We are pleased to announce that the 44th ASAANZ Annual Conference will take place from 14-16 November 2022 at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
We would like to acknowledge the energy, time, and effort that was put into last year’s conference which sadly had to be cancelled. Therefore, building on last year’s theme of “Emergency” and in light of our (re)emergence from lockdown into an ongoing pandemic, we are proposing “Emergenc(i)es” as the theme for this year’s ASAANZ conference.
With the theme “Emergenc(i)es”, we raise and address questions around varied emergent forms, including methodologies and research practices; ways of thinking, being, and working; fears and realities; rituals and routines; subjectivities; vulnerabilities and injustices; practices of care and solidarity; and social relations and political positionings, especially those which are generated under conditions of emergency and crisis. However, taken uncritically, emergence might imply novelty where we could otherwise discern continuity, and passivity where we might better identify action and responsibility. We therefore also encourage critical considerations of the notion of emergence itself.
Abstract submissions open on 2 May 2022 and close on 10 June 2022. Abstracts (of no more than 200 words) can be submitted for 15-minute presentations of academic work, or a performative, visual, poetic or interactive intervention of the same length. Please include title of the paper, author(s), and a short bio with your abstracts. Participants from last year’s conference are more than welcome to resubmit their abstracts.
We invite abstracts that consider:
What political spaces and projects emerge out of crisis? How do these question governance norms and give rise to novel, evolved, or alternative social contracts and visions of the future?
How, and in whose interests, are emergenc(i)es constructed, and to what effect?
What forms of behaviour and social action do conditions of emergency/emergence compel?
How can and should we, as anthropologists, work in emergency/emergent contexts? What theoretical and methodological tools do we have for such times?
What social and temporal dynamics does the notion of emergence attune us to?
What power relations (in labour, domestic, medical, multispecies, and other contexts) have emerged in our fieldsites, in either the sense of becoming, or of becoming visible?
How does anthropology understand and address the social inequalities and inequities (whether racial, gendered, classed, or otherwise) that have recently emerged more blatantly to the surface of social and political life?
How can we shape the prospects for the emergence of a socially-progressive recovery after emergency?
And finally, turning to speculative futures, what might yet emerge from contemporary conditions of crisis and rupture?
Abstracts should be sent to: asaanz2022@vuw.ac.nz.
See our Conference page for more information.
