Development Studies

21/09/2024

Brand new double issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology out now! Read the articles on: https://curatorium.au/

‘Epistemic attunements – Regenerating anthroplogy's form’ is a collective experiment in expanding the expressive and analytic repertoire of anthropology and related disciplines. It features eleven peer-reviewed research articles published on a standalone website that has been designed, built, and maintained by our editorial collective, independent of Wiley's infrastructure and oversight. The result is a unique off-grid adventure in academic publishing that seeks to contribute to the re-orientation and outward opening of a discipline long committed to finding new ways to apprehend—and respond to—worlds undergoing constant, messy, and often-brutal transformation.'

Critical, creative and collective attunements. A special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology.

20/09/2024

There is an urgent need to reinstate free education in Australia, not only to ensure access for all but equally importantly, to provide the country’s youth with the political, historical, and philosophical foundations needed to become more informed and engaged citizens.

My arts degree will probably cost more than $60,000. University students like myself are furious the government isn’t doing more to alleviate our crippling debt

26/06/2024

This just came out. Another reflection on Asmat experiences of time following the 2022 chapter on the impermanence of Asmat materiality that I wrote with Anna Karina.

Because pasts are relative to people’s ethical and political motivations in the present, it is important to understand how and in what shapes pasts emerge in relation to people’s contemporary concerns and the futures they expect. In this chapter, I...

29/05/2024

Tetepare Island's people fled for mysterious reasons 200 years ago. Now their descendants are fighting to protect it. Wonderful initiative and a good story

Tetepare was once home to tribes of people, before it was abruptly deserted about 200 years ago. Now, descendants are protecting it from logging and climate change.

08/05/2024

Solomon Islands after the elections. Here's an excellent report and analysis by Jon Fraenkel

Opinion - Most countries in the Oceania region recognise Beijing and welcome Chinese aid, but no other Pacific state has become so dependent on China as Solomon Islands.

28/04/2024

Postdoctoral Researcher Political Ecology at KITLV - KNAW - Leiden

17/07/2023

How do elections affect PNG’s coffee production?

Coffee contributes 6% of GDP and supports approximately 3.5 million people, yet 2022 exports were at a record low, say Dorum, Poka and Mambon.

19/06/2023

Cash, for some people, inspires a sense of comfort, according to Dr Chris Vasantkumar. “Taking cash away completely gets a little tricky,” says the Macquarie University economic anthropologist. “It can even be destabilising.” This, he says, is what happened in Zimbabwe, which shifted quickly to cashlessness without the support of most of the population, “and confidence in money collapsed as a result”.

Australia has a relatively low unbanked population. But there remain groups vulnerable to the decline or end of cash, say both Vasantkumar and Worthington. Regional and rural people with patchy access to internet services, elderly people who tend to favour cash and be less comfortable with digital technology, new migrants, and people simply uncomfortable or unconfident with cashless payment systems.

Cheques are being phased out. Cash is on the decline. As we use cash less and less, how does this impact the way we think about and use money?

30/04/2023

Job title: PhD Fellowship in Social Anthropology (244250), Employer: University of Bergen, Deadline: Tuesday, June 20, 2023

22/01/2023

Poor people in poor countries are poor largely because of historical, political and technological forces that are beyond their control, rather than because of their individual shortcomings, least of all their unwillingness to work hard.

Coconut isn’t just for eating. The immature fruit is a ready source of clean water—long-distance sail ships crossing tropical waters are said to have routinely carried immature coconuts as an emerg…

01/11/2022

Pig worlds: understanding porcine multiplicity in the Anthropocene

Living as co-symbionts with humans for millennia, pigs are highly adaptable beings. Enacted in multiple ways, they are a ‘diaspora’ constituted through diverse social, ecological, and historical relations. There is no single Sus Scrofa kind, rather, pigs are a kaleidoscope of bodies, capacities, identities, and subjectivities, engaged with by humans as meat, game, pests, ecological engineers, homely companions, medical surrogates, and spiritual relatives. They are great disruptors, challenging the moral, ethical, and spatial (b)orders humans devise to differentiate the im/pure, un/desirable, or domestic/wild.

Porcine subjects offer a multifaceted set of human-nonhuman interactions and perspectives that benefit anthropological comparison. Their multiplicity also enables us to articulate the precarity, contradictions, and patchiness of the Anthropocene. Porcine ways of being are dramatically afforded and constrained during this era. While some have proliferated through colonial expansion, climatic transformation, industrial capitalism, and plantation ecologies, others are threatened by these shifting conditions. Pigs are embroiled in contemporary anthropological concerns, such as emergent pathogenic ecologies, destructive global infrastructures, and other-than-human necropolitics.

This session explores the multiplicity of pig worlds, storying their lives and relations, and their limits. Following the generalist tendencies of pigs, we welcome submissions from all disciplines. Contributions might unfold in or between forests, farms, cities, abattoirs, laboratories or homes, and reside in the material and spiritual. We invite empirical narratives, and ontological, epistemological, and ethical provocations. Thinking through difference, querying hegemonic discourse, reconceptualising their presences in the Anthropocene, the session seeks to probe ways we can understand and reconceptualise such beings, their relations and beyond.