Keynotes
Keynote 1
Live Free and Die: How Ontologies of Freedom Are Killing Americans.
Professor Carolyn Rouse, Princeton University
10am, Wednesday, 29 November
Welcome to Country by Uncle Chris Tobin. Dharug Elder, artist and educator.
Despite the United States’ national wealth and international power, Americans are sicker and die much earlier than people in most wealthy nations and many poorer nations. This talk focuses on why from the perspective of Lake County, California which has one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the state. It also happens to be one of the whitest counties, with about 87 percent identifying as white, about 5 percent as indigenous, and 2 percent as black. Lake County is also one of the poorest counties, but because of structural racism many low income white residents own property. They also associate their private property ownership with their freedom which is why many are also anti-government. Given this, the county has chosen to improve health by changing people’s relationship to their property through code enforcement. This talk describes this radical experiment in what I am calling an economy of care at the ends of capitalism.
This keynote will be Auslan-interpreted and livestreamed here.
Carolyn Rouse
Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University
Carolyn Rouse is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a high school in a fishing village in Ghana. In the summer of 2016 she began studying declining white life expectancies in rural California as a follow-up to her research on racial health disparities. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015).
Keynote 2
Emotional Entanglements, Vulnerability, and the Search for Recognition: A New Kind of Health?
Professor Susanna Trnka, University of Auckland
9:30am, Friday, 1 December
When 22-year-old James wants to tell his boyfriend something important, he avoids face-to-face communication and messages him instead; “it’s easier to talk about your feelings online,” he explains, “because you can quickly change the topic.” James is one of many New Zealand youth who strategically employ distance to enable an intimacy that feels otherwise potentially uncontrollable. Young people, including James, are also, however, deeply attune to how online emotional engagements entail their own pitfalls. This includes the humiliation of being caught out by those unnecessarily vying for attention and the exhaustion of undertaking “emotional labour” on behalf of others. Drawing from Paul Ricouer’s theory of recognition alongside Emmanuel Levinas’ work on the “infinity” of the Other, this presentation examines young New Zealanders’ self-described communicative practices, in particular their careful navigation of online emotional entanglements to maximize meaningful connection while protecting themselves from inter-personal disappointments and threats. I argue that young people are often highly self-reflexive about their attempts to open up safe avenues for emotional disclosure. In doing so, I ask what kinds of emotional ideologies are at play in contemporary enactments of intimacy, vulnerability, distancing, and care. I also ask, what does any of this have to do with new understandings of health?
This keynote will be Auslan-interpreted and livestreamed here.
Susanna Trnka
Professor of Anthropology
University of Auckland
Susanna Trnka is a professor in social and medical anthropology at the University of Auckland whose work examines embodiment through a variety of lenses, including pain; political violence; children’s health; movement; and youth wellbeing. She has contributed to new theories of collective responsibility through her co-edited book, Competing Responsibilities: The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Life and her work on asthma, e.g. One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of Global Health. She is currently the Principal Investigator on a Royal Society of New Zealand project examining youth mental health and digital technology use. She has also written extensively on states of emergency and collective responsibility with respect to Aotearoa/New Zealand’s response to Covid-19. Her most recent book, Traversing: Embodied Lifeworlds in the Czech Republic is a phenomenological examination of movement.
Vulnerabilities Plenary
Professor Heidi Norman, Professor Tess Lea, Dr. Muhammad Kavesh, and Dr. Eve Vincent; hosted by Dr. Chris Vasantkumar
2:00-3:30pm Thursday, 30 November, Price Theatre
Vulnerabilities Plenary
The theme for the 2023 Australian Anthropological Society Conference is Vulnerabilities. We conceptualise vulnerabilities as entailing uncertain and potentially risky kinds of exposure and openness to forces that transcend the individual, the local, the human.
The conference plenary will be hosted by Dr Chris Vasantkumar, and feature Professor Heidi Norman, Professor Tess Lea, Dr Muhammad Kavesh and Dr Eve Vincent. These four speakers will address the theme of vulnerability as it relates to their work.
Heidi will focus on care as a feature of Aboriginal self-determination, reporting on fieldwork research where she examines Aboriginal community-led care made possible by land council infrastructure. Tess will explore how vulnerability is layered into extractivist liberal settler policy settings. Kavesh will talk about hospitality, hostility, and geo-political vulnerabilities in South Asia through the eyes of pigeons and donkeys. Eve will talk about welfare receipt in Australia, poverty, writing as exposure, and teeth.
Participants
Professor Heidi Norman is currently Associate Dean (Indigenous) at UTS. Her work has been focused on Aboriginal land justice and the ways that Aboriginal people, families and communities have regathered and continued to exercise their autonomy and survival within and alongside the dominant social, economic and political discourse.
Professor Tess Lea is the Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. Tess is an anthropologist who specialises in ethnographic accounts of settler colonial policy ramifications. She recently headed the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, a role she assumed following a decade at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has a policy background working in health and education sectors for the federal and territory governments in Australia. She also founded the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University (now the Northern Institute) and has a track record as an academic for both theoretically advanced and highly applied collaborative work with Indigenous groups in Australia and now Canada. Her work spans education, health, housing, infrastructure, and community control.
Dr Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in Anthropology at the Australian National University. He is the author of Animal Enthusiasms: Life Beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan (2021) and co-editor of Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-Human World (2023). He has also co-edited special journal issues in Anthropology Today (2023) and The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2021). Kavesh has published with American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist (forthcoming), Journal of Asian Studies, Oxford Journal of Development Studies, South Asia, Society & Animals and Senses & Society among others. He is currently working on his next book project, “Spies and Other Pigeons.”
Dr Eve Vincent is the chair of anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. Her books include Love Across Class (forthcoming, with Rose Butler, Melbourne University Press), Who Cares? Life on Welfare in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2023) and ‘Against Native Title.’ Conflict and Creativity in Outback Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2017).