Please submit paper abstracts that address the general 'Breaking Boundaries' theme to asaanz2019@gmail.com, or alternatively submit an abstract to the convenors of one of the panels/roundtables below.

Panels

Anthropology Aotearoa

Aotearoa has long blurred geopolitical attempts at boundary making, being simultaneously the global north and the global south, Polynesia and “a former land of new settlement in the British Empire” (Hart 2011), colonial and post-colonial, neoliberal and tribal, and so on. In the context of the recent existential crisis in Anthropology, and Comaroff and Comaroff’s (2012) enthusiasm for the decolonizing and historicizing potential of “Theory from the South”, this panel invites participants to reflect on the local distinctiveness and global significance of Anthropology Aotearoa. Some potential themes include: Does Anthropology in Aotearoa have a distinctive voice? Are there major research questions that are discernible? Are theoretical insights identifiable? How might it intervene in, challenge, or extend, major intellectual debates in the discipline? How does it add to, or complicate, crucial contemporary concerns as identified in the anthropological literature? Is there an identifiable teaching pedagogy? Is there anything distinctive about our fieldwork practices, ethics and methodologies? How do Anthropologists from Aotearoa straddle the tensions between the boundedness of our fieldsites and our discipline’s call for comparison, reflecting on both the particular and the general, the colonised and the coloniser?

Convenors: Tom Ryan and Fiona McCormack (Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato) 

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to fio@waikato.ac.nz by September 20th, 2019.

Mahi Tahi

This panel is an opportunity to showcase some of the mahi that students are working on. We invite all graduate students engaged in Māori research to submit an abstract. There is no set format for Mahi Tahi presentations, a main goal being to share kōrero on research ideas and topics as well as grow student confidence in presenting in academic spaces. The overriding kaupapa of this conference is “breaking boundaries” (https://www.ivvy.com.au/event/N1LQZS/call-for-papers.html) and participants should attempt to fit within this framing. How this is interpreted and created as a 10-15 minute presentation is at your own discretion. Examples include but are not limited to: poster presentation, seminar presentation, video, photography, waiata, and so on. Students are encouraged to critically engage and or challenge the practices of anthropology through, for example, reinforcing Māori and indigenous voices, values, experiences, worldviews and practices.

Convenor: Mona-Lisa Wareka (Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato)

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to mona.wareka@gmail.com by September 20th, 2019.

Shifting sands and fluid boundaries: co-creative method in anthropology

Thinking with the waves of the Raglan coastline that push up onto the sand, create edges and lines, and roll back down into the sea, our panel asks how co-creative methodologies can lead us to engage with boundaries in motion, which are always already both fluid and fixed.
Co-creative method is informed by a conviction that collaboration with such complexity becomes a potentially insightful and generative acknowledgement of the emergence and unpredictability of boundaries in motion. It allows for more public forms of anthropology and to question on whose terms are boundaries understood, made, and broken.
Our frames of attention hold the potential to open out into the world rather than to close it down and bind our knowing within boundaries. As a discipline responsible for making the boundaries in the world, as much as it observes and records them, how then do we ethically embrace the generative potential of anthropology?

Creative Methods Lab: Ethnographies of space, place, and boundaries.
This collaborative lab extends our panel on co-creative methodologies by inviting participants from all research interests to join us in an experimental ethnography engaging with boundaries though and with the foreshore in Whaingaroa Raglan. Together we will think with the waves, sand and tides to explore tensions, boundaries and shifting boundaries. It is an opportunity to employ creative methods, such as filmmaking, drawing, sound recording, writing poetry, photography etc… to interrogate the boundaries, both physically and conceptually, as fluid and fixed. For participants who choose to there will also be the opportunity for participants mini-creative ethnographies to be exhibited as part of a public anthropology event ‘Borderlines’, curated at the conference venue. Showing your work is by choice you do not have to do so if you would prefer not to. We hope you will join us in the creative process of exploring the theme of boundaries.

Convenors: Dr. Ruth Gibbons (Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa); Victoria Baskin Coffey (James Cook University and Aarhus University); and Sebastian J. Lowe (James Cook University and Aarhus University)

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to r.gibbons@massey.ac.nz by September 20th, 2019.

Breaking Gendered Boundaries in the 21st Century

Amidst the contemporary globalised world, gender structures that permeate inequalities still abound. These inequalities are experienced intersectionally by categories of women and men in both the domestic and public spheres. From glass ceilings that inhibit women in the workplace to toxic performances of masculinity, gendered boundaries often dictate performances of gender. Because humans create gendered boundaries, it is possible to re-create them. This panel explores the diverse spaces where gender boundaries are negotiated and contested. It aims to identify how structural boundaries dictating gender norms are established and undone or permeated in a range of empirical cases that serve as gendered sites of social entanglement.

Convenor: Cassie DeFillipo (University of Melbourne)

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to c.de1@unimelb.edu.au by September 20th, 2019. 

Medical Anthropology and Environmental Crisis: Engagements from Aotearoa New Zealand

Medical Anthropologists have been cognizant of the way environmental hazards impact the health and wellbeing of people and populations. This consideration and ability to examine both micro and macroscopic entanglements between health, wellbeing, and the environment allow for a nuanced examination of contemporary life. Drawing on a range of methodologies, a group of medical anthropologists working in/from Aotearoa New Zealand have been looking at environmental crisis and its implications for health justice and wellbeing. We attend to questions of environmental concerns through our medical anthropological lenses as a way to bring attention to the myriad ways the materiality of medicine and world(s) it operates in draw from each other. Dr Wardell’s research into the ‘Near Term Human Extinction’ movement explores the way frameworks from palliative care and bereavement literature are being appropriated by online groups that aim to support people responding to anthropogenic environmental change. In Dr. Herbst’s research, we see how environmental disasters, like the Wellington and Christchurch earthquakes, impact the experiences of families of patients with ordinarily manageable, but life-threatening genetic conditions. Through Dr. Addison’s work we look at the place of genetics in medical and environmental contexts. In Dr. Appleton’s work, she unpacks the political-economic pressures on reproductive justice frameworks when examined under the ‘climate crisis’ liberal narrative. Collectively, these medical anthropologists based in Aotearoa New Zealand draw on their fieldwork locally and globally bringing to light the importance of examining the medical alongside/through/within the environmental.

Panel Discussant: Dr. Mythily Meher

Panel Participants:
Dr. Susan Wardell
Dr. Pauline Herbst
Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton
Dr. Courtney Addison (tentative)

Convenor: Nayantara Sheoran Appleton (Te Whare Wānanga o te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui)

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to nayantara.s.appleton@vuw.ac.nz by September 20th, 2019. 

Research and Reflexivity in Anthropology: A Memorial Panel Celebrating Samuel Taylor-Alexander

Dr Samuel Taylor-Alexander, a friend and colleague to most in anthropology in Aotearoa, was a scholar par excellence. His work is a testament to contemporary anthropological enquiry, in which he examines the embodied experiences of peoples in diverse locations, while also keeping a lens on the self. His commitment to working on intellectual projects, not as abstract aberrations in medical or social spaces, but as complex realities in which we as researchers are embedded is an extremely important reminder for contemporary anthropologists. In his work on the socio-political framing of face transplantations to contemporary genomic worlds, he conceptually put forward ideas around ‘ideal patients,’ ‘modernity and normality in medicine,’ ‘bioprophecy’, ‘regulatory compression,’ and the continuity of medical ‘making’ (Taylor-Alexander 2017; 2014; Taylor-Alexander et al. 2016; Taylor-Alexander and Schwartz-Marín 2013) to list but a few.

For this panel, we call forth papers that draw on his ideas and scholarship, as a way to explicate individual research projects. We would also welcome papers that, following Sam’s example and initiative, engage with our positionality to our own scholarship within anthropology. Further, we encourage papers that take intellectual enquiry and situate the scholar (i.e. us) within our projects – explicating how we relate to our research, as people, as anthropologists and friends of Sam.

To see his work reflected in the anthropology emerging from scholars in Aotearoa would be a fitting tribute to this brilliant scholar, friend, colleague, and anthropologist. 

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to nayantara.s.appleton@vuw.ac.nz by September 20th, 2019.

Publications
A complete list of Dr. Samuel Taylor-Alexander’s papers, with downloadable PDFs can be found on his Academia.edu profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=y-z1-QkAAAAJ

Bibliography
Taylor-Alexander, Samuel. 2014. “Bioethics in the Making: ‘Ideal Patients’ and the Beginnings of Face Transplant Surgery in Mexico.” Science as Culture 23 (1): 27–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.789843.
———. 2017. “Normal/Modern: Reconstructive Surgery in a Mexican Public Hospital.” Medical Anthropology 36 (7): 615–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2017.1306857.
Taylor-Alexander, Samuel, Edward S. Dove, Isabel Fletcher, Agomoni Ganguli Mitra, Catriona McMillan, and Graeme Laurie. 2016. “Beyond Regulatory Compression: Confronting the Liminal Spaces of Health Research Regulation.” Law, Innovation and Technology 8 (2): 149–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/17579961.2016.1250378.
Taylor-Alexander, Samuel, and Ernesto Schwartz-Marín. 2013. “Bioprophecy and the Politics of the Present: Notes on the Establishment of Mexico’s National Genomics Institute (INMEGEN).” New Genetics and Society 32 (4): 333–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2013.845076.
 

Roundtables

Anthropologists outside Academia (AoA)

Anthropology found its institutional home in the university system over a century ago. But the reality now is that very few anthropology graduates have the privilege of full-time tenured employment as university academics. Many go out into the world and do something else, but hopefully they take something of anthropology wherever they go. Others manage to forge careers as anthropologists in a range of government, non-government and commercial organisations or as independent self-employed research consultants. This round-table panel seeks to address two problems following from this reality.
One is that our professional association (ASAANZ) is managed and thus (effectively but unintentionally) dominated by the university academics among us. We have always recognised our colleagues outside academia, and at times they have been well represented in ASAANZ, but the balance has always been heavily toward the academic end of the spectrum. In America, there is a separate organisation of “applied anthropologists”, but we (some? most? all? of us) would prefer a more integrated approach and would like to see membership and functioning of ASAANZ become more balanced.
The other issue is that those of us inside academia are only too aware of the likely career pathways that await our graduates and we try to advise them the best, but many of us feel ill-equipped to advise, let alone prepare them for these careers.
What we envisage here is a round-table discussion, beginning with brief presentations from as many of our AoA collages as possible, with a view to addressing both of these issues. We hope that AoA’s and students will take it over and lead it wherever they want it to go.

Convenor: Graeme MacRae (Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa)

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to G.S.Macrae@massey.ac.nz by September 20th, 2019.

Re-visiting the bounded Fieldsite: A roundtable discussion

Notions of what counts as field, and how fields are constructed, have undergone considerable changes during the last 15 years. Questions of how we map fields, how we imagine them as bounded, and how we engage with expectations of de-colonised fieldsites, are constant companions for contemporary anthropologists. However, these questions are rarely discussed in any depth, and it is not until recently that they have been considered to have some urgent relevance to scholars in Aotearoa.

We would like to invite colleagues around the country and beyond to express their interest in joining us for such a discussion. We are looking for abstracts that suggest topics exploring boundedness in and outside the ethnographic project. Participants should plan for a five-minutes contribution and be willing to join a discussion that explores notions of fieldwork that might or might not transcend our standing notions of the boundedness of ethnographic locations.

Convenors: Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich and Lorena Gibson (Te Whare Wānanga o te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui)

Please send 150 word abstracts for this panel to brigitte.bonisch-brednich@vuw.ac.nz or lorena.gibson@vuw.ac.nz by September 20th, 2019.