SSSWARM
Sydney Staff & Student Workshops in Anthropology, Research, and Methods
PROGRAMME
events in S2 2025
Ethnographic Photo Exhibition:
"Disorganised Labour: ride-hail drivers and social protest in Indonesia"
Robbie Peters (University of Sydney)
Thursday, 18 September 2025 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Level 4, Social Sciences Building, Room 441
Join us on level 4 of the Social Science building to view a series of Robbie’s ethnographic photos featuring protests among ride-hail drivers in Indonesia. We’ll then convene to the Seminar Room 441 to hear from Robbie on the topic and to engage in further discussion around the photos.
Centenary of Anthropology at USYD
100 Years of Anthropology at the University of Sydney
Thursday, 9 October 2025 • 9AM-6:30PM
Please join us in marking the centenary of Anthropology at the University of Sydney—Australia’s first anthropology department. The event will bring together current students, alumni, staff, community partners, and collaborators to reflect on our past, our present, and the future of anthropology.
The one-day celebration will feature:
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A workshop and roundtable on the past, present and future of Anthropology in Australia and Australia in Anthropology
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A panel discussion showcasing the exciting and diverse fields that anthropology graduates have pursued
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Museum exhibitions
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A showcase of recent and current student and staff research
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Social gatherings including a drinks reception
You can find more information and RSVP here:
Book Launch: Sophie Chao, “Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger”
Discussion with Hannah Della Bosca, Shiori Shakuto, and Veronika Koman. Chaired by Sonja Van Wichelen
Friday, 10 October 2025 • 6:00pm for 6:30pm Start
Join Sophie and others in the launch of her new book!
In Land of Famished Beings, Sophie Chao examines how Indigenous Marind communities understand and theorize hunger in lowland West Papua, a place where industrial plantation expansion and settler-colonial violence are radically reconfiguring ecologies, socialities, and identities.
Instead of seeing hunger as an individual, biophysical state defined purely in nutritional, quantitative, or human terms, Chao investigates how hunger traverses variably situated humans, animals, plants, institutions, infrastructures, spirits, and sorcerers. When approached through the lens of Indigenous Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols, hunger reveals itself to be a multiple, more-than-human, and morally imbued modality of being—one whose effects are no less culturally crafted or contested than food and eating.
In centering Indigenous feminist theories of hunger, Chao offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the environment, food, and nourishment in an age of self-consuming capitalist growth. She also considers how Indigenous theories invite anthropologists to reimagine the ethics and politics of ethnographic writing and the responsibilities, hesitations, and compromises that shape anthropological commitments in and beyond the field.
RSVP essential! More information is here: https://gleebooks.com.au/event/sophie-chao-land-of-famished-beings/
Hosted at Gleebooks
On the Art of Rubble: Fragments of concrete, fragments of politics in Thai art.
Eli Elinoff (Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka)
Thursday, 16 October 2025 • 04:00PM - 05:30PM • RD Watt Seminar Room 203
In the past decade, concrete has become a common medium and subject for Thai contemporary artists. Concrete comes in images of completed, half-built, and ruined infrastructures. It also comes as fragments, replications, and fractures of larger sections of built forms. Sometimes it just arrives as dust. During the same period of time, the country has experienced profound political upheaval. What do these two things have to do with each other? Does the emergence of concrete as a material for Thai artists tell us anything about Thai politics? Conversely, what can Thai politics tell us about the proliferation of artworks cast in concrete? In this talk, I will explore these questions through a close examination of the work of several artists exploring the limits of this material to speak back to this moment in time. I suggest that those works mobilize fragments of the urban environment to say something about the convergence between spatial transformation and political change, on the one hand, and changing ecological and moral worlds, on the other. By bringing these themes together, I aim to consider both the works themselves and the affective worlds these works educe.
events in S1 2025
CENTENARY CONVERSATIONS
The custom/religion/state nexus:
the ‘three hearths’ as colliding orders of time and space in Asmat, Indonesian Papua
Tom Powell-Davies (University of Cambridge)
Thursday, 19 June 2025 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Social Sciences Building, Room 441
In Melanesia and Indonesia, socio-political life is frequently organised around a tripartite relationship between custom, religion and state government. Building on the classic work of Kenelm Burridge, I analyse how tensions between these three institutional domains order the social fields of Asmat villagers, who live at the intersection of these regions as a Melanesian people incorporated within the Indonesian state. Asmat say that their key political task is to balance ancestral custom, missionary Catholicism and the state, which they describe as ‘three hearths’ around which people gather. The challenge, villagers argue, is avoiding spatio-temporal ‘collisions’, in which structures of action associated with one institutional ‘hearth’ disrupt the social formations required for the other two. Through a case study of one man’s attempt to draw a state infrastructure project and Catholicism within a ritual feast house construction project, I examine how Asmat people are using the ‘hearth’ as an egalitarian social model to domesticate church and state around local orientations to social spacetime. This case study highlights that the social fascination of the triadic custom/religion/state nexus lies in its instability. Using one institution to reshape the other two offers the promise of living relations of hierarchy as forms of autonomy, by transforming, rather than exiting, ever-shifting formations of the custom/religion/state nexus. This research theorises how subaltern cultural models for ordering society can operate as political tools for resisting and reshaping colonial structures.
Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge
Andrew Lakoff (University of Southern California)
Wednesday, 28 may 2025 • 01:30PM - 03:00PM • Seminar Room 203, RD Watt Building
The fractious and disorganized governmental response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States prompted many observers to ask why the country ‒ which had the knowledge, resources, and plans to deal with such an event ‒ was caught so unprepared when the crisis struck. In fact, this talk will argue, US officials had been planning for a pandemic for more than two decades, and many of these plans were implemented in the early stages of the pandemic. As authorities responded to the crisis, they relied on an already formulated set of concepts and tools that had been devised for managing a future emergency. These preexisting tools enabled officials to make sense of the event and to rapidly implement policies in response, but they also led to significant blind spots. What did these planning tools allow officials to see, and what did they hide from view? And, as we assess the failures in our response to the pandemic and attempt to prepare for “the next one,” to what extent should we take for granted the capacity of these tools to guide future interventions effectively?
The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India
Alpah Shah (University of Oxford)
Insider Indigenous Anthropology: a personal perspective
Jakelin Troy (University of Sydney)
Thursday, 1 May • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Social Sciences Building, Room 650
Professor Jaky Troy is Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at the University of Sydney. A Ngarigu woman of the Snowy Mountains in south eastern Australia, her interests are focused on documenting, describing, and reviving Indigenous languages. She is currently undertaking two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects; one on the history of Aboriginal missions and reserves in eastern Australia, and the history of Aboriginal people who were not institutionalised, and the other on the practise of 'corroboree' by Aboriginal people in the 'assimilation period' of the mid 20th century in Australia. Professor Troy's research interests also tie in with the use of Indigenous research methodologies and community engaged research practises.
PhD Students Present
Thursday, 17 April • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Social Sciences Building, Room 441
Callie Evans, PhD Student in Anthropology
Hospitality and Dispossession in the Archipelago of San Andrés, Colombia
Kevin Abimanyu Jatmiko, PhD Student in Anthropology
Refusing Aid, Cultivating Sovereignty: The Boti Community’s Path to Food Resilience amid Crisis
Carissa Henriksson, PhD Student in Anthropology
Vulnerability and Violence: Perspectives and Experiences from within the Disability Sector in New South Wales, Australia
Reconfiguring Relationships: Ayurveda, preconception, and epigenetics
Natasha Rooney (University of Sydney)
Thursday, 10 April • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Social Sciences Building, Room 441
This talk explores the convergence of epigenetics, a burgeoning molecular science and Ayurveda, a form of medicine forming around the time of the Buddha on the Indian subcontinent. Using data collected from my PhD research using digital ethnography and interviews with Ayurvedic practitioners, I explore the developing relationship between Ayurveda and epigenetics and explore its common focus of reproduction, particularly in relation to the preconception period. This period before a child is conceived is ambiguously defined yet has been highlighted as a window of opportunity by epigenetic researchers. By focusing on the reproductive body, Ayurvedic practitioners can make links between Ayurveda and epigenetic research. I explore how Ayurvedic practitioners view epigenetics within this context and use epigenetic research and terminology to reconfigure their relationship with biomedicine, as well as explore tensions which surface during the process.
events in S2 2024
Cycling Caste and Cargo in Urban India
Malini Sur (Western Sydney University)
Thursday, 15 August 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Social Sciences Building, Room 441
Set against distinct visions of the city shaped by developmental logics of globalization, air pollution and environmental ideas, this paper explores the changing circuits of caste and the resilience of cargo-cycling in India. I take the movements of vendor-cyclists and the goods they circulate as a starting point to think about relationality and difference. My talk will illustrate how the transformation of riverine ecologies and floodplains, the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the creation of new markets reorder the relationship between caste and migration in the city of Kolkata in eastern India.
Translation work, interdisciplinarity and the anatomy of a project
Mardi Reardon-Smith (Deakin University)
Thursday, 29 August 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • RD Watt Building, Room 203
There is growing interest among Indigenous peoples, in Australia and internationally, in finding ways to commercialize traditional knowledge about medicine plants that benefit traditional knowledge holders equitably. To date, the Therapeutic Goods Administration has never approved an Indigenous medicine on the basis of traditional knowledge. In part, this lack of progress on the part of the TGA is what led to the creation of the Indigenous Australian medicines project. This project has brought together medical anthropologists, Indigenous intellectual property legal scholars, biochemists and regulatory affairs experts from three different universities and industry to work on the case study of the mudjala plant, a type of freshwater mangrove used by a diversity of Aboriginal groups along the Martuwarra/Fitzroy River in the Kimberley region of Western Australia for pain relief. I have been working alongside Professor Emma Kowal to develop new anthropological methods to document oral evidence of the traditional use of mudjala in a way that will be legible to the TGA.
The Indigenous Australian medicines project sounds great on paper. It is thoroughly interdisciplinary, is led by an Indigenous scholar, and is based on long-term relationships with key Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. It has decidedly real-world implications, while simultaneously provoking interesting academic questions about how we understand and assess knowledge-claims. However, with such a diversity of disciplinary perspectives and personal attachments towards the project in the research team, part of the work of doing the project has been untangling the sticky sets of priorities and agendas of the research team itself. In this seminar, I will get at some big questions, including: What does it mean to do translation work for a powerful national institution? What does it mean to do interdisciplinary work? And when are disciplinary boundaries actually important for ensuring a project’s success?
Ethnography in the archive: listening, being, and doing in archival collections
Henrietta Byrne (University of Sydney)
Thursday, 12 September 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • RD Watt Building, Room 203
This presentation uses reflections from my doctoral fieldwork in 2021 to explore how anthropologists can bring ethnographic attention to archival materials. As part of my study on the legacies of nuclear testing on Anangu lands and peoples, I spent time in the National Archives of Australia (NAA) and Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) archives with documents from the 1984 Royal Commission into British Nuclear Testing collation. In this presentation, I draw on this experience to consider how archival materials, and archives themselves, can be rich sites for ethnography, as well as question and consider the ways in which anthropologists can engage with colonial archival collections without upholding their epistemic power.
Detective research work amidst unspeakable crimes: Anthropological fieldwork and the Rohingya
Elliott Prasse-Freeman (National University of Singapore)
Thursday, 26 September 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • RD Watt Building, Room 203
Over the past dozen years, the Myanmar military state’s persecution of the Rohingya has been well-documented. The predominantly Muslim people, indigenous to the country’s western Arakan state, have endured oppression - including forced labor, suppression of religious freedom, restriction of marriage, curtailment of movement - that has tipped into ethnic cleansing and even genocide. These facts are important to record. And yet, the weight of the aggregated horror has flattened the Rohingya as a people into a one-dimensional caricature of abjection - impoverished, oppressed, violated, and deracinated, in which each individual Rohingya is a perfect indistinguishable replica of the suffering body. This representation, however, does not conform to the facts - even instances of state violence often reveal significantly differential experiences (for instance, wealthy Rohingya were able to avoid forced labor by paying bribes while poor Rohingya could not) which in turn limns the contours of a highly differentiated society. And yet, here another problem emerges: it is difficult to identify the substantive content of that society and its cultures. The simple anthropological solution - participate in and observe their lives - is made difficult not just due to ongoing war in Arakan, but because, as Rohingya themselves will point out, their culture has been, to differing degrees, destroyed, corrupted, and lost in the face of genocidal assault. And yet, the project feels particularly urgent, especially because Rohingya themselves are trying to preserve their lifeways in the face of erasure. The talk reflects on the necessity of engaging in academic “detective work” - searching for clues, developing hypotheses, chasing hunches - while pursuing a host of mixed methods (ethnography, archival work, an oral history project), and attempts to draw some general conclusions about fieldwork in challenging contexts.
Eco-Anxiety?: Dharam, Masculinity and Madness at the Himalayan Frontier
Nikita Simpson (SOAS University of London)
Thursday, 17 October 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • Social Sciences Building, Room 441
This paper centres the stories of Gaddi young men who experienced bouts of madness (pagalpan), disassociative possession, and distress (tension), seemingly out of nowhere. In some cases, the period of distress was brief – and followed an episode of frustrated agency. For others, forms of distress crept in more slowly, and were experienced as headaches, fevers, and insomnia. They seemed to surround questions of work, and particularly work on the land.
The Gaddi community, who inhabit the foothills of Kangra’s Dhaula Dhar range, have experienced a rapid shift in livelihood over the last century. They have all but given up their semi-nomadic agro-pastoralist way of life for waged labour and entrepreneurial business exploits in the blossoming tourist and hydropower sectors. This shift in livelihood had been mirrored by changes in land use and ownership arrangements, where many Gaddis have sold or are selling their appreciating land to city-dwellers seeking cleaner air in the mountains. It has also been mirrored by rapidly changing patterns of climate and weather, that have brought the snows early, caused crops to fail, and noxious weeds to invade pastures. There is a sense, particularly from elderly Gaddis, that this community has lost their dharam – or moral way of life. Younger Gaddi men are left grappling with the guilt of such a loss, whilst also attempting to patch together their ‘Gaddiness’ with the muscular Hindu nationalist masculinities that they increasingly encounter. For some, such a struggle manifests in distress, and even madness.
This paper examines the experiences of distress that afflict young Gaddi men, as their relationship to the land and environment shifts dramatically. In doing so, it brings the question of mental health and distress to the study of environmental humanities in South Asia. It asks, what are the psychic impacts of climate change and environmental degradation for those who experience it most acutely? However, in order to do so, it does not deploy the epistemological tools of the psy-sciences that privilege Western diagnostic categories. Instead, it delves into the moral and ontological world of the Gaddi people and investigates what symbolic instabilities and stymied vitalities that might generate distress for Gaddi men.
Making museum collections useful to Islanders: restoring women’s knowledge
Leah Lui-Chivizhe (University of New South Wales)
Thursday, 31 October 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • RD Watt Building, Room 203
In 1898 salvage anthropologist Alfred Haddon confiscated a notice board from Mer (Murray Island) and took it with him to Cambridge. When I stumbled upon it in 2012 the only word, I recognised of the Meriam Mir script was “koseker” (woman). Thinking the sign was directed at excluding women, I photographed it and moved on. Back in Sydney I was heartened to learn the sign was taken from an area on Mer that was exclusively for ‘women and many little girls’. When I presented images of the sign and its full translation to Meriam koskir in 2015, one response overwhelmed me; “but the men told us there was nothing here for us”.
The despair in this reply became the catalyst for my work to use museum collections to recover and write Islander women’s histories. In this talk I will share about my work-in-progress for the exhibition, Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous Futures for Colonial Collections.
Research, Outputs and Ethics in Collaboration: Reflections from Myanmar
Elizabeth Rhoads (Lund University) and Jenny Hedström (Swedish Defence University)
Thursday, 14 November 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM • RD Watt Room 203
We will both share recent collaborative projects with civil society groups, researchers, and artists/creators from the projects "Yangon Stories" (https://www.yangonstories.com) - a collaborative British Academy-funded project between University College London and three Burmese civil society organizations working on housing rights and evictions and multiple Burmese visual artists and designers, and "Land, Labor, Love and Revolution", a collaborative project between the NGO Fortify Rights, Dr. Hedstrom, Dr. Hilary Faxon and Burmese researchers and artists which published their research as a graphic novel. What does it look like to work in a collaborative research project from start to finish? Are all collaborators
working towards the same goal or can each have multiple different goals realized through the project? How do the multiple positionalities of partners influence project design and research ethics? How can research 'outputs' be reconceptualized or how do they need to be expanded when working in collaboration?
past events in S2 2023
WORKSHOP: Thursday 3 August
1:30 - 2:30 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Sophie Chao (University of Sydney)
Title: The body as method (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Wednesday 9 August
3:30 – 5:00 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Timothy Neale (Alfred Deakin Institute)
Title: Scraps, scavengings, and being scavenged (more info here)
WORKSHOP: Thursday 7 September
1:30 - 2:30 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Gregoire Randin (University of Sydney)
Title: Fieldwork reflections on the realities of decolonizing ethnography in Fijian iTaukei (Indigenous) communities (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Wednesday 13 September
3:30 – 5:00 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Rihan Yen (University of California San Diego)
Title: Coyote's method (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Wednesday 20 September
3:30 – 5:00 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Elizabeth Chin (ArtCenter College of Design)
Title: Electronic story quilts (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Wednesday 4 October
3:30 - 5:00 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Yancey Orr (University of Sydney/Smith College)
Title: Methodological Dividualism: Experimental Methods to Studying Life in Bits (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Wednesday 18 October
3:30 - 5:00 pm, Social Sciences Building A02 Room 441 and on Zoom (link here)
Presenter: Tom Bratrud (Bergen University)
Title: ‘Proper’ ethnographic fieldwork in the digital age: ambitions, experiences and lessons from rural Norway
(more info here)
past events in S1 2023
GUEST EVENT: Thursday 16 March
Presenter: Matthew Gutmann
Title: Sinking or swimming in methods? (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Monday 27 March
Presenter: Nicholas Peterson (Australian National University)
Title: Doing ethnography (more info here)
WORKSHOP: Thursday 6 April
Presenter: Misty Shan-el-Shalam (University of Sydney)
Title: Ethnography as a method of data collection for qualitative research (more info here)
WORKSHOP: Thursday 4 May
Presenter: Luis Angosto Ferrandez (University of Sydney)
Title: So what does a national flag really mean (more info here)
GUEST EVENT: Monday 22 May
Presenter: Megan Warin (University of Adelaide)
Title: Multi-object ethnography (more info here)
past events in S2 2022
WORKSHOP: Monday 1 August
Presenter: Angela Wong (University of Sydney)
Title: A World between Worlds: Vietnam's Boatpeople in Liminal Spaces of the post-Vietnam War Exodus
WORKSHOP: Monday 5 September
Presenter: Thuy Duong Tran (University of Sydney)
Title: Queer Identity Formation in Socialist Vietnam – Reflection on Research Methods
WORKSHOP: Monday 3 October
Presenter: Dominic Sidoti (University of Sydney)
Title: The Permanent Reduction of Anxiety: Devereux and Fieldwork in a Remote Aboriginal Community
WORKSHOP: Monday 7 November
Presenter: Meherose Borthwick (University of Sydney)
Title: Navigating Difference
WORKSHOP: Monday 5 December
Presenter: Dr Robbie Peters (University of Sydney)
Title: The Ethical Stakes of Pseudonyms