“Unsettling Peripheries,” the 2020 combined conference of the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) and the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand (ASAA/NZ) will be held on December 8-12 at Victoria University of Wellington’s Pipitea campus, in the heart of Wellington city, Aotearoa New Zealand. The conference will open with a pōwhiri at Pipitea Marae on the morning of 8 December, and close with a farewell in the afternoon of Saturday 12 December.
Conference Theme: Unsettling Peripheries
What does an anthropology for these unsettled, often unsettling, times look like? What does it mean to do anthropology in a world where old models of cores and peripheries have been broken apart? What role does the periphery, edge, or margin play in unsettling ossified social, political, or economic forms? How can peripheral anthropologies contribute to the unsettling of the discipline? In asking these questions, the combined AAS+ASAANZ 2020 conference aims to foment conversation around the sites, spaces, actors, and practices taking shape on the periphery to understand the ways they are actively making and remaking the contemporary world.
“Unsettling Peripheries” will bring together international scholars to provoke new thinking on the forces driving social change from the outermost reaches of socio-political life. Unsettling might refer to shaking the status quo; to the uncanny, eerie, disturbing, or challenging; or to unsettling practices and debates about decolonisation in settler societies. Working from the antipodean perspectives of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, we see the periphery as a space of active unsettling that has always been fertile for anthropological thinking. “Unsettling Peripheries” also asks: how do disciplinary traditions forged on the edges of empire helped push anthropological research in new directions, and where might our edgy locations challenge anthropology to go next?
Keynote Speakers
Yarimar Bonilla (City University of New York)
Aileen Moreton-Robinson (RMIT University)
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (University of Waikato)
Plenary panelists
Erik Harms (Yale University)
Atsuro Morita (Osaka University)
Nancy Postero (University of California, San Diego)
Ashanté Reese (University of Maryland)
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Lerma)
Key dates in 2020
Call for Panels: 9 March to 13 April
Panel proposals sent to Committee: 23 April
Panels selected by Committee: 8 May
Call for Papers: 11 May to 15 June
Papers marked up by convenors: 29 June
Early Bird registration: 3 August to 14 September
Virtual participation
We plan to offer a “virtual” option to delegates who cannot attend in person, whereby participants will be asked to pre-record their presentations and be available to take part in discussions online. We also plan to live-stream and/or record sessions where possible. This is appropriate to both the contemporary environmental situation and the geographic location of the conference. More information about virtual participation will be available in March 2020.
Travel Awards
Thanks to funding from a Wenner-Gren Conference Grant, we are able to offer five travel awards for international participants from lower and middle income countries, with preference given to delegates coming from Oceania and Southeast Asia. Participants without access to funding, such as precarious scholars and postgraduate students without institutional support, will be invited to apply for a travel award. The conference organising committee will liaise with one Executive Committee member each from the AAS and ASAA/NZ to consider applications. Further information about the travel awards will be available in March 2020.
Conference organising committee
Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich (Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington)
Lorena Gibson (Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington)
Eli Elinoff (Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington)
Grant Otsuki (Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington)
Caroline Bennett (Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington)
Dave Wilson (New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington)
For all enquiries about the conference, email: unsettling2020@vuw.ac.nz
