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- Convenor:
-
Timothy Neale
(Deakin University)
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Victoria Stead
(Deakin University)
- Formats:
- Roundtables
- Location:
- Eucalyptus (S205), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
Story-telling and practices of listening offer possibilities for engaging with the experience of environmental crisis. This roundtable explores the limits and possibilities of telling and hearing: in laboratories, deserts, forests, conference rooms, online, or elsewhere.
Long Abstract:
Story-telling and practices of listening offer possibilities for engaging with the experience of environmental crisis; with diverse others whose values and ways of knowing are brought into encounter through such crisis; and with the contingent histories and potential futures that stretch out on either side of the present moment. Story-telling and listening are both method and output, both personal and political, both galvanising and mournful. In this roundtable we seek to reflect on ideas and practices of storying within anthropology and its cognate disciplines in recent years (e.g. Haraway 2016, van Dooren and Rose 2012), and also explore the possibilities for moving beyond these, towards more politically engaged relations of story-telling, including in places marked by dynamics of colonialism and decolonisation. Questions that might animate our discussion include: How do stories move, and move us, across different scales? What does listening offer as a mode of response to both local and planetary threat? What, if anything, can storying and practices of listening offer in contexts of alterity or divergent epistemologies? Whether in laboratories, deserts, forests, conference rooms, online, or elsewhere: what are the limits of what we can tell and hear? People interested in participating in this roundtable are invited to submit proposals for short, 5-10 minute provocations in response to one or more of these questions.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
van Dooren, T., & Rose, D. B. (2012). Storied-places in a multispecies city. Humanimalia, 3(2), 1-27.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 5 December, 2019, -Katerina Teaiwa (Australian National University)
Paper short abstract:
This is a very preliminary presentation building on ongoing research on I-Kiribati and Banaban women who are working at the intersections of heritage, traditional knowledge, environmental work, and the visual and literary arts.
Paper long abstract:
This is a very preliminary presentation building on ongoing research on I-Kiribati and Banaban women who are working at the intersections of heritage, traditional knowledge, environmental work, and the visual and literary arts. The Humans of Kiribati Facebook page and Instagram account depicts numerous visual stories and discussions of how women, young people, and I-Kiribati in general are navigating the challenging social, cultural, environmental and political effects of climate change and other contemporary and historical environmental crises. I will reflect on those stories and my observations during recent field work with two female community leaders on Tarawa.
Timothy Neale (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
In a recent article, Gabrielle Hecht suggests that 'the Anthropocene' presents a vital opportunity for formulating emplaced narrations of present predicaments. In this roundtable, I reflect on an ongoing search for 'interscalar vehicles' appropriate to this task.
Paper long abstract:
In their 2018 article 'Interscalar vehicles for an African Anthropocene,' anthropologist and historian Gabrielle Hecht debates the merits of the recent arrival of the Anthropocene to the humanities expansive conceptual shorelines. The true danger for humanities scholarship, Hecht suggests, is that our Anthropocenic excursions risk submitting to geologists' abstractions, thereby ignoring the need to keep things 'in place'. Alternately, the concept also arguably represents a vital opportunity for formulating emplaced narrations of present predicaments while also 'keeping the planet and all of its humans in the same conceptual frame' (Hecht, 135). As for the protagonists of sci-fi films like Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Innerspace (1987), such narrative work requires the selection of appropriate 'interscalar vehicles', meaning objects or entities whose journeys across scales illustrate how temporal and spatial bounds govern worlds. In my contribution to this roundtable, I will reflect on my own search for such vehicles for analysis, thinking through the potential utility of Hecht's method through narratives of elemental entities and exchanges.
References:
Gabrielle Hecht, "Interscalar vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On waste, temporality, and violence," Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 135.
Sophie Chao (University of Sydney)
Paper short abstract:
This contribution examines how indigenous Marind communities in West Papua become-with the forest by attuning to its human and other-than-human songs, stories, and sounds. I then analyze the challenges faced by Marind in storying monocrop oil palm landscapes and their deadly sounds and silence.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution examines how indigenous Marind communities in West Papua story the forest by attuning to its human and other-than-human songs, movements, and sounds. In particular, I examine how Marind incorporate the sounds of the forest in their participatory mapping practices, which are guided by the songs and sound of birds and other sentient forest beings. I then examine the challenges faced by Marind in storying monocrop oil palm plantations, that are expanding rapidly across indigenous territories in West Papua. In particular, I analyze the frictions that arise among Marind over how to interpret and relate to the deadly bioacoustics of monocrop landscapes, where sounds of life are replaced by sounds of destruction. The provocation seeks to highlight the importance of non-ocular mediums for sensing ecological change and degradation, the meaningful dissonances that arise in the colliding ecologies of forest and plantation, and the creative ways in which indigenous Marind themselves torque sounds of life and destruction in their spatial representational practices.
Anja Kanngieser (University of Wollongong)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation asks how, as an academic from the Global North, is it possible to truly hold space for, and actively listen to, the voices of those living through everyday environmental change, particularly when those voices refuse to fit with 'official' storylines.
Paper long abstract:
Informed by ethnographic work with women and LGBTQIA communities in Fiji, Kiribati, and Nauru this presentation asks how, as an academic from the Global North, is it possible to truly hold space for, and actively listen to, the voices of those living through everyday environmental change, particularly when those voices refuse to fit with 'official' storylines and trouble the high stakes of the climate industry. From research fatigue and resentment, to climate denial, the expectation of extractive and unethical fieldwork practices, and ambivalent relations to neocolonialism and external economic assistance, this talk focuses on what it means to amplify self-representation and self-determination in a precarious environment already exhausted by the ongoing legacies of whiteness, colonialism and aid.
Lisa Stefanoff (CDU UNSW)
Paper short abstract:
An overview of key moments in a decade of curated AAS conference screen/media/art programs that have addressed questions of the aesthetics, scale, speed, and affective work of storytelling and listening as counter-colonising practice in a warming world.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past ten years, programming of the AAS conference screen/media/art stream of events has intentionally addressed questions of aesthetics, scale, speed and the affective forces of storytelling and listening in a conflicted and warming world.
Across these concerns, curatorial vision has been attuned to collisions of decolonising and recolonising forces and has foregrounded critical inquiry into the politics and transformations of modes and processes of art-media co-creativity, especially where anthropology, the GLAM sector, community and First Nations' media-arts and national screen industries disentangle and relink in a representational swing-dance of aligned and disarticulated priorities.
My contribution to this discussion will highlight some of the key moments in this curatorial history, paying particular attention to dynamics of voice, extraction and the possibilities of an artful and publicly accessible anthropology engaged with our most urgent contemporary shared human questions and challenges.