).

Join us for three days of multimodal panels and films as we seek to engage questions at the heart of anthropology's relationship to the virtual: What promises and possibilities do virtual spaces, practices, and technologies hold out in everyday social worlds? Where, when, and how do people encounter the limits of virtualization, and with what intimate and collective political forms do they challenge its violence? How can ethnographic practice across a range of mediums - text, film, photography, audio, and digital platforms - enable us to illuminate better the questions of connection, surveillance, access, failure, and survival that virtual spaces open up?

The conference and its embedded film festival will consist of 8 hours of new content each day.  The pre-recorded loop repeats 3 times over 24 hours. Whatever time zone (or early bird/night owl schedule) you are in, catch the loop at your favorite time–or more than once. 

Keep the conference and film festival vibe going by engaging directly with participants through our virtual hallways. Keep an eye out for coffee hours with editors and scholars. Live discussion hallways are sprinkled throughout if you want to talk with presenters and fellow attendees. Who knows… pop-up events might… pop up!

Mark your calendars for your favorite presentations, films, and our keynote speakers: Constanza Piña Pardo, Aimee Meredith Cox, and a conversation on Surveillance Capital And Occupation with Mohamad Junaid, Amahl Bishara, and Darren Byler. 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION
The event is open to anyone who registers in advance by following those quick steps here. Registration follows a scale from $25 to $0 depending on your employment and income.

To register, follow our quick and easy two-step registration process, which will take you to your AAA account (while you do need an American Anthropological Association account to register, you do not need an active membership) and then to Hopin, the virtual platform hosting the conference. We want to make sure everyone can attend, so we made the process simple and created an inclusive pay scale (free for grads / underemployed artists & activists / no one turned away) $25 (faculty, employed people), $15 (students)  or FREE (global south).  On the honor system.

If you're on social media, please join the conversation using the hashtag #VirtualOtherwise22.  

We can’t wait for the conference to start and we hope that it might achieve quite the ultimate 2022 miracle: to change your mind about online events!