Anthropology@deakin Podcast

In this episode, Mythily talks to Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan. Anne is a former academic and current farm witch who, in both roles, has spent a weird amount of time getting to know sheep. Laura is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW and lectures with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Anne and Laura are also, it must be said, dear friends. As they speak of friendship, policy, care, death, and killing, anthropology emerges as a way into practices and relations that could maybe (we hope) inform a ‘better world’. Anne and Laura are both deeply invested—through their entanglements with sheep and farmers (Anne), hedgehogs and ecological conservation workers (Laura)—in understanding what sophisticated practices of love, kindness and friendship look like. So we talk through the sticky and unruly nature of lived ethics; of what it means to dislike with respect. Or, to kill with love. And also, of choosing to walk away from academia. This episode was produced by Myth

We return with a conversation recorded, this past summer, between Ceridwen Dovey and our own Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles. Dovey is a Sydney-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and in-depth essays and profiles, as well as a filmmaker. Born in South Africa, she grew up between South Africa and Australia, studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a postgraduate in anthropology at New York University. But, as we learn in this episode, Dovey did not become an anthropologist, and instead moved to a different but related set of analytical and representational problems as a fiction writer. Is fiction ethnographic? How do the commitments of creative non-fiction and anthropology differ? And, what does the moon think about all this? Tune in to find out. Interested in learning more? Check out https://www.ceridwendovey.com/ Show Credits Lead Production: Timothy Neale Deputy Production: David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher Editing: Timothy Neale and Mythily Meher This conversation w

For this episode, Cameo and Tim caught up with Professor Jessica Cattelino of the University of California Los Angeles. Jessica is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked extensively with Seminole people of Florida in the United States. Her first book High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke, 2008), explores sovereignty and the politicisation of gaming, while her soon to be released second book, follows water in the Florida Everglades. Both works develop critical approaches to recognition politics, settler colonialism and Indigeneity, with relevance across settler states. The conversation also covers Jessica’s approach to service and governance within the academy, and the ways in which it reproduces societal structures and inequities. Interested in learning more? Jessica recommends Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy’s introduction to their special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water”; Teresa Montoya’s work o

This month we bring to you a wonderful conversation between Matt and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University, Dr. Malini Sur. Malini is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia on the themes of agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. This conversation orbits around Malini's recently book 'Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along the violent--yet generative--borderlands between India and Bangladesh. Equal parts ecology, infrastructure, surveillance, and bureaucracy, this conversation will resonate for many well beyond the eastern Himalaya. Show Credits Lead Production: Matt Barlow Editing: Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow This conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of Kaurna and Dharag First Nations People. Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo

In this episode, Tim sits down with Associate Professor Monica Minnegal to chat to Dr. Will Smith, an environmental anthropologist and research fellow at Deakin University. Will’s book, ‘Mountains of Blame: Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands’ recently published with University of Washington Press, explores the political ecologies of forests in relation to the experiences and effects of climate change on the island of Pala’wan, in the Philippines. This conversation tackles some thorny questions around Indigenous understandings of changing climates, the refusal by communities to be categorized by governments as vulnerable victims or resilient saviours, and more-than-human relations marked by fear and violence, rather than reciprocity, flourishing, or love. As Will states, the forests are full of malevolent spirits, and he has been bitten by a lot of stuff in the forests of Pala’wan. Enjoy this great conversation between Will Smith, Monica Minnegal, and Tim Neale. Show Credits Lead Production:

Cameo Dalley talks to Fred Myers (Silver Professor at New York University) and Jason Gibson (Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellow at Deakin University), both of whom work on Aboriginal Australian ceremony and material culture. The conversation roams over reflections on happenstance in their careers, the making of and reception of their work, and the evolving role of the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge in Indigenous communities. https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/jason-gibson https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/fred-myers.html Works Mentioned Gibson, Jason M (2020) Ceremony Men Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection, SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y. Myers, Fred (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) Myers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke Univer

In this episode, Cameo speaks with Imelda Miller, of the Queensland Museum, and Olivia Robinson, of the State Library of Queensland. With over two decades of curatorial work and collaboration, they not only share their insights about collection and exhibition, but — as an Australian South Sea Islander and Bidjara woman, respectively — they share their insights about reimagining curation itself in a way that engages, empowers, and gives voice and agency to their communities.

We are delighted to bring you a conversation between Matt, Tim, and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School, Hugh Raffles. Raffles is the author of three books. The first of which, In Amazonia: A Natural History, is an ethnography about how rivers and humans co-constitute one another in the east Amazon of Brazil. Raffles’ second book, Insectopedia, is a collection of tales about humans and insects that takes us from the discovery of language among bees to artistic representations of contaminated butterfly wings in Chernobyl. His most recent book, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, is a bracing tale of time, memory, and loss, written through stories of stone. Across all three books Raffles has developed a deeply philosophical, historical, and poetic way of writing stories anthropologically that remain open to readers beyond the academy. What Raffles does with these subjects, in researching and writing abo

This episode brings together historians and anthropologists to explore questions that are anthropological in scale: race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, and white nationalist movements in North America and Europe. Kathleen Belew is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, whose book, Bring the War Home, explores the recent history of white nationalist movements and organising in the years between the Vietnam War and the Oklahoma City bombing. Alexandra Minna Stern is a Professor of History, American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, whose work has investigated the intersections of eugenics, racism, and gender in American politics. Her most recent book is Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Britt Halvorson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College whose most recent work, along with our fourth guest, has turned to investigate the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy are embedded in narratives of Mid-Western identity and pl

Pop the kettle on and sit back for our first 'tea' themed episode! For this episode, Matt invited Michael Dunford, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at ANU whose research explores labour, language, and tea in Myanmar, to join him in conversation with Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan. Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the International Labour and Labour Relations School at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas. Her work analyzes how materials and bodies take on value under changing political economic regimes and explores the diverse forms of labor that make and maintain that value. Her first book, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) explores how legacies of colonialism intersect with contemporary market reforms to reconfigure notions of the value of labor, of place, and of

Hello anthro-enthusiasts, we are back for 2021 with a conversation convened by Cameo Dalley on animals, industrialisation, eating and all the manifold issues that unfold at their intersections, featuring special guests Alex Blanchette and Catie Gressier. Dr Blanchette is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and has published widely on the politics of industrial labor and life in a post-industrial United States. His books include 'Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm' (Duke University Press, 2020) and the collection 'How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet', edited with Sarah Besky(University of New Mexico Press, 2019). Dr Gressier, an ARC DECRA Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, has written extensively about the anthropology of food, settler identities, and issues of health and illness, including in her books 'At Home in the Okavango: White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belonging' (Berghahn Books, 2015

Cruising towards the end of 2020, we are back with a new conversation between Matt, Tim and Radhika Govindrajan about relatedness, lives with other species, and the changing context for doing ethnography today. Dr Gonvindrajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington whose research spans the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Their outstanding first book 'Animal Intimacies' (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an ethnography of relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, and the book has since been was awarded the 2017 American Institute of Indian Studies Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities and the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Gregory Bateson Prize in 2019. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and

In this episode, David Giles fires up the international teleconference machine to convene a conversation between Davydd Greenwood, Melinda Hinkson and Cris Shore about austerity, anthropology and the contemporary university. Greenwood is Goldwin Smith Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, Hinkson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Deakin University, and Cris Shore is Professor of Anthropology and Head of Department at Goldsmiths University of London. -- 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 supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Algorithms and artificial intelligence are on the menu for our 36th adventure in anthropology! In this episode, we present two conversations with two great Science and Technology Studies scholars: Dr Nick Seaver and Dr Thao Phan. Dr Seaver, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, examines themes of taste and attention in his research, drawing on his ethnographic research with US-based developers of algorithmic music recommender systems. Dr Phan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, where her research who focuses on gender, AI, and algorithmic cultures. -- For more on our sparkling guests, see: https://twitter.com/npseaver Seaver, Nick. "What should an anthropology of algorithms do?." Cultural anthropology 33.3 (2018): 375-385. https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/download/ca33.3.04/90 https://twitter.com/thao_pow Phan, Thao. "Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5.1 (2019): 1-38. https://catalystjournal.org

The crew have logged on for another episode - live from lockdown - to talk life, the universe and anthropology. In this episode, Tim and Mythily speak with Dr Catherine Besteman, an anthropologist who has spent their career analyzing the power dynamics that produce and maintain inequality, racism and violence. Dr Besteman holds the position of Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College and is the author of several books, including the forthcoming 'Militarized Global Apartheid' (Duke University Press, 2020), and several edited collections, including the recent 'Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World' (University of Chicago Press, 2019). In this conversation, Dr Besteman discusses the subtle violence of humanitarianism, the rising criminalisation and militarisation of mobility, the difference between 'interlocutors' and 'friends', and much more. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by Davi

In this episode, we continue to explore the outer limits of collegiality during a pandemic and bring you a conversation with Professor Anne Pollock and special guest host Professor Emma Kowal (Deakin University). Dr Pollock is Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Kings College London, and her research focuses on biomedicine and culture, theories of race and gender, and the ways in which science and medicine are mobilised in social justice projects. Dr Pollock's books include 'Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference' (Duke University Press, 2012), 'Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge and Place in South African Drug Discovery' (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and, as we discuss, she is finishing a book manuscript on racism, health disparities and biopolitics in the 21st Century titled 'Sickening'. We also discuss hope as a practice, the ethics of the uneventful, accessing medical scientists, feminist STS and much more. -- Conversations in Anthropology is a pod

We at 'Conversations in Anthropology' hope you are all surviving and thriving as we bring you another episode, recorded by our very own David Boarder Giles during a (pre-pandemic) trip to Turtle Island (aka North America) and the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. In this episode, we hear from Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Risa Cromer, three anthropologists who have each made major contributions to our understandings of gender, reproduction and disability. Rapp and Ginsburg are both Professors of Anthropology at New York University, where Ginsburg is also the Director of the Graduate Program in Culture and Media. Cromer is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Purdue University. Each scholar has a fearsome biography to reckon with, and listeners may already be familiar with Rapp's book 'Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America' (1999) and Ginsburg's 'Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community' (1989). In this fascinating and wide-ran

Hello, anthro-enthusiasts! In this episode, we present a pre-COVID conversation that David Giles recorded with the esteemed anthropologist Anna Tsing, a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and director of the AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene at Aarhus University. Dr Tsing likely needs little introduction, as someone whose research and writing on globalisation and capitalism has travelled far outside of anthropology and academia. She is the author several books including 'In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place' (1993)and 'Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection' (2004), both based on fieldwork in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. More recently, she published an ethnography of the Matsutake mushroom and its entanglement in diverse human worlds and economies - 'The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins' (2015) - which won both the Gregory Bateson Prize and the Victor

Here, in the last of our mini-podcasts on crisis and digital research, Mythily is in conversation with anthropologist Jolynna Sinanan (Research Fellow in Digital Media and Ethnography at the University of Sydney). Jolynna's research focusses on digital media practices in relation to family relationships, work and gender. She has written on these themes in Social Media in Trinidad (UCL Press, 2017), Visualising Facebook (Miller and Sinanan, UCL Press, 2017), Webcam (Miller and Sinanan, Polity, 2014) and How the World Changed Social Media (Miller et. al. 2016, UCL Press). Most recently, Jolynna has been developing this work in two projects: on mobile mining work in Western Australia, and on digital/data practices around tourism in Mt Everest. With her fieldwork plans for both sites shelved for the time-being, this conversation reflects on the possibilities of adapting projects to digital modes during a crisis, and also if we should. You can find Jolynna on twitter at @jolynnasinanan - Conversations in Ant

This conversation is the third in our mini-pod series on crisis and the digital. In it, Mythily Meher speaks to Susan Wardell while they are in lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand. They talk about the shape of work, life, distress and future research in this pandemic, and—reflecting on Susan’s work with an online climate change ‘doomer’ community—on the kinds of meaning-making people engage in crisis. Susan is a lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Ōtākou / Otago in Aotearoa. Her ethnographic work deals with emotion and affect, care, religion and spirituality, mental health and wellbeing, and digital worlds. She also publishes poetry and essays, which you can read in Landfall, The Spinoff, Cordite Poetry review and elsewhere. You can find Susan on twitter at @Unlazy_Susan, and you can browse (and contribute to) the collective online pandemic dream diary she is running (find it by googling “CoviDreams”). - Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology prod