08.04.2026
IRI UL at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting 2026 in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico hosted the 2026 annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in March – and IRI UL was there. SfAA is one of the most established international gatherings for applied and practicing anthropologists, bringing together researchers and practitioners who work at the intersection of anthropological knowledge and real-world challenges. Dr Sara Arko, Dr Gregor Cerinšek, and Prof Dan Podjed, took on roles as presenters and session chairs.
Dr Arko and Dr Cerinšek both contributed to the panel Sharing and Scaling Ethnographic Findings for Leadership. Dr Arko’s paper, Anthropology at Work: Collaborating on the Future of Adaptive Offices, was co-authored with Anja Pogladič (IRI UL), Stien Poncelet, Alex Binh Vinh Duc Nguyen, and Andrew Vande Moere (KU Leuven). Drawing on research carried out within the EU-funded SONATA project, the paper examined what it actually means to embed anthropology inside a large, interdisciplinary research and innovation project – and what ethnographic approaches can bring to the development of adaptive workplace technologies that is difficult to achieve through other means.
Dr Cerinšek presented Ethnographic Pathways to Deep Scaling: Applying Anthropology in Living Lab Orchestration and Assessment. The paper addressed the question of how ethnographic knowledge can be scaled and operationalised within living lab environments, specifically for orchestrating and assessing social impacts.
Our team also co-chaired an open session on the future of work, with Dr Podjed taking the lead and Melissa Fisher, PhD (Parsons School of Design, The New School) joining as a special guest. The session tackled a question that is increasingly hard to avoid: as automation, robotisation, and AI continue to reshape the labour market – with the OECD estimating that 27% of jobs are at high risk of disappearing – what does this mean for workers? And what does it mean for anthropologists, whose work depends precisely on the kind of human insight and empathy that is hardest to automate? The roundtable drew on several international research projects, including SONATA and MAG-NET, to explore how applied anthropology might help navigate the futures of work, and what role anthropologists themselves might play in the automated workplaces taking shape around us.
The conference offered an opportunity to engage with a broad community of applied and practicing anthropologists working across a range of contexts and disciplines. For IRI UL, it was a chance to share ongoing work, receive feedback from international peers, and connect our research to wider conversations about work, technology, and social change.
