SUNTA section column for Anthropology News
1st Quarter of 2021
Submitted by Rudolf Gaudio, SUNTA Secretary

In the past year the COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions about the long-term sustainability of cities, while Black Lives Matter protests have called out the systematic injustices and violence endured by racialized urban residents. These challenges have hindered many SUNTA members’ ability to do their work (and to find and keep jobs), while underscoring the need for more critical anthropological research and teaching on urban planning and policy and the ways the built environment and urban forms facilitate or foreclose possibilities for human and other lives. Thanks to the technologies accessible, albeit unevenly, to most of the people reading this column, much of that work continues to be done remotely by SUNTA members and associates in and outside the academy. Read More >>

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IN SOLIDARITY STATEMENT June 3, 2020

SUNTA stands with all victims of police violence and those on the frontlines demanding justice in this week’s protests. 

As a scholarly society committed to social justice, we mourn the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and we reflect on the long history of Black lives lost to racialized state violence.  

As a scholarly group devoted to the study of cities, we see a very long legacy of past injustices shaping the present, in how municipal law enforcement across the United States became militarized and insulated from legal action, in how groups and neighborhoods were criminalized, in how policing remains an ever-growing part of government budgets even as other vital human services face cuts and privatization.

Anthropology also offers us examples of the transformative power of protest, and powerful visions of a more just future. 

And we raise our professional voice to assert that Black Lives Matter!

– The SUNTA Board

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Photo by Jayne Howell

Submissions for SUNTA Column

The Society for Urban, National and transnational Anthropology invites submissions for the SUNTA column published in the Sections News area of the monthly Anthropology News newsletter.

News updates, conference announcements, essays, and research summaries of interest and relevance to the general membership are welcomed. Columns can be up 700 words, and photos will be included as space allows.

Please contact SUNTA Secretary Andrew Newman (andrew.newman@wayne.edu) regarding potential submissions and deadlines.