Events
This page lists the various activities going on alongside and beyond the keynotes, panels and papers.
Before/during the conference

Ngurra: Home in the Ngaanyatajrra Lands
The conference coincides with the South Australian Museum's next major exhibition of Australian Aboriginal culture, Ngurra: Home in the Ngaanyatajrra Lands. Read more ...
The exhibition unpacks the Aboriginal concept of Ngurra (camp/Country/Home) to explore the dynamics and meanings of life in the Western Desert communities. The exhibition is a collaboration with Ngaanyatjarra artists, and explores mobility, youth culture, fashion and technology in the formation of contemporary modes of belonging. AAS delegates will have opportunities to visit the exhibition with Museum curators Glenn Iseger Pilkington and Professor John Carty.
Ashes test match
From 2-6th December – i.e. the week before the conference – the England and Austalian cricket teams will play an Ashes test match at the iconic Adelaide Oval. This will be the first ever day-night Ashes test, and so will be a unique experience. Read more ...
If any delegates are interested in attending the match, then they should make contact with Richard Vokes directly – richard.vokes(at)adelaide.edu.au – who has arranged a block booking for the games. Australian supporters are warned, however, that they should prepare to be disappointed with the result! (writes Richard).
Monday 11 December
AAS Native Title workshop
10:30-16:15
Room G03, Napier Building
School of Law, University of Adelaide
The AAS and the National Native Title Tribunal invite you to join us
for this annual meeting of anthropologists who work and research in
the area of native title and Indigenous land rights.
Read more ...
This year’s program will focus on mapping technologies, research for compensation claims, and the challenges of developing applied research projects about pre- and post-determination native title disputes. See the full program here.
The agenda includes an Open Forum Session that provides participants with an opportunity to ask any research or practice questions they may have been grappling with, as well as a space to announce upcoming events, new publications, and development opportunities. Items were requested to be sent in advance, but additional agenda items are welcome on the day.
We also invite participants who have particular knowledge or experience of research mapping technologies to get in touch, and we’ll make time on the agenda for discussion and/or demonstration. (We are particularly keen to hear from anyone who may have used drones for native title research!). And if you have any particular questions about mapping tools that you would like answered, send those to Pam (details below) in advance.
To register your interest in attending this event, please RSVP
by Friday 24 November to:
Pamela McGrath
National Native Title Tribunal
pamela.mcgrath(at)nntt.gov.au
0439 958 646
Registration for this event is essential, and is separate to the main conference registration process.
ANSA postgraduate workshops
10:00-14:30
Room 208, Napier Building
School of Law, University of Adelaide
The Australian Network of Student Anthropologists (ANSA) hosts a
series of postgraduate workshops covering ethnographic fieldwork, job
applications, jobs and gender issues, and presenting. Read more
(and to book)...
ANSA workshop 1: Doing fieldwork
James Scott elaborates on his experiences with fieldwork, and offers
advice for students.
From 10:00–11:00
To register, click
here.
ANSA workshop 2: Getting that job
David Martin shares insights into the job market for
anthropologists.
From 11:15–12:00
To register, click
here.
ANSA workshop 3: Jobs and gender issues
Helen Lee speaks about the entangled issues of gender and
employment.
From 12:30–13:15
To register, click
here.
ANSA workshop 4: Presenting anthropological papers
Learn about how to present informative and entertaining papers with
Julie Finlayson.
From 13:30–14:30
To register, click
here.
Refreshments/lunch will be provided in the breaks between
workshops.
Everyone is welcome, but please register. Space is limited, so book
now!
Opening reception
18:35-20:30
Art Gallery of South Australia
Delegates are invited to an informal opening reception, after the ASA
Firth Lecture. Catch up with old friends and meet new colleagues over
drinks and nibbles, in the Art Gallery of South Australia. The gallery
has a long history of presenting an outstanding mix of inspiring and
challenging works of art from Australia, Europe and Asia.
Read more ...
The collection began in 1881 and is one of the largest in Australia, boasting over 47,000 works of art, including the work of internationally acclaimed artists. Under the creative direction of Director Nick Mitzevich the Gallery has enjoyed significant momentum and growth and has repositioned itself with a renewed focus on contemporary art.
TARNANTHI Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Art
During the opening night reception, delegates will have the opportunity to undertake free guided tours of the Art Gallery’s exhibitions in the TARNANTHI Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. Read more ...
The 2017 TARNANTHI Festival will build on the success of the 2015 event, by presenting the art of Australia's rich and diverse Indigenous cultures on an unprecedented scale. A platform for important stories from across the country to be seen and heard, TARNANTHI offers an unmissable opportunity to experience the best of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Straitrow Islander art.
Tuesday 12 December
ASA AGM
12:30-13:30
Napier 108.
Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth would like to invite its members to their annual general meeting. Download the agenda and last year's minutes.
Book launch
15:00-15:30
Book Exhibit, Ingkarni Wardli Atrium (Ingkarni Wardli building)
Environment, labour, and capitalism at sea: Working the ground
in Scotland (Manchester University Press 2017)
By Penny Howard
Read more ...
How do fishers extend their bodies and senses to work beneath the surface of the sea in places they cannot see, have never been, and could not survive in? And at what risk? This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry.
The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. Combining phenomenology and political economy, it offers new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies.
The book will be launched by Professor Linda Connor (University of Sydney) and Dr. Alexander Smith, New Ethnographies series editor, Manchester University Press.
Wine tasting
18:45-20:30
Cloisters, Next to Union House
Delegates will have an opportunity to taste and buy wines from local
wine-growing regions, including the Barossa Valley and McClaren Vale.
Wednesday 13 December
Book launch
15:00-15:30
Book Exhibit, Ingkarni Wardli Atrium (Ingkarni Wardli building)
Crosscurrents: Law and Society in a Native Title Claim to Land
and Sea (UWAP 2017)
By Katie Glaskin
Read more ...
It is one thing to know what the law says: it is another to try to understand what it means and how it is applied. In native title, when Indigenous relationships with country are viewed through the lens of a Western property rights regime, this complexity is seriously magnified. Crosscurrents traces the path of a native title claim in the Kimberley region of Western Australia – Sampi v State of Western Australia – from its inception to resolution, contextualising the claim in the web of historical events that shaped the claim’s beginnings, its intersection with evolving case law, and the labyrinth of legal process, evidence and argument that ultimately shaped its end.
ASAANZ AGM
15:30-17:00
Ligertwood 231.
All ASAANZ members are welcome to attend the annual general meeting. Students and early career anthropologists are particularly encouraged to attend.
Drinks reception
18:30-20:30
Ingkarni Wardli Atrium (Ingkarni Wardli building)
Come along for drinks and nibbles to celebrate the Australian
Anthropological Society’s Distinguished Lecture for 2017.
Thursday 14 December
Book launches
10:30-11:00
Book Exhibit, Ingkarni Wardli Atrium (Ingkarni Wardli building)
Complementary Medicine and Culture: The Changing Cultural
Territory of Local and Global Healing Practices (Nova
Science 2017)
Edited by: Tass Holmes and E Paul Cherniac
This book includes topical research regarding impacts of culture
change on traditional healing beliefs and practices, in both
developing and developed nations.
Read more ...
Chapters describe issues ranging from attrition of cultural heritage and healing knowledge, or traditional knowledge (TK), to the implications of unconventional healing in various guises, encountered during various research fieldwork in communities of Australia, Africa and institutions of mainstream healthcare in USA. It explores philosophical aspects of contemporary complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practice, including Chinese and integrative medicine, and engages with social theory domains. The book is relevant to theoretical and anthropological understanding of these diverse fields, and is pertinent for CAM practitioners and consumers, Indigenous health contexts, and marginalised consumers.
Alternative Medicine: Perceptions, Uses and Benefits, and
Clinical Implications (Nova Science 2016)
Edited by E Paul Cherniack and Tass Holmes
This volume provides a helpful synthesis of recent research about
complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), by diverse
international contributors in several sub-fields of contemporary
health and research endeavours.
Read more ...
Chapters include literature reviews (such as study findings about the benefits of CAM for elderly persons and of laughter therapy, from the USA, and herbal treatments for pain, in Mauritius), and original studies (including an anthropological study of poor CAM consumers in Australia, and others about the location of naturopaths’ practice in Canada, and the use of mindfulness meditation among nursing students in Scotland).
#metoo Anthropology
12:30-13:30
Ligertwood Building, 231
This year, the release of the Australian Human Rights Commission ‘Change the Course’ Report and the #metoo movement of women sharing their experiences across social media has shed light on the extent of the problem of sexual assault and harassment in all spaces, including academia. It has also brought about a critical moment for us to confront issues that have tended to remain private. Join us to begin a conversation and take action on how anthropology scholars and associations can best respond to this crisis going forward.
Book launches from New Zealand anthropology
12:30-13:30
Book Exhibit, Ingkarni Wardli Atrium (Ingkarni Wardli building)
Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for
Universities in the Knowledge Economy (Berghahn 2017)
Edited by Susan Wright and Cris Shore
Drawing on a 4-year multi-disciplinary research project funded by
the EU on Universities and Globalisation (URGE) this book charts the
new and emerging landscapes of higher education and focuses on what
is happening on the ground in universities in Europe, Australia, New
Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region..
Read more ...
Under increasing pressure to
pursue excellence, demonstrate research impact, achieve higher world
rankings, commercialise intellectual property, forge business links
and attract more elite, fee-paying students, many universities are
struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, to
improve social mobility and equality, and to strengthen national
cohesion. These developments pose a radical challenge to the future
of the public university. We examine how particular universities are
engaging with these dilemmas and address the following questions:
How are higher education institutions being reconfigured as
entrepreneurial universities¹ and as knowledge organisations¹? How
are new kinds of management and governance regimes transforming the
culture of academia? How are universities coping with these diverse
and seeming contradictory policy agendas? How are national and
international reforms impacting on the social purposes of the
university and its relationship to society? What possibilities are
there for alternative university futures?
Private Oceans: the enclosure and marketisation of the seas
(Pluto Press 2017)
by Fiona McCormack.
As the era of thriving, small-scale fishing communities continues
to wane across waters that once teamed with (a way of) life, Fiona
McCormack opens a window into contemporary fisheries quota systems,
laying bare how neoliberalism has entangled itself in our approach
to environmental management.
Read more ...
Grounded in fieldwork in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Hawaii, McCormack offers up a comparative analysis of the mechanisms driving the transformations unleashed by a new era of ocean grabbing. Exploring the processes of privatisation in ecosystem services, Private Oceans traces how value has been repositioned in the market, away from productive activities. The result? The demise of the small-scale sector, the collapse of fishing communities, cultural loss, and the emergence of a newly propertied class of producers - the armchair fisherman. Ultimately, Private Oceans demonstrates that the deviations from the capitalist norm explored in this book offer grounds for the reimagining of both fisheries economies and broader environmental systems.
One Blue Child: Asthma, Responsibility, and the Politics of
Global Health (Stanford University Press 2017)
by Susanna Trnka.
Radical changes in our understanding of health and healthcare are
reshaping twenty-first-century personhood. In the last few years,
there has been a great influx of public policy and biometric
technologies targeted at engaging individuals in their own health,
increasing personal responsibility, and encouraging people to
"self-manage" their own care.
Read more ...
One Blue Child examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but approach children's health according to very different cultural, political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results.
Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of
Contemporary Life (Duke University Press, 2017)
Edited by Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle
Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a
core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing
Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques
of that concept in political, social, and ethical life.
Read more ...
They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self.
Contributors: Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon
ARC Centres of Excellence and the HASS sector
13:30-15:00
Napier Building, 208
This session introduces participants to the ARC Centres of Excellence
process, the expressions of interest for which close mid-2018. It aims
to encourage greater participation from the humanities and social
sciences sector to form centres that seek to address major research
problems for disciplines and/or major research problems to which
Anthropology can make a major contribution!
Book launch
15:00-15:30
Book Exhibit, Ingkarni Wardli Atrium (Ingkarni Wardli building)
Illness, Identity, and Taboo among Australian Paleo Dieters
(Palgrave, 2017)
by Catie Gressier
Read more ...
The Paleo diet’s vast popularity, replete with impassioned celebrity endorsements and deep commitment among adherents, has been matched by an equal measure of media mockery and condemnation from health authorities. But beyond the hype, who are the people taking up the diet, and why are they drawn to its restrictive regime? Based on ethnographic research in Melbourne and Sydney, Gressier recounts the compelling narratives of individuals struggling with illness and obesity in order to argue that going Paleo provides a sense of agency, and means of resistance, to the politico-economic structures fuelling the prevalence of lifestyle diseases. From its nostalgic appeal to an idyllic past, to the rise of health populism globally—where a sense of crisis, anti-elite sentiments, and new forms of media are fuelling a lucrative alternative health industry—this book explores the promise and pitfalls of the Paleo diet in Australia.
Gala dinner
18:45 - 23:30
Exhibition Hall of the National Wine Centre
The conference’s gala dinner will be held in the Exhibition Hall of
the National Wine Centre. The National Wine Centre is an
architecturally unique venue situated on the edge of Adelaide’s
stunning Botanic Gardens.
Read more ...
The National Wine Centre prides itself on not being a traditional function venue. Its pillarless function spaces have full natural light, and its catering showcases the best of local produce. The Centre houses the largest wine tasting experience in Australia, which adds a unique dimesnion to the dining experience.
The three-course meal will be garnered with plenty of wine and music. The annual AAS prizes for best Honour’s and PhD theses, and best article, will be presented during the evening.
Tickets sold-out in advance, but do swing by the conference office in Napier 205 to see if any colleagues are trying to sell their pre-booked tickets!
Friday 15 December
International workshop on Political Ecologies of Water
13:45-17:15
Napier Building, 108
Organisers: Georgina Drew and Vibha Arora
Workshop keynote: Politics in Principle: bringing cultural
values into the mainstream with the UN High Level Panel on Water,
Veronica Strang (Durham University).
Read more ...
Within the context of national and international policy development, debates about the 'value' of water tend to focus on things that can be measured quantitatively. 'Cultural value' is seen as a separate and rather marginal domain, having something to do with spiritual meanings or cultural heritage. In 2016 the United Nations decided that, to encourage Heads of State to give higher priority to cultural values in relation to water, it would develop a set of guiding Principles for Water. For anthropologists involved in this project, the challenge was therefore twofold. First: how to articulate 'cultural' values in ways that Heads of State and their policy makers could engage with and integrate into their decision-making. Second: how to smuggle a more unifying theoretical approach into the process, and thus to subvert assumed categorical divisions sufficiently to demonstrate that 'cultural values' are as central to economic activities and relationships with the environment as they are to 'spiritual domains. This paper describes the adventure entailed in trying to meet both of these challenges.