Radical History Colleagues,
The Radical History Review (RHR) and Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD) are again organizing affiliate organization sessions for the AHA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, January 4-7, 2024.
At the 2023 meeting we sponsored ten panels on a range of topics, and a number of these drew large audiences (2023 sessions). For the 2022 meeting, held as Covid was receding, we held 10 sessions (2022). In 2021 the meeting was largely canceled because of the pandemic. And in 2020 we sponsored eleven sessions (2020).
We are now calling for session proposals for the 2024 meeting, and our hope is to make our intervention at least as successful as that of 2023 (2023 report), We already have three sessions that have applied to be both AHA and RHR/H-PAD sessions. We aim to develop something like ten more.
Proposals for our affiliate sessions do not go through the AHA vetting process (although as mentioned, three have decided to do this anyway–at any rate the deadline for AHA sessions has passed). Instead, proposals go directly to RHR/H-PAD, and we select and organize our sessions on our own. These sessions are very similar to regular AHA sessions in most ways. They are listed on the AHA website and in the printed conference program. They take place in the same rooms and locations as the regular sessions, at the same times, and under the same conditions. Affiliate sessions, including ours, have become an integral part of AHA annual meetings. The AHA report on the 2023 conference in its journal Perspectives chose to highlight, of the 450 conference sessions, 12, many of which were affiliate organization sessions And of the 12, 3 RHR/H-PAD sessions were highlighted (Perspectives – see especially the last eight paragraphs).
Our AHA sessions are wide ranging in terms of topics and form, and tend to emphasize political questions and frameworks as well as radical theoretical approaches and questions of immediate political intervention as well as ‘’’historical scholarship.” At the last AHA meeting we stressed the culture wars– their origins and their threats– as well as racism, and international processes and crises of imperialism. We also put focus on education and on the educational labor movement. A weakness was that we failed to really emphasize historical and current right-wing attacks on women and LGBTQ+ constituencies, especially on health care and abortion. We need to rectify this failing this time.
Finally it must be mentioned that, for the first time in 2023, we audio- and video-recorded most of our sessions with participant’s permission, and made them available on our website as podcasts and webinars (audio – video).
So please consider organizing a radical history panel for AHA 2024. And if you are considering this, please contact us immediately! Don’t wait until you have everything in place, but let us know now what you are thinking and doing. We can help you in making connections and in pulling things together.
Please contact us with any AHA Conference ideas orquestions at skotna@sage.edu. Please keep in mind that we must send in the completed RHR/H-PAD sessions to the AHA by late May.
In solidarity, Andor Skotnes for RHR/H-PAD