SEBIG 2026
Southeastern Biological Anthropology Interest Group
SEBIG Mission
We are an academic interest group based in the Southeastern United States, dedicated to fostering an inclusive, friendly, and welcoming environment for scientists and social scientists. We welcome all students, faculty, and professional staff interested in the many diverse facets of Bioanthropology to join us for our annual scholarly networking and professional development experience. This annual conference is especially beneficial to both graduate and undergraduate students, who can present their research ideas ahead of professional conferences to receive feedback from fellow students and professors.
SEBIG 2026 Annual Meeting
The next annual meeting of SEBIG will be held at NC State University on February 7, 2026. This is a free, one-day event with lunch included. We are accepting abstracts for paper and poster presentations on topics broadly related to biological anthropology until January 7, 2026. Please fill out this form to submit an abstract for a paper or poster presentation.
Please also register for the meeting using this form by January 30, 2026, whether you are planning to present or to simply attend the meeting.
If you have any access needs to facilitate your participation (ASL request, CART request, mobility request, access to a refrigerator for medications, et cetera), please contact the meeting access coordinator, Katherine Kinkopf (kmkinkopf@ncsu.edu).
2026 Keynote Speech By Dr. Rachel Watkins
Our Quinquennium in Review
The year 2020 marked a distinct period of reckoning with biological anthropology’s history of problematic acquisition and treatment of human skeletal remains for research. Community engagement – grounded in accountability and transparency – was centered on this transformation. Initial responses to the controversies that brought the discipline to a moment of reckoning fell into the category of crisis management. As we move toward developing more sustainable ethical practices, the past five years must be situated within our discipline’s broader historical continuum. This is critical to remaining grounded while moving into uncharted territory that requires us to operationalize our visions for what is possible.
Examples from my research involving African descendant communities and burial sites will be used to illustrate how visions for AAGPRA-type legislation can be operationalized in historically grounded ways. Among other complexities, case studies demonstrate collaboration without artificially bifurcating researchers and descendants. Examples also stress the importance of communication across intellectual lineages within bioanthropology, and engagement with disciplines that inform our current use(s) of social theory. I conclude by discussing how Black Feminist scholarship is contributing to the development of historically grounded, sustainable practices for the ethical treatment of human remains.
