ASA19: University of East Anglia, Norwich 3-6 September 2019
Timetable: ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBAL CHALLENGES
Click where it says "Panel session x" to see the panels taking place within that session.
- 11:30-18:00 Registration desk open
- 13:00-14:30 Panel session 1
- 14:30-15:00 Refreshments
- 15:00-16:30 Panel session 2
- 16:30-16:45 Break
- 16:45-18:30 Welcome, Keynote: 2019 Raymond Firth lecture by Prof. Ann Stoler
Lecture Theatre 1 (located near the University Library)
Colonial disorders past and present: some planetary considerations
Chair: Nigel Rapport
In our current fraught – fiercely inequitable and environmentally precarious-- world order, colonialism – as process, as condition, as situation, as metaphor, and as a shorthand for injustice-- is invoked in a set of both intensely familiar and wholly new ways: at once as a regrettable history to be acknowledged and as decidedly over; increasingly as the logic underpinning a contemporary array of brutal forms of governance (either understood as colonial vestige or reinvention), and not infrequently as a dark diagnostic of where the world is heading on a planetary scale.
In this latter scenario, colonialism extends as a multiplex phenomenon: as imminent proliferating condition, as warning, and as strategic accusation. Naming here is a political practice, part of an alert system on a new scale. And the alert is pointed: to intensified, accelerated differentiations, manifest in ever uglier, blatant forms of expulsions, erasures, and selective dispossibilities. These rival those licit and illicit entwined networks that conferred the right to kill “to defend society” at another time, always imagined as exceptions and urgencies but never on an imperial wide scale. Today the accretions are seen to be new, more encompassing, a division of the earth as empire with sites of damage and reward, precarity and safety, vulnerability and security marking out a clarity of catastrophic differentiation and difference that has never been seen before.
How well does our collective concept-work measure up to grappling with this crescendo? How well does it reckon with metaphoric strategies developed to address physical and psychic damage and long delayed political claims? And how much are state systems dependent on producing internal enemies of their own making? Are those quasi citizens and non-citizens, rendered as the interior frontiers of the polis, the underside of a new imperial logic and division of the world?
This presentation offers an uneasy pause at this conjuncture to consider what these varied sorts of attention to, around and on the edges of “the colonial” politically entail? Do they signal the urgent quest for a more active, vivid conceptual grammar or a more acutely accurate one? Might we treat the range of scenarios and their affective politics as in itself a new measure of a spatial and temporal set of dissonances, a world out of sync with the temporalities in which we think and write? Could one argue that the colonial call does not hark back to Fanon but registers an awkward and only partially effective move: a brazenly non-disciplinary dissent from the disorder and discrepancies of choice, resources, possibilities that the carceral archipelago of empire imposes and that the “the carte blanche” of capital confers on some, insuring that wars over communitas in the idiom of immunitas will continue to shape how, where, and who constitutes the “we” with whom we live. - 19:00-19:30 Address by Magdalene Odundo at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Gallery Reception
There will be an address by Magdalene Odundo in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Magdalene Odundo OBE is one of the world’s most acclaimed artists working in the field of ceramics. The Journey of Things positions her work alongside a large selection of objects chosen by Odundo from across the globe and spanning over 3,000 years. She will discuss how this rich and diverse range of objects and making traditions have informed the development of her own work. Odundo was made OBE in 2008, is Chancellor for the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and received the 2019 Potterycrafts Lifetime Achievement Award. She will be introduced by Professor Paul Greenhalgh, Director of the Sainsbury Centre. - 19:00-21:00 Welcome reception
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Modern Life Café
We recommend starting the evening with Odundo’s speech and then move into the drinks reception area at the Modern Life Café to celebrate the start of the conference with wine and some light nibbles.
- 08:00-16:15 Registration desk open
- 09:00-10:30Panel session 3
- 10:30-11:00 Refreshments
- 11:00-12:30 Panel session 4
- 12:30-14:00 Lunch
- 12:30-14:00 Heads of Departments (HODs) meeting
Thomas Paine Study Centre 2.01
ASA invites the Heads of Departments and their representatives to this annual meeting. All those planning to attend should notify the organisers by email to secretary(at)theasa.org.
- 12:30-14:00 APPLY network meeting
Julian Study Centre 1.02
The APPLY network is for all those seeking to use anthropological theory and practice to applied ends, both inside and outside the academy. Recognising the wide range of contexts in which anthropology is practised, and the diverse conditions and constraints under which practising anthropologists work, we aim to explore ways in which the network can best reach its constituency and support anthropologists working in applied fields. Please join us in discussing proposals for taking the network forward.
- 12:30-14:00 Hannah Knox (UCL) leads a session on Redesigning Conferencing
Julian Study Centre 0.01
ASA Workshop: Redesigning Conferencing in an age of Climate Change
Dr Hannah Knox
This workshop invites participants to participate in a critical conversation about how to confront the ethical dilemma posed by anthropology’s built in commitment to flying. In the panel we will create a space to talk openly and frankly about the role that international air travel plays in anthropological practice, and in particular the structure of academic conferencing. We will then set out to collectively design an alternative format for doing anthropology in the face of climate change. Potential topics for discussion include: the possibilities of virtual conferencing; decolonising anthropology through new geographies of paticipation; the value of slow scholarship; offsetting – solution or sop?; the social status of the cosmopolitan scholar; celebrating indigenous anthropology; devising new materialities of participation etc.
Conferences are arguably the most ecologically unsustainable aspect of academic work. Flying across the world to give a fifteen minute paper, to what are often relatively contained social networks of scholars (that themselves have been historically consolidated by the aeronautic infrastructure of international air travel) is a rarely discussed aspect of the academic practice. Yet arguably the carbon emissions created by academics flying to conferences constitutes an infringement of the core ethical commitments of anthropology as a discipline. Whilst flights currently make up only around 3% of global carbon emissions, for an academic from Europe or America who makes one transatlantic flight a year, this is likely to constitutes half of their individual carbon emissions for the year. One of the most significant things academics can personally do in the fight against climate change is to stop flying. Moreover, flying is not just a question of personal responsibility but also constitutes a disciplinary responsibilty to those with whom anthropologists most frequently do research. How can we justify our high-carbon emitting lifestyles, or fail to speak of the infrastructures and agents of air travel, when those upon whom our discipline relies tend to have the lowest contribution to climate change, whilst they risk facing its most catastrophic consequences. In this workshop we will explore practical ways through which to confront this dilemma, starting with a rethinking the conference format.
- 12:30-13:45 Brown Bag Session on Ethics with Ben Jones
Thomas Paine Study Centre 0
Ethics workshop: Ben Jones & Hailing Zhao
This workshop is aimed at postgraduate students pre- and post-fieldwork. It explores the narrowing of the distance between the ‘desk’ and the ‘field’ and the challenges and opportunities this presents to us as anthropologists and ethnographers. In particular the workshop offers the chance for postgraduate students to explore the ‘everyday ethics’ of doing and being in a particular site, and also the often political ways in which those sites loop back into our lives elsewhere. Part of the session reflects on the experience of working in ‘development landscapes’, where experiences of NGOs and aid workers, defines the lens through which the ethnographer is viewed. There will also be a conversation with a PhD student conducting fieldwork in China. Here was can think about what ethics means in a context where challenges of surveillance and political interference are found, both in the field, and also at the desk.
- 14:00-15:30 Plenary: Prof. Katy Gardner, Dr Jafari S Allen, Dr Luke Heslop
Thomas Paine Study Centre 0
The Evil Outside and the Evil Within: Anthropology, Development and Decolonisation
Plenary speakers: Katy Gardner & Jafari S. Allen
Discussant: Luke Heslop
Session Chair: Dan Rycroft
What and who is anthropology for? Is it an extractive exercise which ultimately reinforces power relations, a form of interpretation and translation, or a potentially radical and even transformational set of methods, theory and insight? Whose interests does it serve?
Whilst the answer is partly that anthropology is all of these things, for the discipline is vast, its history deep and various, and those that practice it in all its forms are heterogeneous, these questions have been present since its 19 th Century infancy and, given their complexity, will almost certainly never be wholly resolved. In my presentation today, however, I want to focus on the question of Anthropology’s relationship to development. After all, the Global Challenges Research Fund (after which this conference is named) is an initiative which locates ‘challenges’, and problem solving research within the domain of development.
In what follows I describe how UK anthropology has shifted in its approach to development over the last thirty years. In the late 1980s / early 1990s, development was largely a despised endeavour and development anthropology a sub-field given little intellectual or indeed moral credence. This position is brilliantly analysed by James Ferguson’s 1997 ‘evil twin’ article – which exemplifies the position of much of the mainstream when I was a graduate student. How different things are today, in which questions of ‘development’ / global problems are now so ubiquitous that they are the themes of the ASA conference! I am particularly interested in the evocation of evil within development, and the underlying question of moral good, which I will return to later. By posing the question ‘what happened next?’ I plan to briefly update the story of the co-dependent, conflict ridden relationship between anthropology and development, situating it within the changing political economy of knowledge production, neo liberal corporatisation and audit culture in HE, as well as profound transformations in the wider worlds in which we work.
What I will argue is that there has been a fundamental shift in the location and nature of the moral problem: whilst up to the 1980s/90s development was an ‘evil twin’, closely related but external, with anthropology and its pristine ‘people without history’ to be protected by anthropology, it is now anthropology itself that has become morally problematic, with calls for the rethinking of its epistemology, methods and political commitments coming in a variety of interlinked guises. Rather than pushing development anthropology to the margins and defending the boundaries of the discipline, as described in Ferguson’s 1997 article, the call is for anthropology not only to own its troubled past but also to open up and engage. Here, we return to the central moral question: engage on what terms, with what, and who for? - 15:30-16:00 Refreshments
- 16:00-17:30 Panel session 5
- 17:30-17:45 Break
- 17:45-19:15 Keynote: Prof. James Ferguson
Thomas Paine Study Centre 0
Rightful shares and the claims of presence: distributive politics beyond labor and citizenship
This paper presents a perspective on the contemporary politics of distribution -- i.e., that modality of politics that is concerned with the fundamental questions of who gets what, and why. It starts with the observation that labor and citizenship (long the anchors for our thinking about these fundamental questions) no longer provide an adequate way of answering them. Both in my own area of specialization (southern Africa) and across the global South and beyond, the old answers leave out huge populations. Growing masses of unemployed and underemployed and the rapid expansion of precarious and so-called “informal” livelihoods undermine the old promise of universal provisioning via wages. At the same time, an increasingly mobile global population leaves growing numbers, all over the world, undocumented -- thus undercutting the citizenship-based rights that have traditionally provided the political justification for distributions of “social” payments from the state. Yet emergent new forms of distributive politics show the importance of different kinds of distributive claims in these times -- claims based on neither labor nor citizenship but on what we might call (in the broadest sense) “ownership”, on the one hand, and what I have termed “presence” on the other. The paper argues that the rise of these alternatives to the long-established grounding of distributive allocations in labor or citizenship is part of a larger process that is opening up new grounds for distributive claims, and new kinds of arguments for the legitimacy of distributive shares. The challenge for scholarship is to better grasp the implications of these new claims and arguments that are now profoundly challenging long-entrenched ways of thinking about distribution.
This paper presents a perspective on the contemporary politics of distribution -- i.e., that modality of politics that is concerned with the fundamental questions of who gets what, and why. It starts with the observation that labor and citizenship (long the anchors for our thinking about these fundamental questions) no longer provide an adequate way of answering them. Both in my own area of specialization (southern Africa) and across the global South and beyond, the old answers leave out huge populations. Growing masses of unemployed and underemployed and the rapid expansion of precarious and so-called “informal” livelihoods undermine the old promise of universal provisioning via wages. At the same time, an increasingly mobile global population leaves growing numbers, all over the world, undocumented -- thus undercutting the citizenship-based rights that have traditionally provided the political justification for distributions of “social” payments from the state. Yet emergent new forms of distributive politics show the importance of different kinds of distributive claims in these times -- claims based on neither labor nor citizenship but on what we might call (in the broadest sense) “ownership”, on the one hand, and what I have termed “presence” on the other. The paper argues that the rise of these alternatives to the long-established grounding of distributive allocations in labor or citizenship is part of a larger process that is opening up new grounds for distributive claims, and new kinds of arguments for the legitimacy of distributive shares. The challenge for scholarship is to better grasp the implications of these new claims and arguments that are now profoundly challenging long-entrenched ways of thinking about distribution. - 19:45-22:00 A respectful conversation about: migration
UEA Drama Studio (DRA 0.01)
Norwich Arts Centre and LJ Hope Productions present
A respectful conversation about: migration - Migration and Knowledge Production in the Arts and Academia: Collaborative Utopias?
Chaired by Katy Jon Went
A panel of speakers representing our wide academic and artistic community will lead discussions on the subject of migration and knowledge production, with a key focus on the opportunities and limitations of collaborations between diverse communities in academia, the art sector and beyond. Our aim is to underscore the various practical challenges in reaching a broader dialogue between the university and a multi-cultural society. This is not a debate with winners and losers but the chance for proper conversations to take place in a safe and respectful environment. There will be plenty of opportunity for everyone to join in and share thoughts and ideas with a view to enabling a better understanding of all points of view. This event is co-organised by the ASA conference panel on “Anthropology, Museums and Art: Collaborative Methodologies in Migration Research” in its aim to engage in a wider conversation with the community.
- 08:00-16:15 Registration desk open
- 09:00-10:30 Panel session 6
- 10:30-11:00 Refreshments
- 11:00-12:30 Panel session 7
- 12:30-14:00 Lunch
- 12:45-13:45 Workshop: Anna Mudeka (public event)
UEA Drama Studio (DRA 0.01)
The Arts Journey from Past to Future
Anna Mudeka, musician and festival organiser
Kure Kure/Faraway: A tale of Ancestors, Identity, Atavism, Migration and DNA
Anna will introduce her work as a Zimbabwean artist living in the UK. She is currently touring a one-woman theatre show KURE KURE/FARAWAY. The show is hailed as "An epic story of migration, atavism, DNA and the ancestors" origins which speaks of the challenges and opportunities of starting a new life in a different country. Anna's work considers the threads that link the ancient and the modern and asks questions around history, politics, time, place & identity. - 12:45-14:00 ASA’s Annual General Meeting
Julian Study Centre 0.01
All members of the ASA are invited to attend the association’s AGM. Come and have your say on ASA business. Download the agenda and view the accounts.
- 12:45-14:00 The New Ethnographer meet-up lunch
Julian Study Centre 1.02
This meet-up is designed to offer a safe space for PhD students and junior scholars to debrief about challenging fieldwork experiences. Colleagues are invited to join us to discuss these experiences to the extent they would like to, to meet like-minded individuals and build a supportive network within ASA. It is also an opportunity to find out more about contributing to The New Ethnographer’s blog, workshops, and forthcoming publications.
Bring your lunch along, and we look forward to seeing you there.
- 14:00-15:00 (Un)Named Maker: a tour of Sonny Assu’s exhibition
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, East End Gallery
During an artistic residency in the summer of 2019, First Nations Kwakwaka’wakw artist Sonny Assu curated an exhibition exploring his encounter with Britain at the Sainsbury’s Centre for Visual Art entitled (Un)Named Maker. Combining the historic collections with his own artistic responses, Sonny explores the transcultural relationships involved in museums and contemporary art, particularly exploring the notions of identity and value, drawing on the themes of global interconnectedness and colonial/post-colonial reconciliation.
Tour provided by Dr. Jack Davy of the AHRC-funded project Beyond the Spectacle.
- 14:00-15:30 Panel session 8
- 15:45-16:15 Refreshments
- 16:00-17:15 Architectural tour of the UEA campus
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Gallery Reception (enter using the east end doors)
The architectural tour of the UEA campus will explore how the modernist ideas that informed Denys Lasdun's designs are experienced by residents and users of the university. It will bring to visitors and conference delegates an understanding of the spatial and material qualities of the campus, and look into how and why Lasdun's designs have either been disrupted or accommodated by later building complexes. Given the evolving role of the university in relation to the region, the city, and the planet, we will look into architectural responses to issues of sustainability and social engagement. The tour will be led by Prof Stefan Muthesius, of the Department of Art History and World Art Studies at UEA. Prof Muthesius is the co-author, with Peter Dormer, of Concrete and Open Skies: Architecture at the University of East Anglia 1962-2000 (London: Unicorn Press, 2001), a study of the UEA campus.
- 16:15-17:45 Plenary: Prof. Sharon Macdonald
Thomas Paine Study Centre 0
Castles in the air… and on the ground: utopian worlding and troubling temporalities in heritage-making
Chair: Ferdinand de Jong
In the centre of Berlin, a major heritage-making project is nearing completion. A partial reconstruction of a destroyed castle (or palace – Schloß), the project has been invested with grand hopes for healing the wounds of history, supporting the building of a new, unified German nation, and even reshaping European sensibilities to the wider world. For others, however, such hopes are ‘castles in the air’ – overblown and unrealisable utopian imaginings. They see the new Schloß – which is formally called the Humboldt Forum – as an affront to their memories, evidence of the failings of elites, and a manifestation of deeply problematic relationships with other peoples and places. These divided perspectives concern the Schloß building and its site, and also proposed contents of the Humboldt Forum, especially the collections of the Berlin national Ethnological Museum, which will be exhibited there. Central to fuelling the divisions over the Schloß are memories of socialism (the German Democratic Republic’s parliament building was also on this site) and colonialism (especially in relation to the ethnological collections) – themselves failed and dystopian, utopian projects. These memories trouble other planned utopian narratives. As a multi- researcher ethnography of the development shows, however, such troubling also opens up new possibilities, and even helps ferment new energies, for what is, in effect, an at least partial re-worlding of the Schloß project and its repercussions. Drawing on this, and in light of calls to rethink recognition and decolonize heritage, the presentation seeks to offer an anthropological contribution to the challenges and potentials of contemporary and future heritage-as-world-making. - 19:00-21:00 'Alternative banquet'
Haggle restaurant, 13 St Benedicts St, Norwich NR2 4PE
OR
The Last Wine Bar, St Georges St, Norwich NR3 1AB
Those not attending the formal conference dinner might wish to avail of the tables reserved for ASA participants at either Haggle or The Last Wine Bar restaurants close to the Conference dance in the centre of Norwich. Both have reasonable prices and good food!
Haggle is a Middle Eastern Restaurant offering a unique combination of aromatic and vast flavouring that caters for every palate.
The Last Wine Bar offers locally-sourced food and over 60 wines. Why not go along to network with other delegates to discuss anthropology over an economic dinner? Then take a short stroll to St Andrews Hall for the conference dance.
See further http://hagglerestaurant.com and https://www.lastwinebar.co.uk
- 19:00-21:00 Conference dinner at St. Andrew's Hall
St.Andrews Hall, The Halls, St Andrew's Plain, Norwich, NR3 1AU
The Halls in Norwich, Norfolk is the most complete medieval friary complex surviving in this country and has been welcoming visitors since passing into civic hands in 1538. St. Andrew's Hall is the centrepiece of The Halls and is the name by which many people refer to the whole complex of buildings. It has a fine, high-beamed ceiling, beautiful stained glass windows, limestone columns and a large polished maple floor. It was originally the nave of the friary and was completed in 1449. The size and beauty of its proportions are impressive without elaborate decoration in keeping with the friars' rule of simplicity. The stained glass, stone carving and deeply-coloured portraits add richness to the simple backdrop of the building, adding a contemporary feel to this incredibly historical building of civic tradition - the best of both worlds. The nave was intended as a great preaching hall for citizens of Norwich with the pillars kept as light and as high as possible to maximise vision and acoustics. The fine hammer-beam roof was a gift from Sir Thomas Epingham who commanded English archers at Agincourt. The west window is Victorian Gothic and contains fine examples of stained glass depicting the coats of arms of well-known local families.
The dinner will be a three-course meal with wine. Tickets for the conference dinner needed to be booked in advance when registering - no new tickets can be purchased during the conference. However we will run a banquet ticket exchange (for those with no special dietary requirements) in NomadIT's office during the conference. So if you wish to try and buy/sell, it's worth popping in to ask, although we cannot guarantee success.
- 21:00-23:30 Conference dance
St.Andrews Hall, The Halls, St Andrew's Plain, Norwich, NR3 1AU
FREE FOR ALL - just bring your badge!
Come and dance the night away with Jose Ferrera and Cubanda, multinational latin band based in Norwich. They play a mix of the latin music, salsa, merengue, Bachata and many more, they guarantee to have the audience up and dancing.
Jose Ferrera: Percussionist
Carlos Antonio Fumero: Vocalist
Vilem Hais: Bass
Jonathan Threadwell: Guitar
Thomad: Pianist
Rob: saxophonist, clarinet and flute
Special guest Anna Mudeka, vocals and mbira
- 08:00-14:00 Registration desk open
- 09:00-10:30 Panel session 9
- 10:30-11:00 Refreshments
- 11:00-12:30 Roundtable: Traditional art practice and indigenous knowledge
Thomas Paine Study Centre 0
Traditional art practice and indigenous knowledge
Chairs: Karen Jacobs & Steven Hooper
Presenters: Kodzo Gavua & Lissant Bolton
This roundtable will address issues concerning the challenges faced in several regions of the world by practitioners who continue to work in media and forms deriving from their own cultural backgrounds, whether carving, textiles, pottery or other media. In what ways are these practices, connected to "heritage" and indigenous knowledge, (a) under threat, and/or (b) responding to environmental, climate change and other contemporary challenges? - 12:30-14:00 Lunch
- 14:00-15:30Panel session 10