87th Annual Meeting FAQ

SAA’s vendor, 42chat, has been used successfully by several large associations, such as the American Anthropological Association and the Geological Society of America. Their site is compliant with GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act. See more: https://www.42chat.com/privacy-policy/ No SAA staff will see information uploaded by advance registrants, although SAA staff will receive status reports on advance registrants who have not completed their vaccination validation, so we can follow up with registrants who may be unaware of the requirement.

To build the portal and define requirements for “fully vaccinated,” SAA will use CDC guidance as of January 15, 2022. It will take approximately two weeks to bring the portal online. 

Please ask any additional questions to meetings@saa.org, so we can help you and enhance this FAQ.

Because of COVID and the dramatic disruptions of this pandemic, the SAA understands that there may be new and unforeseen difficulties for 2022 program participants. For the 2022 meeting, we are implementing new procedures to accommodate these unexpected difficulties this year.

• If you are a PRESENTER in a symposium or general session, your session chair is responsible for downloading all presentations in advance of the meeting and bringing these presentations on a laptop to the session room. If your session chair is comfortable, they could allow you to send a video recording or a voice over power point presentation. SAA cannot guarantee the stability of the internet, which is not suitable for streaming a video or presentation stored remotely. It is important that the recording be on the laptop and not streamed. Because presenter abstracts are reviewed by the Program Committee in September and October, we cannot accept replacement presentations.
• If you are a DISCUSSANT in a symposium, forum, lightning round, or electronic symposium, your session chair has the option of replacing a discussant. A replacement discussant must register for the meeting and become a member of SAA by January 30, 2022, so staff can produce a correct final program and meeting app. No replacement discussants are possible after January 30, 2022. The session organizer needs to email cheng_zhang@saa.org with their session title, and the name and email of the replacement. Because presenter abstracts are reviewed by the Program Committee in September and October, we cannot accept replacement presentations.
• If you are a POSTER PRESENTER, SAA staff is continuing to support traditional poster sessions at the 2022 physical meeting as well as developing an electronic portal for PDFs of posters. Many details about the ePosters are not known right now, but we will have details in the guidelines that we share with poster presenters in February 2022. ePosters will need to be uploaded to the ePoster site by March 15, 2022. This is because SAA staff needs to have completed helping poster presenters and launched the ePoster site before flying out to the Annual Meeting and supporting the physical meeting.
  
  Please note that all poster presenters will continue to have a presentation time slot during the 2022 annual meeting, so you may wish to ask a co-author or a colleague to bring and present your poster during your designated session time. The hotel does not recommend mailing any posters to any hotel guest as packages are difficult to locate. SAA staff will not able to help locate and pin posters to bulletin boards.

Because of new and unforeseen complications from COVID, session organizers can add discussants for 2022 sessions as long as their session remains within the annual meeting submission format rules. (In other words, if a forum already has 12 discussants, it may not add a new discussant.) All new and existing discussants must register for the meeting and become a member of SAA by January 30, 2022, so staff can produce a correct final program and meeting app. Session organizers need to email cheng_zhang@saa.org with their session title.