Conversations in Anthropology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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