Things are Looking Up: Researching the Rich, the Powerful and Those In-between
Convenors: Michael Gilding, Swinburne University of Technology; Tess Lea, Charles Darwin University; Martin Forsey, University of Western Australia
It is more than thirty years since Nader exhorted social researchers to ‘study up’: to cease gazing at the colonized in favour of research focused squarely on the rich and powerful on their home turf. She named access, attitudes, ethics and methodology as the main obstacles identified by her colleagues, but dismissed these objections either as issues faced in all types of fieldwork, as untested propositions, or as something we had to side-step if we are to really make a contribution to understanding the human condition. And yet, the project suggested by Nader has been barely touched by social researchers. Anthropologists in particular remain fixated on championing the subaltern, a focus that continues to hamper our ability to describe and comprehend relations of power and the social production of inequality. In calling for papers focused on the methodological, ethical and epistemological implications of conducting research among elites and the middle classes, we invite potential participants from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, those who have conducted research with upward inflections, those who are thinking of it and those who would not even consider it and are prepared to say why.
Abstracts
Bianca Brijnath, Monash University - ‘Most of them come from respectable middle-class families, and suddenly find themselves lost’: Dementia Care as a Middle-Class Conundrum in India
Ceridwen Spark, Monash University - Carleton’s Kids: ‘Power and wealth’ in Contemporary PNG
Ann Hale, University of Sydney - Circumcise or Circumvent: The Colonization of the Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS Research
Veronica Strang, University of Auckland - Old Guardians, New Guardians: Elite Contests over Land and Water in Queensland
Emma Kowal, University of Melbourne - Benevolent Anthropologies: The Hazards of Critiquing Liberalism
Michael Gilding, Swinburne University of Technology - Trust and Complicity: Methodological Issues in Interviews with Elites
Geoff Cartner, Charles Sturt University - Don’t Look Down: Adding a New Dimension to Police Culture by Looking up
Claire Malavaux, University of Western Australia - Studying Bureaucrats: Challenges and Difficulties.
Catherine Pattenden, University of Queensland - Putting on the Corporate Hat: The Methodological Challenges and Benefits of a Mining Corporation as a Site of Ethnographic Fieldwork
Martin Forsey, University of Western Australia - Critical Ethnography and the Importance of Studying In-between
Tess Lea, Charles Darwin University - Going Native in the Bureaucracy
Debra McDougall, University of Western Australia - Why We Should Keep Looking Down: Against the Metropolitanization of Anthropology
Discussant Wrap Up – Cris Shore, University of Auckland
