2025 ASAA/NZ Conference:
Edges, Borders, Margins, and Peripheries

Whāingaroa (Raglan), Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand

9-12 December 2025

We are pleased to announce that this year’s annual conference will be held on 9-12 December in Whāingaroa (Raglan), Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Conference theme: Edges, Borders Margins, and Peripheries.

What role do edges, borders, margins, and peripheries play in shaping social and material worlds? What does it mean to do anthropology in a world where old models of cores and peripheries have been broken apart? How can peripheral anthropologies contribute to the unsettling of the discipline? In asking these questions, the 2025 ASAA/NZ conference aims to foment conversations around the sites, spaces, actors, and practices taking shape on the periphery to understand how they are actively making and remaking the contemporary world. 

Anthropologists have long considered “remote and edgy” (Harms et al. 2014) places fertile for knowledge production, but we increasingly understand these edges as critical to the making of social, economic, and political orders. This mirrors the intensifying attention that boundaries attract from state and non-state actors, as evidenced by the fortification of many national and regional boundaries. It also reflects tensions in many urban peripheries, as migrants, private enterprise, and rural citizens struggle over social and physical space. From climate refugees in the Pacific to digital diasporas, from special economic zones to informal economies, edges, borders, margins, and peripheries emerge as key sites for understanding contemporary transformations. 

Working from the antipodean perspective of Aotearoa New Zealand, we see the periphery as a space of active unsettling that has always been fertile for anthropological thinking. “Edges, Borders, Margins, and Peripheries” also asks: How do disciplinary traditions forged on the edges of empire help push anthropological research in new directions, and where might our edgy locations challenge anthropology to go next?

Key dates

Call for abstracts: 17 March – 31 May 2025
Notification of abstract acceptance: 30 June 2025

Conference Organising Committee

Fiona McCormack
Bronwyn Isaacs
Lorena Gibson
Carolyn Morris