This edition of WWNA turns its attention to a world increasingly defined by states of emergency. From wars, climate catastrophes, and forced displacement to public health crises, democratic weakening, economic precarity, and technological disruption, “emergency” has become both a lived reality and a governing logic.

But what does it mean to live in perpetual urgency? Who declares an emergency, who benefits from it, and who bears its costs?

Anthropology in Times of Emergency invites participants to critically examine how emergencies are produced, experienced, narrated, and managed across diverse contexts. While emergencies are often framed as sudden ruptures, anthropological perspectives reveal their longer histories: slow violence, structural inequalities, colonial legacies, extractivist economies, and fragile infrastructures that render some communities perpetually “at risk.” By focusing on people’s lived experiences, relationships, and knowledge shaped by their specific contexts, anthropology provides useful ways to understand the politics behind crises.

This edition seeks to highlight anthropology’s unique contributions in moments of disruption.

Ethnographic methods illuminate how communities mobilize care networks in the wake of disaster, how mutual aid and informal economies sustain survival, and how local epistemologies contest standardized humanitarian interventions.

Over three days in Salamanca, we will create a space for dialogue between scholars, practitioners, and community actors working across fields such as environmental justice, migration, public health, digital infrastructures, conflict mediation, and humanitarian response.

Through lectures, workshops, and collaborative formats, we will explore how anthropology not only interprets emergencies but actively participates in shaping more just and sustainable futures.

Anthropology in Times of Emergency calls for courage, care, and collaboration.

In a time when crisis feels constant, our discipline has the responsibility —and the capacity— to move beyond reaction toward imagination, solidarity, and structural change.