Keynote Panel:
Jafari S. Allen of Columbia University
Omar Dewachi of Rutgers University
Kim Fortun of University of California, Irvine
Justin Richland of University of California, Irvine
Panel to be moderated by Talia Dan-Cohen & Leo Coleman, 2026 Executive Program Chairs
A Roundtable on Authority, Institutions, and Disciplines on the Verge
The fields we work in are under pressure. This panel will address those forces.
Five anthropologists. Five vantage points: law, environment, medicine, Black Studies, and the discipline itself. All grappling with the same question: what happens to knowledge, institutions, and expertise when the ground shifts beneath them?
This isn’t an abstract exercise. These are scholars who work inside the systems they’re analyzing, as a physician treating patients across war-fractured health infrastructures, as a justice on a Native nation’s highest court, as researchers watching their fields defunded, dismantled, and disputed in real time.
The roundtable format means you’ll hear them think together, push back, and connect the dots across domains. It’s the kind of conversation that only happens when the right people are in the same room—and this year, that room is in St. Louis.
Distinguished Lecturer:
Agustín Fuentes, Princeton University
Don’t miss one of the most compelling voices in anthropology today.
Agustín Fuentes is a Princeton anthropologist, bestselling author, and one of the discipline’s most electrifying public intellectuals—and he’s coming to St. Louis.
Fuentes brings together anthropology, biology, and psychology to dismantle the myths we take for granted about human nature: race, sex, gender, aggression, and what it actually means to be human. His work goes beyond informing, it reshapes how you think.
This is your chance to hear him live, at a meeting already defined by its theme of transformation and possibility. “On the Verge” couldn’t have a more fitting Distinguished Lecturer.
Seats will fill fast. Be in the room.
