Short Abstract:

Building on the history of feminist anthropology roundtable in 2019, this roundtable invites emerging feminist anthropologists to join the conversation with established scholars to reflect on the history and contemporary practices of doing feminist anthropology in Australia.

Long Abstract:

In the 2019 roundtable, “Theory as Reproduction,” five established feminist anthropologists reflected on their own experiences during fieldwork and in the university. Informed by feminist perspectives, the panel served as an opportunity – in a format that combined oral history – to take stock of the gender relations that animate the reproduction of anthropological knowledge. Looking “through the maternal line,” the work of remembering what anthropology has been honed our attention on the inequalities that are sustained through knowledge practices in the present. Despite many changes, tracking the history and future of a feminist tradition in Australian anthropology remains a vital mode of interrogating the exclusions that our knowledge practices entail.

Two years on, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have further transformed the university as a site for contestations over gender and power. As feminist scholars have observed, the pandemic exacerbated gendered patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the production of knowledge. How might anthropological knowledge, starting with a focus on knowledge practices within anthropology, establish critical vocabularies with which to address the present moment? Building on the 2019 roundtable and The Familiar Strange two-part podcast based on it, this roundtable invites emerging feminist anthropologists to join the conversation with established scholars to continue the discussion on the work of producing theory and the labour involved in its reproduction through the maternal line.