November 21, 2025

The Boards of Directors of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) and the American Anthropology Association (AAA) have selected Dr. Amelia Fiske to receive the Margaret Mead Award for 2025. Fiske was selected for her book,

Reckoning with Harm - The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia, published by University of Texas Press (2023). She is currently Senior Researcher at the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich (Germany).

The Mead Award was initiated by the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1979 with the approval of Margaret Mead. Since 1983, the award has been sponsored and presented jointly with the American Anthropological Association. The award is presented annually to a young scholar for a particular accomplishment, such as a book, which employs anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful and accessible to a broadly concerned public.

The award honors the memory of Margaret Mead, who in her lifetime was the most widely known woman in the world, and arguably the most recognized anthropologist. Mead had a unique talent for bringing anthropology into the light of public attention.

Prior to arriving at the Technical University of Munich, Fiske received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), held a postdoctoral position at Kiel University (Germany), and conducted extensive field research in Ecuador and Latin America.

She has over a decade of experience conducting interdisciplinary qualitative and ethnographic research in two broad arenas: 1) anthropological and critical social science approaches to bioethics, artificial intelligence, and digital and sociotechnical changes in knowledge production; 2) ethnographic attention to issues of socio-ecological justice, experiences of toxicity in the context of extraction, participatory research methods, and graphic arts.

The Mead Award will be presented to Dr. Fiske on March 20, 2026, at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Additional information on the Mead Award and prior recipients may be found on the SfAA website - www.appliedanthro.org.