Anthropology@deakin Podcast

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 supporte

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. B

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 Gil

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 Con

A late festive treat? An early new year surprise? Our new episode features a conversation with the renowned anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Across their illustrious career, Nancy has researched social suffering and structural violence in a variety of contexts, including Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and, internationally, through the global trade in kidneys and other organs. Most recently, she has written about the scandal of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She is the author of 'Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland’ (1979), 'Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil’ (1989) and 'The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics, Global (In)Justice and the Traffic in Organs’ (2008), as well as numerous articles, edited collections, and other book chapters. She is also the co-founder of Organs Watch, a watchdog organisation that monitors organ trafficking. In this episode, we twist and t

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

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.

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 an

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 autho

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 Un

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 m

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, includ

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 A