Conversations in Anthropology

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

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 articles. 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

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

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

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

In this engaging discussion, renowned anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes shares insights from her remarkable career, highlighting her research on social suffering and organ trafficking. She dives into her Brooklyn upbringing and how early experiences shaped her path in anthropology. Scheper-Hughes reflects on the tension between solidarity and disagreement in activism, and her groundbreaking work on clerical abuses and organ trafficking, which even led to meetings with Pope Francis. Her passionate advocacy sheds light on the complex ethical dilemmas faced by anthropologists.

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.

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.

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.

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.