2026 Anthony Forge Memorial Lecture: "Just Sign for Her" - Proprioception and Consent
Lecture
This upcoming lecture is co-sponsored by the ANU Gender Institute and the School of Archaeology and Anthropology and is free to attend. Register your attendance through Humanitix to stay up to date with event information. Originally published on the ANU Gender Institute website.For the renegade…
How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent
Lecture/seminar
This past summer, wildfires again washed across southeast Australian landscapes, affecting over 500,000 hectares. Many of the forests that have carried these combustive tides are regrowth of native forests industrially cleared for mining and then recleared for timber. Many of the grasslands that…
Reckoning with Anthro-Cast: A Progress Report from the Wenner-Gren Foundation
Lecture/seminar
In 2024, Chip Colwell and I convened a Wenner-Gren Seminar that scrutinised the Foundation's ethical obligations in connection with the Foundation's legacy casting program, Anthro-Cast, a profit-generating enterprise that the Foundation ran between 1962-76 (see Colwell and Rutherford 2025)1.…
Forensic Investigation of Victims of the Batavia Mutiny, 1629
Seminar
On 4 June 1629, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) retourschip Batavia wrecked on Morning Reef, in the Houtman Abrolhos, approximately 65 km off the Western Australian coast. The macabre events following the wrecking saw more than 100 individuals murdered over a three-month period, by…
Reading Radiation: Evidence and Future-Making in Post-Disaster Fukushima
Lecture/seminar
How does radiation function as evidence? Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Fukushima, Japan site of the 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, this talk examines how radiation is activated, contested, and suppressed in discourse across a range of sites—museum…
Stepping Stones in the Indian Ocean: New Archaeological Evidence for Trade and Interaction in the Comoros Archipelago, East Africa
Lecture/seminar
New archaeological evidence from the Comoros Archipelago reveals its pivotal role as a maritime crossroads linking East Africa, Madagascar, and the wider Indian Ocean. In this public lecture, Associate Professor Alison Crowther will unveil recent discoveries that are rewriting our understanding of…
Care Circuits: Yolŋu, kidney disease and the work of policy translation
Lecture/seminar
An epidemic of end-stage kidney disease in remote Australian First Nations communities calls attention to the care practices that enable patients’ blood to flow through dialysis machines in order for it to continue to flow through their bodies. The care practices of patients, their families, health…