Exploring Indigenous histories and cross-cultural collecting encounters in German art, archival and material culture collections: The Agnes S Schulz and Frobenius Expedition to Arnhem Land, Australia 1954-1995
Seminar
In June 1954, Agnes Susanne Schulz, a member of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travelled to the Northern Territory, where, over a period of nearly two years, she recorded rock art, cultural knowledge and practices, and collected material culture of local Aboriginal peoples…
Credit as care and financial frontier. An ethnography of predatory inclusion under Brazil’s ‘fintech revolution’
Lecture/seminar
In Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a rise in poverty and accelerated the already ignited ‘fintech revolution,’ pushing a policy agenda of financial inclusion that has been transforming Brazilian society for more than a decade. In the aftermath of the pandemic, indebtedness was at a record…
“Fighting not sinking”: How emotions impact Pacific diplomacy, geopolitics and climate security
Lecture/seminar
Emotions impact Pacific diplomacy, causing ripples and rifts in regional geopolitics and climate security. Islands, and atolls in particular, are often constructed by Western science as locations of vulnerability. Sinking islands have become a fatalistic visage that looms over Pacific islands in…
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…
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…
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…
Super Review of 1001 Nights in the Colony
Lecture/seminar
This seminar will take a different format. The idea behind a super review is to provide HDR students and ECRs with some insights into how a review conversation can be productive and exciting, and leads to stronger work, with the added bonus of making the audience aware of the manuscript, hopefully…