1. Vulnerable relationships and resilient selves: Distress, well-being, and kinship in times of change

Paola Tiné (Monash)

In recent years, social researchers have underlined the need to study relationships and intimacy as they are impacted by and, in turn, shape social change around the world. In fact, as Gammeltoft and Oosterhoff (2018, p. 534) postulated, individual ‘psychic states are inseparable from the states of mind of intimate others’. But while there is consensus that processes of social change involve a redefinition of pre-existing local ethos, the scholarship on how these factors unravel in domestic contexts and how entanglements of social suffering and resilience are linked to individual and collective well-being is still thin. This panel invites researchers to discuss their findings, work in progress, or project proposals exploring how dimensions of struggle and well-being intertwine with the making of moral consciousness through the negotiation of domestic relationships in contexts marked by accelerated social and economic transformations across the globe.

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2. Conflict, vulnerability, and resilience: Forensic and expert social anthropology

James Rose (Melbourne), Richard Davis (Australian Defence College)

Social anthropology emerged from a context of inter-cultural conflict created by cresting European colonialism in the 1870s. Since then, the field has moved away from colonial ideology and administration and aligned with decolonisation efforts, particularly by cooperating with Indigenous land claims, cultural heritage preservation, and advocacy for cultural equality. Inherent in this developmental trajectory is a professional concern for the asymmetric risk profiles of culturally marginalised communities with which social anthropologists typically work. This concern is especially tangible for forensic and expert social anthropologists working in legal-administrative settings such as international development, cultural property law, child protection, and cultural defence proceedings. In these and related processes overseen by courts, governments and other legally empowered bodies, social anthropologists walk a tightrope between accusations of prejudicial advocacy, and a professional duty to mitigate against risks faced by culturally marginalised communities. One result is that anthropologists have been averse to working with the powerful for fear of being seen to contribute to risk and vulnerability. This panel presents papers by social anthropologists working across a range of legal-administrative settings, which require strategies for identifying, modelling and explaining community risk profiles and associated vulnerabilities, describing anthropological risk, and supporting culturally based resilience measures.

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3. Negotiating vulnerabilities in religious and spiritual communities

Kathleen Openshaw (Western Sydney)

In an increasingly unstable world, many people engage religion and spirituality in response to their everyday personal, structural, societal and spiritual vulnerabilities as well as during periods of acute crisis. Whilst some adherents find remedy, resilience and agency within these practices, others encounter exploitation and abuse. This panel invites contributions that critically attend to the complex ways vulnerability, invulnerability and vulnerance (the capacity to inflict harm in contexts of vulnerability) manifests in religious and spiritual institutions and communities. It hopes to address (but is not limited to), the following questions:

• How can vulnerabilities be spiritually (re)generative?

• How do supernatural forces create / remedy / exploit vulnerabilities?

• In what ways do religious and spiritual institutions and communities produce, shape and address adherents’ vulnerabilities?

• How are these institutions themselves vulnerable to the likes of corruption, a changing social landscape and mechanisms of accountability?

• How is religion / faith / spirituality mobilised to attack vulnerable groups?

• When religious and spiritual communities are fieldsites, how do anthropologists negotiate their own vulnerabilities both across the physical and the supernatural realm?

• What are the implications of faith communities / institutions / faith-based organisations addressing the increasing deficit in government support for vulnerable groups?

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4. On brokenness

Daniel Tranter-Santoso and Jaap Timmer (Macquarie)

Broken objects, bodies, relationships, infrastructures, communities, nations, and ecologies; brokenness reveals something about our relationship to the world. How do we experience and respond to brokenness? We welcome papers that consider questions such as: Are all things vulnerable to brokenness? What does it mean for something to be broken? In what ways is brokenness more specific than 'change'? How is restoration sought in a state of brokenness? Is repair an adequate term? How can a focus on brokenness shape our understanding of the relationship between being and becoming, past and future, materiality and immateriality, and stasis and flux?

 

We also invite papers that explore the cultural and cosmological dimensions of brokenness. While Christian worldviews often take brokenness as the basis of their soteriology, how is brokenness understood in other cosmologies and lifeworlds? What scales does brokenness move through? Thinking of current crises — ecological, political, economic, and humanitarian — is our current state of obvious brokenness a permanent feature of the world, as in dominant Christian theology? Or is there something particular about the way the world is currently broken? This panel explores the complex and multifaceted ways in which brokenness shapes our understanding of the world and our place within it.

 

 

5. Becoming anthropologists (ANSA panel)

Jerrold Cuperus (Queensland), Fergus Boyd (Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre), Nikki Manolakis (Melbourne)

This panel provides space for any student anthropologist to engage with and reflect upon their own research. Postgraduate students who are still exploring varying theoretical and thematic avenues are especially vulnerable to exclusion from themed annual conferences as they may not yet have found their niche. ANSA aims to provide students at various stages of their research journey the opportunity to propose a paper that relates to their developing research interests, even if it does not necessarily align with the theme of the conference.

 

In the past years, HASS disciplines have had to deal with budget cuts and the dissolution of entire departments. This has put HDR students in increasingly precarious positions. Involvement in an encouraging disciplinary community is invaluable to any level of student or early-career academic, yet access to conferences and other career-development opportunities are increasingly limited by funding and travel-grant restrictions. In line with ANSA’s goals and the pre-conference workshop, this panel encourages the expression of student voice and student work and looks forward to proposals from presenters which explore their own exciting and enriching research. Co-authored papers will also be accepted.

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6. When brokers fail: Anthropologies of disjuncture and vulnerability in development

John Cox and Monica Minnegal (Melbourne)

Recent anthropology of development has explored several variations on the role of the broker, and what kinds of parties brokers mediate between (Bierschenk et al. 2002; de Jong 2018; James 2011; Lindquist 2015a; de Jong et al. 2023; Diprose 2023). While all acknowledge the performative nature of brokerage as an activity that creates, reinforces, and fixes (but can also challenge the identities of various collective or institutional players), there is still a tendency to see brokers as people who bring together two binary worlds such as the global and the local (de Sardan 2005; Mosse and Lewis 2006), the centre and periphery of states and border zones (Goodhand and Walton 2023; Decobert 2021), powerful state actors and grassroots social groups (de Jong et al. 2023; Diprose 2023) or the divide between development practice and policy (Lewis 2010). A further assumption is that brokers largely succeed in bridging these worlds. However, there are also examples of the failure of brokers and of their vulnerabilities (e.g. Minnegal and Dwyer 2022). This panel invites contributors to consider the implications of failed brokers for anthropological and other theories of brokerage and development.

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8. Climate change and vulnerability in Oceania and Australia

Anna-Karina Hermkens (Macquarie), Sophie Pascoe (Menzies School of Health Research, Charles Darwin University)

This panel builds upon the recent Australian Association for Pacific Studies (AAPS) conference The Hell with Drowning by contesting representations and clichés about Oceanic islands and Indigenous peoples’ vulnerability, as these get in the way of understanding how people are dealing with climate change. While framing these communities as vulnerable and ‘drowning’ victimises local people and obscures their agency, a focus on people's resilience and adaption capacity may shift attention away from the responsibility of Pacific Rim states, such as China and Australia, for causing climate change through greenhouse gas emissions. This panel delves deeper into these and other tropes that tend to sideline people in their own place. We discuss how Oceanic peoples figure in current debates about climate change, how Indigenous knowledge and deep Oceanic histories are simultaneously embraced and marginalized (Jolly 2015), and how we might reclaim a plurality of knowledges. Possible topics include:

• People’s relationships and relationality of places in connection to climate change

• The interplay between faith, gender and climate change

• Frictions between Indigenous and technocratic/bureaucratic knowledges and practices

• Vulnerabilities and inequalities in the contexts of climate change impacts, mitigation/adaptation interventions and ongoing resource extraction

• Climate change activism in Oceania and Australia

 

 

9. Emotions, ethnography, epistemology: The affective politics of research

Sara Niner (Monash)

Ethnographers generate knowledge primarily through human relationships and emotions play a significant role in ethnographic research. If the personal is political, then the political is deeply (inter)personal. Social, economic, ecological and pandemic crises greatly shape our personal lives, the lives of the people we work with, our relative power relationships, and our research. Over the last century, anthropology has progressed from the model of the detached, objective, external observer and expert who reports on/make conclusions or findings about a supposedly unchanging, bounded and holistic/homogenous ‘field’ or community or society. Feminist and critical ethnographers have transformed the way we study the centrality of gendered, racialised and colonial power relations in the generation of anthropological knowledge, and the complex ethics and politics of such ‘generative inequality’.

 

In this panel, we will delve deeper into the emotional life and affective politics of research and knowledge generation. We invite fellow researchers to reflect upon how you have co-created knowledge, and how your own emotions and your emotional and relational connections with your research community and your interlocuters reflect the broader politics of the times. By generatively reflecting on our emotions, we deepen the political relevance and transformative potential of our research.

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10. New epistemic attunements: Regenerating anthropology’s form

Victoria Baskin Coffey (Aarhus / JCU), Jennifer Deger (Charles Darwin University), Lisa Stefanoff (Charles Darwin / UNSW), Sebastian J. Lowe (Aarhus / JCU)

What kinds of ambitions, opportunities and vulnerabilities shape creative academic work that exceeds the infrastructural capacities and imaginative reach of the corporate publishing machine? Why eschew the downloadable pdf of static text and figures? At what cost? And to what advantage?

 

In March 2024 The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA) will publish a one-off special issue of 12 articles composed on a custom website designed and built by the Curatorium Collective. This ‘off grid’ adventure in academic publishing is committed to nurturing anthropologically-attuned design processes within co-creative scholarship. This performative approach to critical-creative thinking combines sound, image and text in response to the aesthetic affordances of screens and the finger-click-and-scroll haptics of computer navigation. It reformulates academic ‘writing' as multi- and intermedia curation, assemblage, design, and composition (cf. Berry, Deger, Feld, Higgins, Rajewsky, Shipka).

 

Contributors will preview their articles and speak about the ethics, aesthetics, politics and sheer pragmatics of creating them. Together we will ask: How do experimental digital forms provoke new epistemic attunements and new forms of accountability in co-extensive human and more-than-human worlds? How do these articles demonstrate what we call ‘the analytic force of the digital’? What are the hidden costs of this bespoke scholarly labour?

 

11. The anthropology of anxiety

John Taylor (La Trobe), Kalissa Alexeyeff (Melbourne)

Reflecting everyday vulnerabilities and the embodiment of uncertainty, the condition of anxiety is axiomatic of human experience. In both its temporal and ontological registers it consorts with concepts like hope and precarity. Yet in contrast to these, very little direct attention appears to have been paid to anxiety within anthropology.

 

For many people anxiety surges up as an enigmatic tremor of everyday experience. Sometimes this can be crippling. At others, anxiety can be turned towards positive action. As a term it reverberates in diverse institutional spaces and political discourses, and it has been medicalised into an increasing array of distinctly diagnosable categories of ‘disorder’.

 

W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue suggests how the cultivation of shared sympathy and what he elsewhere referred to as ‘local understanding’ may open possibilities to meeting the temporal, political, relational and phenomenological in and around anxiety. This panel invites grounded and/or exploratory discussion on the potential for anthropological perspectives to offer unique, empathetic insights into worlds of anxiety, including for example as negotiated through narrative, politics, ritual, performance, and in quotidian life.

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12. Vulnerabilities and crisis: Exposure, response and aftermath

Samson Keam and Catherine West (Deakin)

Crisis exposes vulnerabilities. When forces converge to produce situations of crisis they generate, uncover and animate the vulnerabilities of peoples, places and ideas. This panel is interested in (but not limited to) papers that take an anthropological lens to innovative responses to crisis. These dynamic situations draw on tradition and historical cultural idioms, which ultimately come to be reconfigured and attuned to the prevailing context. Our contemporary era is replete with a sense of crisis in politics, economics, ecology, health and religion, to name but a few. In an age where crisis proliferates, subjects are regularly moved to formulate novel responses. What is the nature of these responses and what insights into social fields might they produce? How do hegemonic entities and vulnerable agents manage and counter crisis? Are new terrains opened for creative and generative relations? Or does the status quo reappear newly clothed and empowered? The panel also welcomes reflections situated in the aftermath of crisis, where exposed vulnerabilities might be shut down or erased. These potentialities open questions of temporality and timescales in crisis response and their attendant ruptures.

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13. How I learned to stop worrying and love meetings: Toward an anthropology of and in the office

Simon Theobald (AMES), Ian Pollock (Paper Giant), Alexander D'Aloia (ANU)

Many anthropologists find themselves working without anthropology in the job description. We are researchers, policy officers, strategic designers, and marketing experts. While valued for our production of actionable insights, we remain vulnerable. We produce knowledge that resists simplification and commodification but is difficult to parse outside the university. A failure to successfully communicate such knowledge speaks to the limitations of the discipline and our vulnerabilities as ‘academics outside of academia’. How then do anthropologists walk the interstitial spaces between academic and ‘corporate’ anthropology?

 

In this panel, we encourage submissions that consider the work of anthropologists outside of anthropology—in government, industry, and the not-for-profit sector, as well as the office more broadly. We seek to understand how anthropologists bring methods, analytical frameworks, and research ethics to bear on professional situations outside the university, asking not just what can anthropology do for the workplace? but what can the workplace do for anthropology? We hope to better grapple with the limitations of organisational power structures and how the vicissitudes of limited time, money, and work hours, might produce not just knowledge and change, but help illuminate and expand the borders of anthropology.

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15. Trusts: Transforming vulnerability and financial risk through charity

Randi Irwin (Newcastle), Leilah Vevaina (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Building on Leilah Vevaina’s Trust Matters (2023), this panel grapples with the work of trusts and other legal-financial devices to constrain, direct, and transform the distribution of assets. While the notion of trust implies a vulnerability in one’s openness, financial trusts dictate responsibilities that simultaneously constrain and generate. The obligations embedded within trusts, contracts, and other forms of financial devices are imbued with an intentionality that seeks to direct the forms of being, belonging, and doing across scales. While financial trusts, aid, and charity come with notions of opportunity and possibility, this panels examines the ways in which their associated obligations - both present and future – generate risk and vulnerability. This panel reflects on the co-mingling of finance, charity, and obligation to examine how forms of accountability transform – and are transformed by – frameworks of belonging and exclusion. How might anthropologists engage with the entanglements of finance and charity to interrogate the vulnerabilities that emerge through acts of giving and receiving? We welcome contributions that grapple with the complexities of inheritance, obligation, and accountability across a range of contexts and scales as we seek to consider how trusts and notions of trust produce new forms of vulnerabilities, opportunities, and risks.

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16. (Somewhat) full disclosure: I’m a human first and an academic second

Nabil Sabio Azadi and Sarah Haggar (Queensland)

Universities increasingly use strategic institutional language to present themselves as ethical environments. Yet vulnerabilities of all kinds abound for students, educators, and researchers alike. This panel seeks to create a productive and empathetic environment to conduct pragmatic institutional critiques while acknowledging that people in vulnerable positions are often not able to make such critiques. University policies pertaining to access and disability often counterproductively increase uncertainty and self-exposure for the people such policies are meant to aid. Students, educators, and researchers face vulnerabilities of disclosure under these policies which taboo physical and mental health. The casualisation of university workforces and other (dis)employment tactics create economic and professional precarity. What armour are students, educators and researchers required to wear within institutional settings? How does any armour worn within the education sector intersect with race, Indigeneity, gender and/or class? These questions highlight institutional constraints which can also impede teacher-student pedagogic relationships and discourage the vulnerability of self and mutual disclosure inherent to the aspect of teaching that is performance. The social sciences are defending their relevancy within an academic structure that fosters individualism over the possibility of mutualities and cooperation. This panel thus asks: what actions can we take?

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17. Feminist anthropologies in an era of decoloniality: Speaking with and speaking for other women (Workshop)

Sara Niner (Monash)

Sara Ahmed (2000: 53) warns against ‘privileged white women’ who are in a ‘position to be heard’ speaking ‘for the subaltern woman’. By interpreting other women’s representations through a white, western, feminist lens, do we as academics unintentionally misinterpreted them or do we provide a space for their voices and experiences to be heard in broader circles where women’s experiences and voices are still crowded out by men’s? Deliberating from secure permanent positions in wealthy white neoliberal Universities can we appreciate their intersectional position as women of colour. Can we speak of their subjective experience when we have not experienced it?

 

This workshop will involve opening reflections from Sara Niner (Monash), Maree Pardy (Deakin), Kalissa Alexeyeff (MU) and Rachel Diprose (MU) on these questions in relation to our work as anthropologists and engagement with women in Asia and the Pacific before moving to a general discussion of this important topic.

 

18. Explaining change over the Land Rights era

Francesca Merlan and Paul Burke (ANU)

The drawing to a close of land claims under the Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory provides an opportunity for anthropologists who have been intimately involved in land claims to critically reflect upon their involvement, the changing circumstances of the Indigenous people involved, and the effects upon Indigenous claimants as well as anthropologists of working under these statutory regimes. Ethnographically grounded contributions are invited on the topics of:

• The changing nature of affiliations to traditional lands and whether they can be accommodated under the current definition of traditional owner in the Land Rights Act;

• Changes in the generational transmission of knowledge of traditional country;

• How affiliations are differently conceived and treated in Land Rights and Native Title regimes and the effects of the differences on Indigenous claimants and anthropologists;

• The changing nature of traditional ownership disputes and royalty disputes;

• The ways in which Land Rights have spurred and enabled new aspects of Indigenous social life or new expressions of Indigenous culture;

 

We envisage contributions leading to a publication aimed at the educated public about how the Land Rights Act works in practice and to provide some overview of the trends and changes of the `land rights era’.

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19. Bridging polarised discourses

Tim Pilbrow (Social Context), Pascale Taplin (North Queensland Land Council), David Martin (Anthropos Consulting) 

Anthropological knowledge production has centred on encounters with otherness, and thus offers much towards remedying the spiralling polarisation within our public spheres.

 

Communications technology enables us to participate in geographically-unrestricted communities of interest to an extent never before possible. Research suggests that our interactions are increasingly channelled and curated into widely polarised or even separate discursive spaces. Consequently, we rarely engage in productive discourse across these polarities. We may even sense that we no longer share a common sphere of civil discourse with those whose public representation signals a politics or moral outlook we find uncomfortable. And we may feel that our respective discursive frames are so divergent that dialogue is not possible. Our experience of hyper-curated niche conversations thus affects how we create our ‘difficult others’, and this shapes our participation in the geographically-constrained, state-bound public spheres that frame our everyday lives.

 

Reflecting on anthropologists’ preparedness to engage with certain modes of 'distant' otherness, we are concerned by our own hesitance to afford relativistic credence to closer forms of otherness that disturb our moral sensibilities. We invite papers that explore how mutual vulnerability in ethnographic encounters with ‘difficult others’ makes possible a generative and collaborative mutuality across polarising discourses.

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20. Keeping the people in the ethnography: Person-scaled and interaction-focused approaches in anthropology

Gregory Downey, Laura McLauchlan, Alexander Gillett and Sara Kim Hjortborg (Macquarie)

Individual people—living, breathing, idiosyncratic and psychologically complex—can be challenging to include in accounts of cultural worlds. Their complicated, fraught, ambiguous interactions, so context dependent and prone to misinterpretation, can be challenging to convey within ethnographic accounts. However, for those of us interested in studying the specifics of embodiment, such person- and interaction-level focus is vital. And yet, without attention to ethnographic context, studies of the mechanisms and specifics of embodiment—such as in cognitive science and psychology—may make unfounded generalisations about what it is to be human.

 

For those of us interested in producing social and cultural analyses of human phenomena that also pay close attention to living, breathing, people, how might we proceed? This panel calls for reflections on and demonstrations of human-centred ethnographic and interactional analysis, scaled to the psychological and interpersonal level—the 'microethnographic' scale, in which the community is the context but not the object of analysis. We welcome approaches that draw on psychology, psychodynamics, phenomenology, cognitive science, microsociology, even social neuroscience, among others, in which idiosyncratic details are fundamental to the way that we explore social and cultural ways of living.

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21. Workshop: (Auto)Ethno/Graphic Scholarship: Comics as Research 

Can Yalçınkaya, Laura McLauchlan and Anna-Karina Hermkens (Macquarie), Caroline Schuster (ANU)

[Not open for paper submissions. Workshop structure.]

What is ethno/graphic scholarship, and what might comics offer as a mode of anthropological research and dissemination? In this two-part workshop, participants are invited to learn and share insights and practice ethno/graphic research themselves. Please do not submit a paper to this workshop in advance. Come along on the day!

 

Part 1: Can Yalçınkaya will offer a theoretical framework for drawing, particularly cartooning, as a way of knowledge-making in ethnographic research. Providing examples of recent anthropological graphic novels, he will discuss graphic recording as a method of taking fieldnotes, and present insights from his autoethnographic comics practice as a form of sensuous scholarship and scholarly activism. Workshop co-convenors and participants will share their experiences of publishing and producing ethno/graphic work and reflect on the use of cartooning, illustrating and sequential art in their own, or others’ research. Part 2: Participants are invited to have a hands-on experience of making a one-page research comic. 

 

This workshop is for anyone intrigued by the possibilities of comics as research. No experience necessary (we invite you to embrace the vulnerability of drawing with colleagues!) 

 

What to bring: 

 

 * An abstract of a research paper you have published or are working on 

 * A4 size paper, pencils, erasers, pens etc (we will have extras if you don't have your own) 

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22. Transforming ‘naturalism’: What might it take?

Ute Eickelkamp (Ruhr University), Sally Babidge (Queensland)

A growing body of anthropologies grounded in the ethnography of First Nations and non-Western lifeworlds emphasizes a ‘relational ontology’; the primacy of connections between the human and more-than-human as the essence of orienting the self in the world. These essentially relational worlds come up in their opposition to and entanglement with a globalised modernity responsible for planetary destruction. Anthropologists do not propose that relational ontologies are a panacea, rather, they have been taken as a provocation to change naturalism’s power to perpetuate the material and political organization of modernity (Charbonnier et al. 2017: 8). But what might it take to transform ‘naturalism’ – Descola’s contested term for the mindset, practices and manifest manners of the modern ontology – in order to support a viable future for life at large?

 

We invite empirical case studies, creative works and/or theoretical reflections that examine naturalism’s vulnerabilities in times of ecological crisis. We ask contributors to seek out cracks, contradictions, and emerging signs of transformation. Possible themes and topics include: material practices, symbolic orders, affect, values, extractivism, deindustrialisation, environmental movements, Indigenization of ecologies, and studies of science, technology, bureaucracies and management.

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23. Whose loss? Towards an understanding of cultural loss

Richard Martin (Queensland), Gareth Lewis (Consultant anthropologist, Darwin)

This panel considers the concept of cultural loss, how such loss is valued, and by whom. In Australia, cultural loss has assumed enhanced significance with the High Court’s decision in Northern Territory v Griffiths [2019] HCA 7, which sought to ‘intuit’ the meaning of cultural loss from Indigenous testimony, and ‘translate the spiritual hurt from compensable acts into compensation.’ The destruction of Juukan Gorge in Western Australia’s Pilbara region in 2020 also prompted efforts to assess cultural loss and evaluate it, building on a litany of Aboriginal sacred site and cultural heritage contests involving what seem to be varying perceptions of Indigenous culture and loss held by members of the broader society. Parallel debates about treaties with Indigenous people in Australia have also raised the issue of ‘reparations’ for colonisation building on international examples. We invite papers which consider diverse experiences of cultural loss in Australia and internationally. We are particularly interested in Indigenous perspectives on loss, restitution, resilience, and survival, as well as reflection on how the discipline of anthropology has framed ‘culture’, ‘heritage’, ‘change’ and ‘loss’, especially in politically-engaged research relating to colonisation, land claims, native title, mining and resource contestation, site protection and the environment.

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24. Speculative vulnerabilities/vulnerable speculations: Rethinking economic forms by way of other worlds

Chris Vasantkumar (Macquarie), Caroline E. Schuster (ANU)

Our proposed panel brings economic speculation and speculative fiction into close proximity in order to spark new and provocative discussions about the radical open-ness of economic projects and values to the multiplicity of life within and beyond this world. Speculation has often been dysphemised as sinister and extractive finance. By contrast, we foreground the vulnerability of economic instruments, institutions and activities (from money and banking, to finance and financialization, to the market and market behavior) to reconfiguration via an engagement with speculative fictions. Under this rubric we include ‘genre fiction’ broadly conceived: punk manifestos, science fiction, fantasy, horror, graphic novels, ethnography, and work on more-than-human and other-than-human worlds. Such writing laces together speculation’s multiple valances: acting in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss; forming theories or modes of action and attentiveness in the absence of firm evidence, while also foregrounding older meanings that highlight speculation’s grounding in close observation and rapt attention. By bringing together speculative fictions and economic theories, institutions and instruments as key elements of our own cosmologies we hope to engender provocative and productive discussions about how to reshape economic knowledge in light of alterities both human and non-.

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25. What’s working? Transformations to work and labour

Victoria Stead (Deakin)

What it means to labour — what the stakes of labour are — are increasingly uncertain propositions. Theorists of precarity have highlighted the intensification of vulnerability associated with the decline of Fordist production and post-WWII social democracy, and the ascendency of neoliberal or late capitalist conditions (Berlant 2011). As many have pointed out, however, the secure, full-time, protected labour relation now understood to be in decline was only ever a norm for a relative few. Wageless forms of life and livelihood have long predominated in the informal economies of the Global South (Denning 2010). And feminist scholars have long pointed to forms of labour—paid and unpaid—that occur outside the relations of ‘standard’ work. Their calls to recognise reproductive labour as labour are now enjoined with new attempts to extend the holding capacity of the labour concept. These include calls to attend to multitudinous forms of ‘distributive labour’ (Ferguson 2015), to non-human labour (Besky and Blanchette 2019), and to the implications of AI and robotics for human work (Richardson 2015).

 

This panel invites contributions that explore the ways that labour is changing, and the significance of those changes for human lives and relations, including in the context of our own discipline.

 

26. Rethinking Australian Ethnographic Film  

Pedram Khosronejad  (Western Sydney), Sarah Pink  (Monash) 

The 20th Century left a diverse, deep, and at times contentious archive of footage and documentaries made by Australian ethnographic filmmakers. Australian ethnographic filmmakers were exemplars of innovative and collaborative documentary practice. However, today there is no regular celebration or exploration of ethnographic film in Australia, and no Australian university with a program fully devoted to visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking.    

 

What is the future of ethnographic film in Australia? Who is making new films, where are anthropologists training and what would a new Australian visual anthropology fit for the 21st century look like?  

 

The panel invites ethnographic filmmakers and others to join us to consider the place and work of ethnographic film in the anthropology in Australia today.  We welcome papers in any aspects of the topic, whether theoretical, historical, or applied methods. Suggested topics include:   

• The role that Australia has played in ethnographic filmmaking internationally;

• The role of Australian anthropological programs and institutions in the development of ethnographic filmmaking;

• Ethnographic film and cinematic traditions in Australia,  

• Decolonizing Australian ethnographic film and documentaries;

• Archival materials, accessibility and repatriation; 

• Intellectual ownership, copyright and authorship;  

• Collaborative ethnographic film and community engagement,   

• Post Covid-19 and ethnographic film production   

• Digital technologies, new approaches.  

 

27. Visual Media and Relational Vulnerabilities  

Pedram Khosronejad and Irena C. Veljanova (Western Sydney)

Humans have always been vulnerable; perhaps vulnerability remains a fundamental condition of life.  Theories around vulnerability have developed since the last decades of the 20th century as a distinct multidisciplinary cluster of philosophical, ethical and legal enquiry. Judith Butler (2016) argues vulnerability could not and should not be defined because it is a relational term, which needs to be understood through other terms and paradigms, such as power, violence, agency and passivity.  

 

This panel invites speakers to discuss this conceptual ambiguity of vulnerability from a visual artist/scholar perspective, closely considering that relationality is at the core of the 'open dialogue' with the audiences for said artists/scholars.  For applied social and visual anthropologists, creative visual practitioners, artists and activists, thinking about vulnerability raises questions about representation: who or what is represented as vulnerable? How can vulnerability be captured or represented? Which mediums should be used to capture vulnerability? Suggested topics include:   

• Representations of vulnerability across different visual and performative media; 

• Vulnerability of media;

• Vulnerability over time and place;

• Risk, vulnerability, and technology; 

• Visual and artistic considerations in demystifying vulnerability; 

• The special relationality between the ‘vulnerability narrative’ and audiences; 

• Ethics of vulnerability; 

• Vulnerability, sexuality, and eros, 

• Vulnerable corporealities; 

• Vulnerability and resistance. 

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28.  The anthropology of vulnerabilities: General submissions

Selvaraj Velayutham (Macquarie)

We invite scholars to engage with the concept of vulnerabilities vis à vis their respective research areas. 
Submissions here will be thematically grouped by the conference organisers and assigned into separate panels.