Anthropology Seminar Series | Performing control: Ritual and divination in Australian emergency management
Anthropology Seminar Series:
Performing control: Ritual and divination in Australian emergency management
Speaker: Tim Neale (Deakin University)
Join via Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84573121784
During an unprecedented crisis of insuppressible fires, the staff of emergency management control centers in southeast Australia pause to perform rites with their political leaders. They reenact decisions that have already been made and generate divinations of fiery futures that are unlikely to occur. Their work, like others within large centralized technical infrastructures, is made possible by such performances of control over open and uncontrollable systems. Caught in a double-bind, they repeat rituals that both inevitably fail to command the world’s hazardous surprises and undermine the potential for self-critique or transformation. Attending to this situation, emergency management control centers and their inhabitants reveal persistent attachments to systems of control in our late industrial and changing climate.
Tim Neale is an anthropologist and STS scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand whose work addresses two overlapping fields of inquiry. The first examines natural hazards and environmental disasters through the social life of its technical infrastructures, and the second focuses on the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to lands and waters.
Host: Sophie Chao
3:00–5:00 PM (Sydney time, GMT+10)
Join via Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84573121784