Conversations in Anthropology

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/

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! 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.