SSSWARM Seminar Series

Scraps, Scavenging and Being Scavenged

Speaker: Timothy Neale, Deakin University

Room 441, Social Sciences Building, A02 and Zoom

A guest speaker event hosted by SSSWARM (Sydney Staff and Student Workshops on Anthropological Research Methods) (The SSSWARM seminar series will not be recorded)

Dr Timothy Neale is an STS scholar and anthropologist at Deakin University in Melbourne (Narrm), Australia. A pakeha (settler) academic from Aotearoa New Zealand, his research concerns the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to land, including the social life of land management infrastructures. He is the author of Wild Articulations (UHP, 2017) and his work has been published in multiple journals including Current Anthropology, Social Studies of Science and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He is also Editor of the STS journal, Science, Technology, & Human Values.

Dr. Neale’s talk will examine how ethnographers studying “up” or “across” must often develop forms of “polymorphous engagement’’ (Gusterson, 1997) or “scavenging” (Seaver, 2017) to understand interlocutors’ worlds, even where they have significant access to field sites. Reflecting on over seven years of research on Australia’s fire management sector, including multiple periods of participant observation, he will discuss how anthropologists in such contexts both hunt for scraps of knowledge and generate them. He will consider: if one hopes to scavenge successfully in a contemporary bureaucracy or business, does one also have to become an object of (bountiful) scavenging?

Suggested reading:

Seaver, Nick. 2017. “Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems” Big Data & Society 4 (2): 2053951717738104.

Please contact Sophie Chao for further information: sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au