Paper short abstract:

I consider the tensions in being a settler-colonial anthropologist in PNG, being an early career scholar navigating academic employment, and efforts to work in ways that destabilise colonialist and exclusionary practices that reverberate through academic structures and ways that knowledge is valued.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I reflect on practicing solidarity and decolonisation as a white early career scholar working in Papua New Guinea. In recent times, there has been an amplification of the ways in which traditional structures of scholarship in colonial and settler-colonial countries marginalise academics and scholarship from outside of Western institutions. To 'do no harm' in anthropology now means more than behaving ethically towards research participants. It is a call to destabilise exclusionary and violent practices that are inherent in ways that different forms of knowledge and scholarly practice have historically been valued. This means rejecting and reframing what Eve Tuck (2009) has called 'damage centred research' that, even when intended as a way to leverage resources by drawing attention to problems, actively reinforce colonialist depictions of deficit and lack (Stella 2007). These conversations also traverse uncomfortable discussions around whose work gets cited, who is invited to speak on panels and why, and who gets employed—or indeed, who gets employed in academic roles that affords them the opportunity to write. In Papua New Guinea, where research visas are contingent on proof of local 'partnerships' and the guidance, insights and relationship brokering by Papua New Guinean scholars is critical to successes of international researchers, there are also questions of how different inputs to a project are valued. Here, I raise these questions with the intention of challenging collective practice and hearing what ethical and decolonised anthropology means for Papua New Guinean and other scholars.