The Dr Cyril Timo Schäfer Memorial Graduate Student Conference Presentation Awards take place at the Association's annual conference. The purpose of the awards is to recognise excellence in conference presentation skills by ASAA/NZ graduate student members.
The 2023 ASAA/NZ conference “Engaging Anthropology” was held at the University of Otago, where Cyril worked until his sudden passing in 2015. The judging panel was impressed with the extremely high standard of graduate student presentations and ASAA/NZ is pleased to announce our 2023 award winners:
1st Prize: Willow Forgeson (Massey University)
Engaging with the Everyday: Eating Autoethnography for Dinner
My project revolving around meal kits, morals and motherhood, purposely blurs the line between work and home. As an emerging anthropologist and a mother who uses meal kits, I chose to probe my own life as a site of analysis before engaging with the lives of others. This decision led me on a path of engaging every day with the everyday. Prior to conducting fieldwork with other mothers, I spent a year documenting my own experiences feeding my family using meal kits. What I intend to present is a multisensory representation of my experience of engaging with autoethnography. By simultaneously cooking while I present, I aim to recreate the dualism of having to feed my family every night whilst simultaneously trying to understand what cooking using meal kits means regarding motherhood, care and learnt behaviour. Throughout my research, I engaged with strong sensory experiences that I was unable to express fully within my written thesis. Engaging with an audience in this way allows me to share the olfactory, audio and gustatory experiences integral to my experience and understanding of feeding using meal kits.
Bio: I have an interest in the mundane and my work focuses on the everyday decisions and actions that shape lives. Currently a master’s student at Massey University my background is in the performing arts and early childhood education. My present work revolves around the practices of feeding, and motherhood explored through the lens of using meal kits. I am drawn to autography as a way to illuminate the often-overlooked nuances that exist within the everyday.
2nd Prize: Jay Jomar F. Quintos (Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago | The University of the Philippine)
Nostalgia and Wayward Lives: The Aestheticized, Brutalized, and Exoticized Visual Cultures in Mindanao and Sulu from 1898 to 1967
In this presentation, I aim to make an excursus that complicates the cinematic renderings and ways enmeshed in the lifeworlds and struggles of the Lumad and Moro, Indigenous peoples of Mindanao and Sulu, Philippines from 1906 to 1967. I lay bare the spectacle of the aestheticized, brutalized, and exoticized visual cultures – which includes photographs, actuality films, and full-length films – on the Lumad and Moro. This presentation behooves us to ask: How does the archiving of life through the cinema on the Lumad and Moro elucidate nostalgia and waywardness in relation to propelling the aspirations for social and ecological justice, radical hope, and decolonization? For the purposes of this presentation, I explore Svetlana Boym’s notion of nostalgia and Saidiya Hartman’s imagination of waywardness to give a new way and approach to the reckless, unwanted, and wayward imaginings of the Lumad and Moro in Mindanao and Sulu.
Bio: Jay Jomar F Quintos is a PhD candidate at the Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago. He is currently on a study leave as associate professor at the University of the Philippines. With folk studies, literary studies, and cinema studies as research interests, his critical and creative works have already appeared in various publications.
