A Field in Flux

A Field in FluxIt should come as no surprise that ASA's 68th annual meeting was an intense, cathartic series of events.Arriving in Atlanta at the tail end of what has been a long and harrowing year for many members of our community, attendees greeted each other across the cavernous hotel foyer with excited waves and warm hugs.As I exchanged my own hellos and hugs with far-flung friends and colleagues, I was struck by the irony of meeting in a hotel that served as the set for several iconic Hunger Games scenes.I suspect I was not alone in this, at least among fellow millennials.Everywhere one looks, exploitation is dressed up as competition for the entertainment of oligarchs.The fact is that for many ASA attendees, 2025 was an endless administrative gauntlet of budget delays, funding cuts, program closures, and hiring freezes.Many others endured internet harassment, immigration anxieties, and infringements on academic freedom.Amid these many challenges and injustices, however, members also shared triumphant stories of new career paths, private funding support, and institutional reinvestment in the field.Several major institutions, including ASA's home base, Rutgers University, have positioned themselves to increase support for African studies and programs in Africa.Given this broader context, one of the meeting's most recurrent and resonant questions was: how will we prepare the next generation to understand Africa given scarce resources and uneven institutional support in the current political climate?The 2025 Program Chairs, Pedro Monaville and Anatoli Ignatov, anticipated the urgency of this question when they set the meeting's intellectual and political tone with their thematic essay, "Crossing Boundaries and Recovering Intellectual Traditions."That essay rightfully highlights the "multiple, intersecting crises" of the moment: the crisis of "late capitalism, leading to growing socio-economic inequalities and precarity; the crisis of the nation-state and liberal democracy, signified by the global resurgence of far-right populism; the crisis of militarism, made visible by the suffering and deaths of thousands of people fueled by record high world military expenditure; and the ecological crisis."In response to this timely essay and the rapidly shifting political landscape, ASA's program quickly filled with sessions addressing the impact of these intersecting crises on the academic landscape.Anene Ejikeme (Trinity University), for instance, led a discussion on study abroad "in the post-pandemic Trump world," sponsored by Africa Network-a community of Africanists in Liberal Arts colleges.This dynamic session focused on resilience and explored specific strategies for building ethical and mutually beneficial partnerships with