Engendering the Anthropocene in Oceania: Fatalism, Resilience, Resistance
Seminar
The concept of the Anthropocene, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history. But who are ‘we’ in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is…
The Informal Economy of the Just Share in Indonesia’s Motorbike-Taxi Industry
Seminar
About the Lecture Indonesia’s new ride-hailing economy is touted as a partnership between the motorbike-taxi-drivers and the company that owns the smart-phone application used to get customers. Drivers must be accountable, and the company must give them 80 per cent of the customer’s fare. In…
Babies, brains, tools, & war: Trends in human evolution
Seminar
Natural selection for walking on two legs (bipedalism) in our ancestors was associated with evolutionary-developmental (‘evo-devo’) changes in the physical development of babies. Over time, these modifications sparked other changes that have been retained in the growth and development of modern…
Homo luzonensis: A new species of hominin from the Late Pleistocene of northern Luzon, Philippines
Lecture
Prof. Armand Mijares of the Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philippines, Diliman led an international team of researchers that discovered the remains of a new species of Homo at Callao Cave, northern Luzon Philippines, which they named Homo luzonensis. In this lecture, Prof.…
An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea
Lecture
Abstract: The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) introduced new forms of relations between companies and their local stakeholders. In this paper I sketch out the process through which resource extraction companies use CSR to manage ways in which they get entangled in local social,…