EAA wishes you Happy New Year

Dear friends,

From now we will use Christmas, the solstice, the end of the old year and the start of the new, these mid-winter days of celebration for so many cultures of light and darkness, of order and chaos, with all its potential ahead, as an opportunity to wish you all, our treasured members, the becoming of your hopes in the New Year. In doing so, I am mindful that happiness and wellbeing are not ethereal concepts, but they are created with contributions from each and every one of us.

2017 was a great year for the EAA. We had a superb Annual Meeting in Maastricht using the principle to ‘build bridges’. We have received a truly wonderful response from members to the call for sessions for the Barcelona 2018 Annual Meeting to ‘reflect futures’ and many of the proposed sessions have offered provocative perspectives that address this theme.

As the situation in Barcelona began to appear potentially problematic in the past few months, our membership showed their trust, support and interest in our Annual Meetings and reacted by offering the highest number of sessions (274) in the history of the EAA (almost 25 years now). This response from members fills us all with great pride in the EAA: it tells something about the type of organization we are, the type of values we endorse and the type of work we do, even when these may have different meanings for each of us.

In the behalf of the EAA Officers, the Executive Board, the Secretariat, and all the Committees and Communities, we wish you the very best for the New Year to come, the European Year of Cultural Heritage. See you all in Barcelona!

Felipe Criado-Boado

EAA President