Anthropology@Deakin Podcast

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A podcast about life, the universe and anthropology based at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. Each episode features an anthropologist or two in conversation with David Boarder Giles and Timothy Neale. Presented with support from the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University.

Anthropology@Deakin


    • Aug 18, 2022 LATEST EPISODE
    • infrequent NEW EPISODES
    • 53m AVG DURATION
    • 52 EPISODES


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    Latest episodes from Anthropology@Deakin Podcast

    Episode #49: Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan

    Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2022 68:07


    In this episode, Mythily talks to Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan. Anne is a former academic and current farm witch who, in both roles, has spent a weird amount of time getting to know sheep. Laura is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW and lectures with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Anne and Laura are also, it must be said, dear friends. As they speak of friendship, policy, care, death, and killing, anthropology emerges as a way into practices and relations that could maybe (we hope) inform a ‘better world'. Anne and Laura are both deeply invested—through their entanglements with sheep and farmers (Anne), hedgehogs and ecological conservation workers (Laura)—in understanding what sophisticated practices of love, kindness and friendship look like. So we talk through the sticky and unruly nature of lived ethics; of what it means to dislike with respect. Or, to kill with love. And also, of choosing to walk away from academia. This episode was produced by Mythily Meher, with editing and production support from Tim Neale and Matt Barlow. Mythily lives and works in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we recognise Māori in Aotearoa as tangata whenua (people born of the whenua [land/placenta]), whose right to sovereignty here is inalienable. Conversations in Anthropology is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society. Works mentioned: ‘Lively Collaborations: Feminist Reading Group Erotics for Liveable Futures' by Laura McLauchlan (in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy) ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World' by Anna Tsing ‘Power in the Helping Professions' by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig Also, more generally, the expansive works of Deb Bird Rose, and Maria La Puig Bellacasa

    Episode #48: Ceridwen Dovey

    Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2022 54:42


    We return with a conversation recorded, this past summer, between Ceridwen Dovey and our own Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles. Dovey is a Sydney-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and in-depth essays and profiles, as well as a filmmaker. Born in South Africa, she grew up between South Africa and Australia, studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a postgraduate in anthropology at New York University. But, as we learn in this episode, Dovey did not become an anthropologist, and instead moved to a different but related set of analytical and representational problems as a fiction writer. Is fiction ethnographic? How do the commitments of creative non-fiction and anthropology differ? And, what does the moon think about all this? Tune in to find out. Interested in learning more? Check out https://www.ceridwendovey.com/ Show Credits Lead Production: Timothy Neale Deputy Production: David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher Editing: Timothy Neale and Mythily Meher This conversation was produced by Timothy Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

    Episode #47: Jessica Cattelino

    Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2022 66:55


    For this episode, Cameo and Tim caught up with Professor Jessica Cattelino of the University of California Los Angeles. Jessica is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked extensively with Seminole people of Florida in the United States. Her first book High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke, 2008), explores sovereignty and the politicisation of gaming, while her soon to be released second book, follows water in the Florida Everglades. Both works develop critical approaches to recognition politics, settler colonialism and Indigeneity, with relevance across settler states. The conversation also covers Jessica's approach to service and governance within the academy, and the ways in which it reproduces societal structures and inequities. Interested in learning more? Jessica recommends Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy's introduction to their special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water”; Teresa Montoya's work on permeability; Courtney Lewis's book, Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty; and Carla Scaramelli's book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey. Show Credits Lead Production: Cameo Dalley Editing: Cameo Dalley and Tim Neale This conversation was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

    Episode #46: Malini Sur

    Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2021 58:34


    This month we bring to you a wonderful conversation between Matt and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University, Dr. Malini Sur. Malini is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia on the themes of agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. This conversation orbits around Malini's recently book 'Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along the violent--yet generative--borderlands between India and Bangladesh. Equal parts ecology, infrastructure, surveillance, and bureaucracy, this conversation will resonate for many well beyond the eastern Himalaya. Show Credits Lead Production: Matt Barlow Editing: Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow This conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of Kaurna and Dharag First Nations People. Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo

    Episode #45: Will Smith and Monica Minnegal

    Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2021 56:35


    In this episode, Tim sits down with Associate Professor Monica Minnegal to chat to Dr. Will Smith, an environmental anthropologist and research fellow at Deakin University. Will's book, ‘Mountains of Blame: Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands' recently published with University of Washington Press, explores the political ecologies of forests in relation to the experiences and effects of climate change on the island of Pala'wan, in the Philippines. This conversation tackles some thorny questions around Indigenous understandings of changing climates, the refusal by communities to be categorized by governments as vulnerable victims or resilient saviours, and more-than-human relations marked by fear and violence, rather than reciprocity, flourishing, or love. As Will states, the forests are full of malevolent spirits, and he has been bitten by a lot of stuff in the forests of Pala'wan. Enjoy this great conversation between Will Smith, Monica Minnegal, and Tim Neale. Show Credits Lead Production: Tim Neale Editing: Mythily Meher, Tim Neale, and Matt Barlow. This episode was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Check us out on twitter @ anthroconvo.

    Episode #44: Fred Myers and Jason Gibson

    Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2021 59:19


    Cameo Dalley talks to Fred Myers (Silver Professor at New York University) and Jason Gibson (Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellow at Deakin University), both of whom work on Aboriginal Australian ceremony and material culture. The conversation roams over reflections on happenstance in their careers, the making of and reception of their work, and the evolving role of the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge in Indigenous communities. https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/jason-gibson https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/fred-myers.html Works Mentioned Gibson, Jason M (2020) Ceremony Men Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection, SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y. Myers, Fred (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) Myers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Myers, Fred (2019) The Difference that Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Remembering Yayayi (film) Directors, Pip Deveson, Fred Myers, Ian Dunlop. Show Credits This episode was produced by Cameo Dalley on the lands of the Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and it was edited by David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher.

    Episode #43: Imelda Miller and Olivia Robinson

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 27, 2021 53:06


    In this episode, Cameo speaks with Imelda Miller, of the Queensland Museum, and Olivia Robinson, of the State Library of Queensland. With over two decades of curatorial work and collaboration, they not only share their insights about collection and exhibition, but — as an Australian South Sea Islander and Bidjara woman, respectively — they share their insights about reimagining curation itself in a way that engages, empowers, and gives voice and agency to their communities.

    Episode #42: Hugh Raffles

    Play Episode Listen Later May 29, 2021 68:37


    We are delighted to bring you a conversation between Matt, Tim, and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School, Hugh Raffles. Raffles is the author of three books. The first of which, In Amazonia: A Natural History, is an ethnography about how rivers and humans co-constitute one another in the east Amazon of Brazil. Raffles' second book, Insectopedia, is a collection of tales about humans and insects that takes us from the discovery of language among bees to artistic representations of contaminated butterfly wings in Chernobyl. His most recent book, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, is a bracing tale of time, memory, and loss, written through stories of stone. Across all three books Raffles has developed a deeply philosophical, historical, and poetic way of writing stories anthropologically that remain open to readers beyond the academy. What Raffles does with these subjects, in researching and writing about them, is somewhat alchemical, spinning them into meditations on humanity that are searing, deep, and evocative, like art; his fascination on the page is contagious. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Hugh Raffles, on his career and process, what he is learning from newer generations of anthropologists, crafting an authorly voice, and supporting others to find and craft theirs. https://www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty/hugh-raffles/ Works mentioned Hartman, S 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. WWNorton Press, New York. Stepanova, M 2021. In Memory of Memory. Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, England. Show Credits This episode was produced by Matt Barlow and Timothy Neale, and edited by Matt Barlow, Timothy Neale, and Cameo Dalley. Conversations in Anthropology is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society and made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association.

    Episode #41: Kathleen Belew, Britt Halvorson, Joshua Reno, and Alexandra Minna Stern

    Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2021 55:42


    This episode brings together historians and anthropologists to explore questions that are anthropological in scale: race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, and white nationalist movements in North America and Europe. Kathleen Belew is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, whose book, Bring the War Home, explores the recent history of white nationalist movements and organising in the years between the Vietnam War and the Oklahoma City bombing. Alexandra Minna Stern is a Professor of History, American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, whose work has investigated the intersections of eugenics, racism, and gender in American politics. Her most recent book is Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Britt Halvorson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College whose most recent work, along with our fourth guest, has turned to investigate the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy are embedded in narratives of Mid-Western identity and place-making. Their forthcoming book is provisionally titled Real Americans: A Global History of the Midwest and White Supremacy. And Joshua Reno is a Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, and the co-author, with Britt, of Real Americans.

    Episode #40: Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2021 72:21


    Pop the kettle on and sit back for our first 'tea' themed episode! For this episode, Matt invited Michael Dunford, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at ANU whose research explores labour, language, and tea in Myanmar, to join him in conversation with Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan. Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the International Labour and Labour Relations School at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas. Her work analyzes how materials and bodies take on value under changing political economic regimes and explores the diverse forms of labor that make and maintain that value. Her first book, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) explores how legacies of colonialism intersect with contemporary market reforms to reconfigure notions of the value of labor, of place, and of tea itself.  Her second book, Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020) blends historical and ethnographic research on science, value, and the idea of quality in the tea industry to analyze efforts at economic reform in India. Another book, How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019), a volume co-edited with Alex Blanchette, brings together contemporary theoretical conversations in posthumanism with classic and continually relevant questions about political economy, precarity, and the meanings of work.  Sarah’s new research explores the intersections of agricultural extension and experimentation, colonial and postcolonial governance, and the everyday productive and reproductive work of farming in the Himalayan region of Kalimpong, West Bengal. Mythri Jegathesan is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Santa Clara University. Her research focuses on gender, labor, minority politics, and development in the Global South, and has explored the social and economic experiences of Tamil women tea plantation residents and workers in Sri Lanka, where she has conducted field research since 2005. She is currently researching the first women's trade union in Sri Lanka, the dynamics of transnational organizing across formal and informal employment sectors, and the changing development practices of local NGOs in postwar Sri Lanka. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, American Association for University Women, and American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. Her first book 'Tea & Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka', published in 2019 by the University of Washington Press, was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

    Episode #39: Alex Blanchette and Catie Gressier

    Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2021 61:37


    Hello anthro-enthusiasts, we are back for 2021 with a conversation convened by Cameo Dalley on animals, industrialisation, eating and all the manifold issues that unfold at their intersections, featuring special guests Alex Blanchette and Catie Gressier. Dr Blanchette is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and has published widely on the politics of industrial labor and life in a post-industrial United States. His books include 'Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm' (Duke University Press, 2020) and the collection 'How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet', edited with Sarah Besky(University of New Mexico Press, 2019). Dr Gressier, an ARC DECRA Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, has written extensively about the anthropology of food, settler identities, and issues of health and illness, including in her books 'At Home in the Okavango: White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belonging' (Berghahn Books, 2015) and 'Illness, Identity, and Taboo Among Australian Paleo Dieters' (Palgrave, 2017). -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #38: Radhika Govindrajan

    Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2020 49:13


    Cruising towards the end of 2020, we are back with a new conversation between Matt, Tim and Radhika Govindrajan about relatedness, lives with other species, and the changing context for doing ethnography today. Dr Gonvindrajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington whose research spans the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Their outstanding first book 'Animal Intimacies' (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an ethnography of relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, and the book has since been was awarded the 2017 American Institute of Indian Studies Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities and the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Gregory Bateson Prize in 2019. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #37: Greenwood, Hinkson and Shore

    Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2020 65:06


    In this episode, David Giles fires up the international teleconference machine to convene a conversation between Davydd Greenwood, Melinda Hinkson and Cris Shore about austerity, anthropology and the contemporary university. Greenwood is Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, Hinkson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University, and Cris Shore is Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department at Goldsmiths University of London. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #36: Nick Seaver and Thao Phan

    Play Episode Listen Later Oct 6, 2020 71:48


    Algorithms and artificial intelligence are on the menu for our 36th adventure in anthropology! In this episode, we present two conversations with two great Science and Technology Studies scholars: Dr Nick Seaver and Dr Thao Phan. Dr Seaver, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, examines themes of taste and attention in his research, drawing on his ethnographic research with US-based developers of algorithmic music recommender systems. Dr Phan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, where her research who focuses on gender, AI, and algorithmic cultures. -- For more on our sparkling guests, see: https://twitter.com/npseaver Seaver, Nick. "What should an anthropology of algorithms do?." Cultural anthropology 33.3 (2018): 375-385. https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/download/ca33.3.04/90 https://twitter.com/thao_pow Phan, Thao. "Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5.1 (2019): 1-38. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/29586/24800 -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #35: Catherine Besteman

    Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2020 51:12


    The crew have logged on for another episode - live from lockdown - to talk life, the universe and anthropology. In this episode, Tim and Mythily speak with Dr Catherine Besteman, an anthropologist who has spent their career analyzing the power dynamics that produce and maintain inequality, racism and violence. Dr Besteman holds the position of Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and is the author of several books, including the forthcoming 'Militarized Global Apartheid' (Duke University Press, 2020), and several edited collections, including the recent 'Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World' (University of Chicago Press, 2019). In this conversation, Dr Besteman discusses the subtle violence of humanitarianism, the rising criminalisation and militarisation of mobility, the difference between 'interlocutors' and 'friends', and much more. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #34: Anne Pollock

    Play Episode Listen Later Aug 4, 2020 56:19


    In this episode, we continue to explore the outer limits of collegiality during a pandemic and bring you a conversation with Professor Anne Pollock and special guest host Professor Emma Kowal (Deakin University). Dr Pollock is Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Kings College London, and her research focuses on biomedicine and culture, theories of race and gender, and the ways in which science and medicine are mobilised in social justice projects. Dr Pollock's books include 'Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference' (Duke University Press, 2012), 'Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge and Place in South African Drug Discovery' (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and, as we discuss, she is finishing a book manuscript on racism, health disparities and biopolitics in the 21st Century titled 'Sickening'. We also discuss hope as a practice, the ethics of the uneventful, accessing medical scientists, feminist STS and much more. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode 33: Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Risa Cromer

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 6, 2020 55:43


    We at 'Conversations in Anthropology' hope you are all surviving and thriving as we bring you another episode, recorded by our very own David Boarder Giles during a (pre-pandemic) trip to Turtle Island (aka North America) and the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. In this episode, we hear from Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Risa Cromer, three anthropologists who have each made major contributions to our understandings of gender, reproduction and disability. Rapp and Ginsburg are both Professors of Anthropology at New York University, where Ginsburg is also the Director of the Graduate Program in Culture and Media. Cromer is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Purdue University. Each scholar has a fearsome biography to reckon with, and listeners may already be familiar with Rapp's book 'Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America' (1999) and Ginsburg's 'Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community' (1989). In this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, our three guests discuss many topics including how, whether in life or academia, you often don't know what the universe has planned for you. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode 32: Anna Tsing

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2020 39:01


    Hello, anthro-enthusiasts! In this episode, we present a pre-COVID conversation that David Giles recorded with the esteemed anthropologist Anna Tsing, a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and director of the AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene at Aarhus University. Dr Tsing likely needs little introduction, as someone whose research and writing on globalisation and capitalism has travelled far outside of anthropology and academia. She is the author several books including 'In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place' (1993)and 'Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection' (2004), both based on fieldwork in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. More recently, she published an ethnography of the Matsutake mushroom and its entanglement in diverse human worlds and economies - 'The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins' (2015) - which won both the Gregory Bateson Prize and the Victor Turner Prize. In this conversation, David and Dr Tsing discuss her training in anthropology, working for things you believe in, telling terrible stories beautifully, and the possibilities of ethnography in the Anthropocene. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode 31.4: Jolynna Sinanan

    Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2020 19:01


    Here, in the last of our mini-podcasts on crisis and digital research, Mythily is in conversation with anthropologist Jolynna Sinanan (Research Fellow in Digital Media and Ethnography at the University of Sydney). Jolynna's research focusses on digital media practices in relation to family relationships, work and gender. She has written on these themes in Social Media in Trinidad (UCL Press, 2017), Visualising Facebook (Miller and Sinanan, UCL Press, 2017), Webcam (Miller and Sinanan, Polity, 2014) and How the World Changed Social Media (Miller et. al. 2016, UCL Press). Most recently, Jolynna has been developing this work in two projects: on mobile mining work in Western Australia, and on digital/data practices around tourism in Mt Everest. With her fieldwork plans for both sites shelved for the time-being, this conversation reflects on the possibilities of adapting projects to digital modes during a crisis, and also if we should. You can find Jolynna on twitter at @jolynnasinanan - Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode 31.3: Susan Wardell

    Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2020 22:21


    This conversation is the third in our mini-pod series on crisis and the digital. In it, Mythily Meher speaks to Susan Wardell while they are in lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand. They talk about the shape of work, life, distress and future research in this pandemic, and—reflecting on Susan’s work with an online climate change ‘doomer’ community—on the kinds of meaning-making people engage in crisis. Susan is a lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Ōtākou / Otago in Aotearoa. Her ethnographic work deals with emotion and affect, care, religion and spirituality, mental health and wellbeing, and digital worlds. She also publishes poetry and essays, which you can read in Landfall, The Spinoff, Cordite Poetry review and elsewhere. You can find Susan on twitter at @Unlazy_Susan, and you can browse (and contribute to) the collective online pandemic dream diary she is running (find it by googling “CoviDreams”). - Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode 31.2: Jonah Lipton

    Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2020 23:44


    Number 2 in our series of mini-episodes featuring conversations with anthropologists about crisis and the digital. This episode, Timothy Neale speaks to Jonah Lipton, a post-doctoral researcher based at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and the ESRC Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the London School of Economics. A specialist in the anthropology of West Africa, Lipton conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone immediately before and during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and in this conversation he reflects on that work and how it is shaping his interpretation of the current COVID-19 pandemic. For more on Lipton's work visit: http://www.lse.ac.uk/africa/people/Researchers/JonahLipton or look him up on Twitter @Jonah_Lipton -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode 31.1: Adia Benton

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2020 24:55


    We're changing up our schedule and format a little to bring you some mini-episodes of short and sharp conversations with anthropologists around the themes of crisis and the digital. The first conversation is with Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Adia is a cultural anthropologist with interests in global health, biomedicine, development and humanitarianism, and is the author of 'HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone' (University of Minnesota, 2015) and well as numerous article. In the interview, Adia and Tim discuss the current COVID-19 pandemic, virality, relevance, and her article 'Ebola at a Distance: A Pathographic Account of Anthropology's Relevance' (Anthropological Quarterly, 90:2, 2017). Find more about Adia Benton at: https://ethnography911.org and https://twitter.com/ethnography911

    Episode #30: Rick Smith and Megan Warin

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2020 56:26


    Hello friends, how are you? Are you running out of listening content? We are back with a new episode, featuring a conversation recorded by Matt Barlow (in the days before physical distancing) with Rick Smith and Megan Warin. Rick is a biocultural anthropologist who is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Neukom Institute for Computational Science and the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth, and Megan is a professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide. In this episode, they discuss epigenetics - its origins, politics, promise and potential risks - and what anthropology can contribute to this field of biological research. Many thanks to Alex Fimeri and his team at the Learning Enhancement and Innovation Unit at the University of Adelaide for their assistance in the recording of this episode. DOHaD (https://dohadsoc.org/) Indigenous STS Lab (https://indigenoussts.com/) Scholarship mentioned: Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barker, David. 1994. Mothers, babies, and health in later life. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingston. Bolnick, Deborah. 2015. ‘Combating Racial Health Disparities through Medical Education: The Need for Anthropological and Genetic Perspectives in Medical Training.’ Human Biology. 87(4): 361-371. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coole, Diane and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Roberts, Elizabeth. 2019. ‘Bioethnography and the Birth Cohort: A Method for Making New Kinds of Anthropological Knowledge about Transmission (which is what anthropology has been about all along).’ Somatosphere. November 19. http://somatosphere.net/2019/bioethnography-anthropological-knowledge-transmission.html/ Sharp, Gemma G; Deborah A Lawlor; Sarah S Richardson. 2018. ‘It’s the mother!: How assumptions about the causal primacy of maternal effects influence research on the developmental origins of health and disease’. Social Science & Medicine. Vol. 213: 20-27. Smith, Rick and Deborah Bolnick. 2019. ‘Situating Science: Doing Biological Anthropology as a View from Somewhere.’ In: Vital Topics Forum—How Academic Diversity is Transforming Scientific Knowledge in Biological Anthropology. American Anthropologist. 121(2): 465-467. Tallbear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Warin, Megan and Tanya Zivkovic. 2019. Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs: Unpalatable Politics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Warin, Megan; Emma Kowal; Maurizio Meloni. 2020. ‘Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape: The Politics of Epigenetic Hope and Reparation in Australia.’ Science, Technology, & Human Values. 45(1): 87-111. Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #29: Jason De León and Teresa Mares

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2020 52:31


    We’ve got a roving mic on the loose. In this episode, that mic is in the hands of David Giles, as he roamed the halls of the 2019 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and Canadian Anthropology Society in Tkaronto/Toronto. There, David caught up with two bright minds of migration studies, namely Jason De León and Teresa Mares. What does an anthropological framework bring to the study of borders? How do you do an ethnography of borders? This episode covers some big contemporary questions. Jason is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA, and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term study of clandestine border crossing on the Mexico-USA border. Teresa is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont, and has conducted extensive ethnographic research on food access and food security among Latino/a in the United States. Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at https://conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #28: Michael M.J. Fischer

    Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2020 43:08


    We are back for 2020 with a new episode, a new name and a new and larger collective to bring you further conversations about the state of anthropology and what it has to tell us in the twenty-first century. In this episode, we present a conversation between Timothy and Michael M.J. Fischer recorded at the Society for the Social Studies of Science 2019 conference in New Orleans. Dr Fischer is Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of several books including 'Anthropological Futures' (Duke University Press, 2009) and, most recently, 'Anthropology in the Meantime' (Duke University Press, 2018). He conducts fieldwork in the Caribbean, Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and writes on an extensive range of topics including anthropological methods and the anthropology of biosciences, media circuits, and emergent forms of life. To find out more, visit his faculty website at https://anthropology.mit.edu/people/faculty/michael-fischer Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at https://conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

    Episode #27: Nancy Scheper-Hughes

    Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 2020 91:45


    A late festive treat? An early new year surprise? Our new episode features a conversation with the renowned anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Across their illustrious career, Nancy has researched social suffering and structural violence in a variety of contexts, including Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and, internationally, through the global trade in kidneys and other organs. Most recently, she has written about the scandal of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She is the author of 'Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland’ (1979), 'Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil’ (1989) and 'The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics, Global (In)Justice and the Traffic in Organs’ (2008), as well as numerous articles, edited collections, and other book chapters. She is also the co-founder of Organs Watch, a watchdog organisation that monitors organ trafficking. In this episode, we twist and turn through a number of topics, discussing Nancy’s childhood, solidarity and militant anthropology today, disagreement as intellectual practice, relating to the Pope and much much more. This episode is hosted and produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles and features guest host Tanya King. This podcast is made with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University and in partnership with the American Anthropological Association. For more on Nancy Scheper-Hughes see: https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/nancy-scheper-hughes

    Episode #26: Catherine Trundle and Eli Elinoff

    Play Episode Listen Later Nov 10, 2019 53:18


    Episode 26 takes us back to Aotearoa New Zealand and our ongoing interest in how anthropology reaches its established and emerging audiences. In this episode, Tim speaks to Dr Catherine Trundle and Dr Eli Elinoff, both Senior Lecturers in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and both members of the Senior Editorial Collective of the new anthropology journal ‘Commoning Ethnography’. The journal is self-described as ‘an off-centre, annual, international, peer-engaged, open access, online journal dedicated to examining, criticizing, and redrawing the boundaries of ethnographic research, teaching, knowledge, and praxis’. So, understandably the conversation not only goes to Eli and Catherine’s respective interests in environmental and medical anthropology, but also the state of journal publishing today? Why start a journal now? How might we think of the purpose of journals a little differently? Conversations in Anthropology at Deakin is produced by David Giles and Timothy Neale with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University and in partnership with the American Anthropological Association.

    Episode #25: Tess Lea

    Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2019 63:17


    It's our 25th excursion! In this episode, Tim and David are in conversation with Associate Professor Tess Lea (University of Sydney) to talk about the anthropology of policymaking, cultures of remedialism and much more. Tess is an anthropologist with a fundamental interest in with issues of (dys)function: how it occurs and to what, whom and how it is ascribed. Looking at extraction industries, everyday militarisation, houses, infrastructure, schools, and efforts to create culturally congruent forms of employment and enterprise from multiple perspectives, her work asks why the path to realising seemingly straightforward ambitions is so dense with obstacles. Tess is the Chief Investigator of the Housing for Health Incubator and the author of two books: Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts (2008) and Darwin (2014). This episode ALSO features special guest host Dr Cameo Dalley (Deakin University), a socio-cultural and economic anthropologist whose work focuses on the politics of belonging, indigeneity, and land.

    Episode #24: NAISA 2019 with Heather Dorries, Robert Henry and Willi Lempert

    Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2019 66:01


    On the road again! In our 24th episode, we bring you two conversations recorded by Tim at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) annual meeting, which was hosted at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. The first interview is with geographer Heather Dorries (University of Toronto) and sociologist Robert Henry (University of Calgary), two of the editors of the forthcoming collection 'Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West'. The second interview is with anthropologist William Lempert (Bowdoin College), an ethnographer and filmmaker, and editor of the 2018 special issue of Cultural Anthropology on 'Indigenous Media Futures'. How to summarise all this? It's impossible! Colonialism and land planning, the erasure of urban Indigenous life, the search for extraterrestrial life, and so much more. Our thanks to the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association for support for this episode.

    Episode #23: Sally Babidge

    Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2019 52:37


    Our guest this episode is the marvellous and generous Dr Sally Babidge, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Queensland. Ahead of a seminar in Melbourne, we caught up with Sally to talk about second field sites, abandonment and dispossession, various Chile-Australia connections, the social lives of mines, and much more. Sally has been involved in extensive historical and anthropological research with Indigenous peoples in Queensland and Chile, and her research spans the anthropology of resource extraction, indigeneity, land rights, and applied Anthropology. In addition, as is often our custom, we’re joined by a guest host: Dr David Kelly, a postdoctoral researcher at Deakin’s HOME Research Hub whose current research focuses on urban space, housing, and displacement.

    Episode #22: Caroline Schuster and Fabio Mattioli

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2019 66:33


    Who doesn’t love ECONOMIC anthropology? Even if Marx, Mauss, and Malinowski aren’t your thing, we are confident you will enjoy this episode, as David and Tim sit down for a chat with Dr Caroline Schuster, a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian National University, and Dr Fabio Mattioli, a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. The conversation introduces our guests' respective field sites - Paraguay and the Republic of Northern Macedonia - and gets into some big issues around insurance, microcredit, illiberal politics and the temptations of 'innovation’. If you are interested in following up with some reading, Caroline is the author of 'Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy’ (University of California Press, 2015), and Fabio the author of the forthcoming 'Illiquidity and Power: The Economics of Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe'.

    Episode #21: Sarah Pink

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2019 45:34


    In this episode, we meet in an undisclosed location (David's home) with Professor Sarah Pink, the Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, to talk digital ethnography, collaboration and the small matter of... the Future! Sarah is well known to many as a key theorist of digital ethnography and design anthropology, and has studied everything from laundry to Big Data, urban lighting schemes, wearable technology, documentary film, driverless cars, and a host of other topics. She is the author and/or editor of near-countless books, including 'Atmospheres and the Experiential World' (with our recent guest Shanti Sumartojo), 'Digital Ethnography: principles and practice', 'Doing Sensory Ethnography', and 'Making Homes: Ethnography and Design'.

    Episode #20: Rosalind Fredericks and Anand Pandian

    Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2019 67:11


    It's time for some reports from 'the field', thanks to a recent trip by Tim to the east coast of the USA. In this episode we have two conversations, the first with Rosalind Fredericks (NYU) and the second with Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins). Rosalind is Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at New York University. Her research and teaching interests are centered on development, urbanism, and political ecology in Africa. In this episode, she discusses her new book 'Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal,' published recently by Duke University Press, as well as new research in Dakar. Anand Pandian, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of several books, including 'Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India' (Duke, 2009), an co-editor of several great collections. In this episode, he discusses his forthcoming book, titled 'A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times', as well as the emergent futures of anthropological writing and conferences. Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin is produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles, with production support from Lachy Mackenzie. The podcast is also supported by the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University and made in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

    Episode #19: Shanti Sumartojo

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2019 51:48


    We didn't mean to leave you hanging, but we are back with Episode #19 and returning to our regular-ish monthly schedule. This episode features a conversation with A/Prof Shanti Sumartojo (Monash University) and our guest host Prof Andrea Witcomb (Deakin University) about affects, memory, and the the trickiness of working in a fleshy material world. Shanti's research explores how people experience their spatial surroundings, including both material and immaterial aspects, with a particular focus on the built environment, design and technology, using ethnographic methodologies. Her recent books include 'Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods' (with Sarah Pink) and 'Commemorating Race and Empire in the Great War Centenary' (with Ben Wellings). See: http://www.shantisumartojo.com/

    Episode #18: Elizabeth Povinelli and Karrabing Film Collective

    Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2019 55:56


    In this episode, host David Giles and guest host Melinda Hinkson(Deakin University) are joined by Elizabeth Povinelli, Lorraine Lane, Linda Yarrowin, Cecelia Lewis, Sandra Yarrowin, members of the Karrabing Film Collective to talk about their films and their Country. Karrabing is a community of Indigenous Australians who make films that analyse and represent their contemporary lives, and also keep their country alive by acting on it. In the process, they seek to integrate their parents and grandparents ways of life into their contemporary struggles to educate their children, create economically sustainable cultural and environmental businesses, and support their homeland centres. The Karrabing Collective have produced and tour internationally with films such as Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, The Jealous One, and the winner of best short film at the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival, When Dogs Talked. In addition, Povinelli is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She’s the author of books such as Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism and Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. She has been working with Karrabing people in Northern Australia for over twenty years. For more about the Karrabing Collective, you can follow them on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/Karrabing-Indigenous-Corporation-140878209304639/

    Episode #17: Nikolas Rose

    Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2018 54:18


    What's a genetic dream? What are psychiatry's truths? We are back from a brief break with a conversation about all this and much more between David, Tim, Eben Kirksey (Deakin University) and our visiting guest Nikolas Rose. For those who do not know him, Nikolas is a Professor of Sociology and one of the founders of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College, London. Most broadly, his work explores what it means to be human, and the ways in which science and expertise have transformed the very possibilities of the human culturally, politically, and even biologically. He is the author of numerous influential books on power, governance and the self including 'Powers of Freedom: Reframing political thought' (Cambridge, 1999), 'The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century' (Princeton, 2009) and most recently 'Our Psychiatric Future' (Wiley, 2018).

    Episode #16: Alison Kenner and Siad Darwish

    Play Episode Listen Later Oct 10, 2018 62:51


    Episode 16 comes to you from the recent Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, where Timothy managed to catch up with Alison Kenner and Siad Darwish for a conversation. We talk about pollution, asthma, making things legible, the utility of 'the Anthropocene', and much more. Alison Kenner is Assistant Professor in the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Drexel University. Her anthropological work focuses on the study of contemporary health practices, and how biomedical science and emerging technologies shape the way we understand and care for chronic disease conditions. Her work can be found in a number of journals, including Health, Risk and Society and Cultural Anthropology, and her book Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change will be published by University of Minnesota Press in November 2018. Siad Darwish is an anthropologist who explores how unequal economic and socio-political orders are inscribed in bodies and landscapes through environmental pollution. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, where he recently defended his dissertation, Waste and the Environmental Legacies of Authoritarianism in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia. You can find his work in Anthropological Forum and in the 2017 book Global Africa edited by Dorothy Hodgson and Judith Byfield. Some links: https://www.siaddarwish.com https://drexel.edu/coas/faculty-research/faculty-directory/kenner-alison/ https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/breathtaking

    Episode #15: Akhil Gupta with Sam Balaton-Chrimes

    Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2018 60:55


    We are firmly in our teens now, back in your feed with Episode 16. In this episode, David is accompanied in his hosting duties by Sam Balaton-Chrimes, Lecturer in Politics at Deakin University. Their guest is Akhil Gupta, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and also a visiting Professor of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. This episode, like Akhil's work, explores questions of transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption, primarily in India. Akhil’s work has become required reading across the discipline, interrogating anthropological theory from the margins, drawing on critiques of development, postcoloniality, globalization, and the state. Most recently, he has been investigating the phenomenon of the call centre and what it can tell us about the future of global capitalism. He has written and edited numerous books including Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke University Press, 1998), to most recently Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Duke University Press, 2012).

    Episode #14: Niko Besnier and Ghassan Hage

    Play Episode Listen Later Aug 9, 2018 66:47


    In our 14th episode, we are lucky enough to get in a room with both Niko Besnier and Ghassan Hage. In this episode, our guests cover a raft of topics befitted of their wide interests, including discussions of ‘the global’, the political economy of sport, public anthropology, activism in academia and… knowing your enemies! Niko is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and, this year and last year Research Professor in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University here in Melbourne. He has an extraordinary list of achievements to mention, including that he is the author of books such as On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation and Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, has written prolifically on the topics of gender, sexuality and sport in the Pacific, and is editor-in-chief of the journal American Ethnologist. Ghassan is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of four books, including White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society and, most recently, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin is produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. http://pacific.socsci.uva.nl/besnier/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan_Hage

    Episode #13: #MeTooAnthro with Mythily Meher, Hannah Gould, Martha McIntyre and Tanya King

    Play Episode Listen Later Jul 12, 2018 74:12


    In Episode 13, we hand over the microphones to Mythily Meher, Hannah Gould, Martha Macintyre and Tanya King for a special roundtable on the place of the #metoo movement in the work-lives of anthropologists. Mythily and Hannah are part of the #metooanthro campaign, advocating for a safer, more just, discipline. They use this conversation with feminist anthropologists of different generations to consider how the #metoo movement against sexual assault and harassment might affect, or even alter, the cultures and institutions surrounding anthropology, and to imagine the possible futures that may come of this. Mythily Meher is an anthropologist and sessional academic, currently lecturing in Gender and Culture Studies at Sydney University. She tweets at @tythily. Hannah Gould is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Get in touch at hannahgould.com and twitter @hrhgould. Martha Macintyre is an Associate Professor and Honorary Senior Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor at The Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at The University of Queensland. Tanya King is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University. Follow (or join) the activities of the #metooanthro collective: www.metooanthro.org or @metooanthro (on twitter and instagram). Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin is produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University.

    Episode #12: Paige West and Jo Chandler

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 20, 2018 60:56


    In Episode 12, we are lucky enough to be joined by Paige West and Jo Chandler for a conversation about many things, including Papua New Guinea, the ethics of representation, decolonising scholarship, and the promises of development and conservation. For those who don’t know her work, Paige is an anthropologist who investigates the relationship between societies and their environments. She is the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Colombia University and has authored numerous books on conservation and our relationships with environments, including Conservation is Our Government Now: the Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (Duke, 2006) and Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea (Columbia, 2016). Jo Chandler is an award-winning Australian journalist who has written about environmental concerns around the world, including Papua New Guinea. She has been covering Papua New Guinea for a decade now, and is the author of the award-winning book Feeling the Heat (Melbourne, 2011). Jo also lectures in journalism at University of Melbourne. Further reading: https://paige-west.com https://jochandler.com.au/

    Episode #11: Monica Minnegal and Victoria Stead

    Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2018 54:02


    We’re back, live from Tim's lounge! Episode eleven see the podcast return to a roundtable format with two outstanding anthropologists who’ve both recently published books about land rights and development in Papua New Guinea: Monica Minnegal and Victoria Stead. Monica is Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne many years working with Gubor and Bedamuní people in Papua New Guinea, studying the impacts of modernity on their understandings and practices. Most recently, Monica is the author, with Peter Dwyer, of Navigating the Future: An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea (ANU Press, 2017). Victoria is DECRA Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. Her research has a strong Pacific focus, and she is the author of Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste (University of Hawaii Press, 2017). Some further reading: Minnegal M and Dwyer PD. (2017) Navigating the future: An ethnography of change in Papua New Guinea, Canberra: ANU Press. Stead V. (2017) Becoming landowners: Entanglements of custom and modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Minnegal M, King TJ, Just R, et al. (2003) Deep identity, shallow time: sustaining a future in Victorian fishing communities. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 14: 53-71. Minnegal M, Lefort S and Dwyer PD. (2015) Reshaping the social: A comparison of Fasu and Kubo-Febi approaches to incorporating land groups. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 16: 496-513. Stead V. (2015) Homeland, territory, property: Contesting land, state, and nation in urban Timor-Leste. Political Geography 45: 79-89. Stead V. (2018) History as Resource: Moral Reckonings with Place and with the Wartime Past in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Forum.

    Episode #10: Hugh Gusterson

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 5, 2018 52:34


    Episode 10! Once again, one of the pod-hosts is off on their own – this time David Giles presents a conversation he recorded with Hugh Gusterson about a wide range of topics including public anthropology, the ethics of activist-inspired fieldwork, secrets, and academic precarity. Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. Previously, he taught at MIT's program on Science, Technology, and Society, and at George Mason's Cultural Studies program. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has written two books on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists: Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Gusterson also co-edited Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005) and its sequel, The Insecure American (University of California Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on the polygraph. Some further reading: Gusterson H. (1998) Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War: University of California Press. Gusterson H. (2007) Anthropology and militarism. Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 155-175. Gusterson H. (2017) Homework: Toward a critical ethnography of the university AES presidential address, 2017. American Ethnologist 44: 435-450.

    Episode #9: Andy Stirling

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2018 44:39


    Our ninth episode comes from a conversation recorded at the 'A Crisis of Expertise?' symposium at the University of Melbourne. At the symposium, Tim caught up with Andy Stirling (SPRU, Sussex) and Matthew Kearnes (UNSW) to talk about 'policy-engaged research', policy expertise, and activism in the boardroom. Andy Stirling is Professor of Science and Technology Policy at Sussex University. He has a background in the natural sciences, a master's degree in archaeology and social anthropology and a D.Phil in science and technology policy. Formerly a board member of Greenpeace International, Andy has worked in collaboration with a diverse range of organisations. His research interests include technological risk, innovation policy, scientific uncertainty and public involvement in decision-making, and he has been involved in developing some participatory appraisal methods. Associate Professor Matthew Kearnes is a member of the Environmental Humanities group, in the School of Humanities & Languages at UNSW. Matthew's research is situated between the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), human geography and contemporary social theory. His current work is focused on the social and political dimensions of nanotechnology and synthetic biology, climate change and society, and the social and political dimensions of climate modification and geoengineering. Some follow-up reading: Stirling A. (2014) Transforming power: Social science and the politics of energy choices. Energy Research & Social Science 1: 83-95. Stirling A. (2008) “Opening up” and “closing down” power, participation, and pluralism in the social appraisal of technology. Science, Technology, & Human Values 33: 262-294.

    Episode #8: Elana Resnick and Chloe Ahmann

    Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2018 34:51


    We're back for 2018 with our eighth episode, recorded at the 2017 American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, DC. Amidst the academics scrambling between seminars, our very own David Giles tracked down fellow anthropologists Elana Resnick (UC Santa Barbara) and Chloe Ahmann (George Washington University) for a conversation about their work, the social dimensions of waste, the value of theory, and much else besides! Dr Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include environmental justice, materiality, waste management, racialization, nuclear energy, informal economies, urban infrastructure, postsocialism, EU integration, the Romani diaspora, and humor. Based on over three consecutive years of fieldwork in Bulgaria conducted on city streets, in landfills, Roma neighborhoods, executive offices, and at the Ministry of the Environment, her current book manuscript examines the juncture of material waste management and racialisation, specifically highlighting the intersection between physical garbage and the Roma minority, often considered “social trash” throughout Europe. Dr Chloe Ahmann is a graduate of George Washington University. Her work takes up the future as a political object, and it considers what state efforts to think and enact the future look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism. Many of her research sites materialize the tension between past and future – and more specifically between decline and desire – that weights the late-industrial experience. Her current project, Cumulative Effects: Reckoning Risk on Baltimore's Toxic Periphery, explores the historical and embodied dimensions of risk from the perspective of a community in south Baltimore over a 200-year period, querying how residents' past experiences with risk inform their present-day opposition to a proposed incinerator. This project takes anticipatory interventions that are typically theorized as issues of futurity and considers their multiple temporal inflections.

    Episode #7: Cameo Dalley

    Play Episode Listen Later Dec 10, 2017 38:57


    In this seventh episode of the Anthropology@Deakin podcast, David Giles and Timothy Neale are joined by Lara Fullenweider to discuss belonging, pastoralism and the intercultural with Cameo Dalley (University of Melbourne). Cameo is the McArthur Postdoctoral Fellow in anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her current research project has investigated the multiple realms in which kardiya and Ngarinyin Aboriginal belonging is manifest in the Kimberley region. She has published on topics of identity, indigeneity and the intercultural and her most recent publication examines education-driven mobility for Indigenous youth.

    Episode #6: Eve Vincent

    Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2017 43:25


    In the sixth Anthropology@Deakin podcast, David Giles and Timothy Neale (Deakin University) discuss land rights and creativity with Eve Vincent (Macquarie University). Dr Vincent - a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University - is the author of '‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia' (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2017), the co-editor of 'Unstable Relations: Environmentalism and Indigenous People in Contemporary Australia' (University of Western Australia Press, 2016), and she has also written for rich variety of academic and literary journals. Her work engages with ideas of indigeneity, recognition and governmentality, and she has written on issues such as native title, intercultural collaboration, and welfare quarantining. She has a long-term ethnographic engagement with the town of Ceduna in South Australia.

    Episode #5: Tim Edensor

    Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2017 39:03


    What does attention to light reveal about the workings of power? What can anthropologists learn from cultural geography? In the fifth Anthropology@Deakin podcast, David Giles (Deakin University) and guest Melinda Hinkson (Deakin University) discuss illumination and space with Tim Edensor (RMIT/Manchester Metropolitan University). Tim is the author of Tourists at the Taj, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, and From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom, as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. He has written extensively on national identity, tourism, ruins and urban materiality, mobilities and landscapes of illumination and darkness.

    Episode #4: Frédéric Keck

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2017 41:48


    What is a sentinel chicken and how do different societies view zoonoses (diseases trasmitted via animals)? What is it like to be an anthropologist working in a contemporary museum? In the fourth Anthropology@Deakin podcast, Tim Neale (Deakin), David Giles (Deakin) and guest Andrea Witcomb (Deakin)discuss matters of biosecurity and museums with Frédéric Keck (CNRS). Frédéric, currently Director of the Research Department of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, is a researcher whose work has investigated the history of anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) and contemporary biopolitical questions of human-nonhuman relations.

    Episode #3: Cris Shore

    Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2017 44:41


    What can anthropology bring to the study of public policy? What is ‘audit culture’ and how does this term help us to understand changes occurring in Western societies? In the third Anthropology@Deakin podcast, Tim Neale (Deakin), David Boarder Giles (Deakin) and guest Jill Blackmore (Deakin) discuss the rise of neoliberalism in the contemporary university with Cris Shore (University of Auckland). Cris's main research interests lie in the interface between anthropology and politics, particularly the anthropology of policy and the ethnography of organisation. His most recent book, co-edited with Susan Wright, is Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Universities in the Knowledge Economy (Berghahn Press, 2017). Notes: the Anthropology@Deakin podcast is produced by David Boarder Giles and Tim Neale. Music supplied by Bradley Fafejta and Brand New Math.

    Episode #2: Eben Kirksey

    Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2017 35:01


    What happens when we pay close attention to critters and nonhumans? Why would an anthropologist make a fridge for a frog? In the second Anthropology@Deakin podcast, Tim Neale (Deakin), David Boarder Giles (Deakin) and guest Emma Kowal (Deakin) discuss the rise of multispecies ethnography, doing anthropology with scientists, bioart and much more with Eben Kirskey (UNSW). Eben is the author of two books — Freedom in Entangled Worlds (Duke, 2012) and Emergent Ecologies (Duke, 2015)— and is currently Senior Lecturer and the Environmental Humanities Convener at UNSW Australia. You can kind out more about his work at http://ebenkirksey.blogspot.com.au Notes: the Anthropology@Deakin podcast is produced by David Boarder Giles and Tim Neale. Music supplied by Bradley Fafejta and Brand New Math.

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