A New Chapter for SHA's Performance Offering

SHA has a long history of holding open mic events dating back to 2004. In recent years, the practice was revived by SHA board member Kristina Jacobsen, who hosted the Creative Ethnographer’s Salon during the 2025 American Anthropological Association meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Held at the backstage of the iconic Howlin' Wolf, the event drew over 75 attendees, featured 13 performers, and generated a waitlist, a clear sign of the community's interest for this kind of gathering.

Building on that energy, the Fall 2026 Conference planning process became an opportunity to reimagine SHA's performance practice more fundamentally. In conversation with conference organizers — Amina Tawasil (a Tausug from the Sulu Archipelago), Fernanda Dias (co-founder of the Kilomba Collective, a Black Brazilian women's collective in the U.S., and a member of the Paulo Freire Initiative), and Amanda Bressack (Pennsylvania Dutch) — SHA's leadership began centering the full range of its membership's origins, traditions, and ways of knowing in the design of the event itself. This led us toward a different tradition altogether: one rooted not in the salon drawing rooms of 18th-century Paris, but in the popular education movements of Latin America.

That tradition is the círculo de cultura, a practice developed within popular education movements, most closely associated with Paulo Freire, in which knowledge is generated collectively rather than transmitted from a single authority. In a círculo de cultura, there is no stage and no audience in the traditional sense: participants are co-creators, and the circle itself is the methodology.

From this lineage, SHA's Círculo de Etnografia is born, an immersive, interactive open mic that transforms SHA's performance event into a living expression of multimodal ethnography. The Círculo de Etnografia will take place annually. This year, 2026, it will be part of the SHA Fall Conference in New York City and at the AAA Annual Meeting in November.

Calls for performers will be published after conference programs are finalized.