SSSWARM Seminar Series

Multi-Object Ethnography

Speaker: Professor Megan Warin

Room 441, Social Sciences Building, A02 and Zoom

(The SSSWARM seminars series will not be recorded)

A guest speaker event hosted by SSSWARM (Sydney Staff and Student Workshops on Anthropological Research Methods)

MEGAN WARIN is a Professor and social anthropologist at the University of Adelaide. Her research explores the intersections of food, health, gender and place; how communities in Australia and the Pacific identified as ‘obesogenic’ and ‘vulnerable’ creatively respond to stigmatisation through relations of care and belonging; critical investigations of maternal nutrition, reproduction and developmental origins of health and disease; and the multiple forms of care needed when attaching epigenetic understandings of inter-generational trauma to Indigenous peoples and health. Megan is author of Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia (Rutgers University Press, 2009) and co-author with Tanya Zivkovic of Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs: Unpalatable Politics (Springer Nature, 2019). For more information, click here.

Prof. Warin’s talk will draw on her ethnographic research from the Australian suburbs and detail the complex relationships that interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research work entails. In investigating multi-object ethnography, we will bring anthropological practice, feminist Science and Technology Studies and public health into critical conversation.

Suggested readings:

1) Mol, A (2002) ‘Doing Disease’, Ch 1. in The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press, Durham. Available here.

2) Yates-Doerr, E. (2015). Intervals of confidence: Uncertain accounts of global hunger. BioSocieties, 10, 229-246. Available here.

3) Warin, M & T Zivkovic (2019) ‘Fat can ‘do stuff’’ (Ch 6) in Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs: Unpalatable Politics (Springer Nature).

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