Conversations in Anthropology

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'.

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'.

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.

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/

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/

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 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

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).

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

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.