AAS 2026 Conference - Call for Papers

Anni Kajanus (University of Helsinki)

Mild unpleasant feelings, such as annoyance, awkwardness, and disappointment, are a pervasive feature of the human experience, something that plays a major role in relationships of many kinds. We may find ourselves irritated by strangers, but perhaps ever more so, by those with whom we are close, e.g., our spouses, colleagues, siblings, and friends. These emotional experiences can be seen as minor or secondary by comparison with love, fear, hate, disgust, etc. But their everydayness – combined with the constraint, in many contexts, against voicing them publicly – can make them powerful. It might be felt that emotional friction is a threat to intimacy; that if taken too far, it will compromise the very patterns of cooperation and care on which these relationships depend. And yet the pervasiveness of this mild friction in our everyday experience suggests something else: that in some sense we may need it – even that it is a constitutive layer of human sociality.

This panel invites contributions that bring new perspectives on human sociality and intimate life by putting mild emotional friction at its centre. We encourage critical and productive engagements across disciplinary boundaries, to explore the cultural, psychological, and embodied dimensions of emotions.

Glen Michalski (Adelaide University)

How might pulling back the layers of reality and plumbing the depths of impossibility open new lines of flight? Contradiction, aporia, and failure are something anthropologists encounter both in the field and in their attempts to conceptualise field materials. Anthropology’s commitment to reflexivity entails an awareness of the limitations of our knowledge, this panel asks anthropologists to intensify this commitment by asking after the ontological and epistemic potentiality of these very limitations. A symmetrical anthropology, moreover, would point not only to the failures of ethnographic theory but also the failures at the heart of the life-worlds the discipline explores ethnographically. If, as Mimica (2010) argues, un/knowing is central to the practice of anthropology, how does un/knowing manifest in the mundane and remarkable events of being-in-the-world? Bubandt (2014), for example, has described the force of doubt and aporia in witchcraft in Buli; Espírito Santo (2024) has perhaps gone the furthest in exploring the negative and unknown in her work across Latin America. This panel asks anthropologists to reflect on doubt, negativity and the impossible through their own case studies and theoretical experiments. How does the unknowable shape both our existential projects and anthropological knowledge production?

Judit Molnar (Australian National University)

How do migrants experience and sustain connections to ‘home’ across distance, time, and political rupture? This panel explores layers of attachment as lived, contested, and reworked amongst diaspora communities. Rather than treating 'home' as a fixed place, we understand it as uneven and often ambivalent, shaped both by affect and state power that defines regimes of belonging. 

Migrants may sustain multiple, overlapping, or contradictory senses of belonging: to a homeland that has changed; to a state that claims them instrumentally; to kin and communities fractured by migration; or to imagined futures that reconfigure what ‘return’ might mean. Through the study of everyday practices of communication, ritual, and remittance sending, moral obligations, political engagement, and emotional labour, we unveil how these layered attachments interact and what kind of subjectivities emerge in the process.

The panel welcomes ethnographically grounded papers that engage with diverse regions and migration contexts. By bringing together comparative cases and theoretical reflections, the panel aims to advance anthropological debates on diaspora by centring how migrants experience home not as a singular anchor, but as a layered and conflicting horizon.

Anna-Karina Hermkens (Macaquarie University), Sophie Pascoe (Menzies Institute for Health Research), Anna Sanders (Australian National University)

In the face of climate change, resource extraction and ongoing inequities, First Nations peoples demonstrate strength, tenacity and innovation in responding to environmental and social change. First Nations populations across Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia are on the frontline of climate change impacts, namely sea-level rise, flooding, drought and cyclones. While diverse, these communities share values and practices deeply grounded in connections to their lands, waters and ancestors. This panel provides an opportunity to explore the intersections between climate change, custom and Indigenous knowledge and discuss the layers of externally-driven and locally-grounded responses to climate change and cultural conservation in our wider region. Incorporating Indigenous and local knowledge is central to design and assess adaptation approaches and their impacts on communities and ecosystems. Sharing of experiences, stories and approaches between contexts may support lines of connection across countries. These connections can enhance the depth of understanding around multidimensional causes/impacts of climate change and opportunities for collaboration, adaptation and mitigation.

Sophie Chao (University of Sydney)

This panel invites contributions that rethink food, diet, and nourishment as metabolic relations—processes of absorption, ingestion, and transformation that link bodies, ecologies, and political economies, sustaining some lives while undermining others. Building on the analytic of “metabolic (in)justice”, it attends to how nourishment is unevenly distributed through racial colonial capitalism, extractive frontiers, and global food systems, while also remaining grounded in more-than-human dependencies that make eating possible. In keeping with the 2026 AAS conference theme, we ask presenters to track the lines (supply chains, borders, kin relations), layers (histories of dispossession, policy regimes, infrastructures), and depths (gut-level embodiment, multispecies interdependence, geological and hydrological strata) through which nourishment becomes a site of struggle and possibility in Mparntwe/Alice Springs and beyond. Possible lines of inquiry for this panel include: Where do metabolic injustices “stick” in bodies, lands, and communities—and how are they made ordinary? How do people and other-than-human kin rework nourishment amid extractive or settler-colonial food regimes? What would “metabolic justice” look like as practice (care, sovereignty, repair) across sites, scales, species, and subjects? Alongside formal presentations, artistic contributions to this panel are also warmly welcome, including in the form of film, photo essays, and audio.

Tamara Kohn (Melbourne University), Sascha Fuller (University of Newcastle), Paul Mason (Macquarie University)

Food moves along lines of kinship, trade, care, and governance, but also along routes of extraction, processing, regulation, aid, disposal, and scientific classification. It accumulates layers of meaning through labour, memory, policy, the senses, and Dreaming, and gains depth through time. Through soils and aquifers, bodies and microbiomes, and the stories that bind people to place, food becomes a site where ecological processes, social relations, and ethical obligations converge. Because food is simultaneously material and symbolic, ecological and chemical, intimate and infrastructural, food anthropology offers a generative lens through which layered histories of deterritorialisation and survival, environmental injustice and ecological adaptation, governance, and care can be examined together. We invite papers that explore food practices across deep time and contemporary crises, including Indigenous food sovereignty and bush foods; colonial and corporate food regimes; arid-zone food futures under climate change; industrial and agricultural production; ultra-processed foods, plastic pollution, conspicuous consumption, food waste and health inequities; the medicalisation of eating; alternative and Indigenous knowledges; and emerging scientific and cultural narratives around functional foods and bioactives. By approaching food as sustenance, medicine, commodity, waste, and moral practice, the panel extends anthropological debates on sovereignty, care, and sustainability in the Anthropocene.

Alan Williams (EMM Consulting Pty Ltd), Delyna Baxter (EMM Consulting Pty Ltd)

How do you define an impact from a road, transmission line, building, wind turbine, etc., to intangible places, stories and/or values, and what constitutes a credible mitigation outcome when recovery, relocation or salvage is not feasible? For decades, industry-driven investigations and assessments have focussed on management of tangible cultural heritage (e.g. rockshelters, stone artefacts, etc.), but stronger consideration of intangible places and values is becoming increasingly critical. The Federal Court challenge of the Barossa offshore gas project, potentially impacting the Ampiji and Jirakupai Dreaming ancestral beings, and the recent rejection of the billion-dollar McPhillamy gold project in NSW as a result of a Blue-Banded Bee Dreaming story are two examples where understanding and managing this component of Indigenous heritage is essential. As a result, anthropologists and archaeologists working in industry and cultural heritage management contexts must address the complexity of documenting and managing often poorly spatially defined places, stories and values within rigid spatial regulatory frameworks. This extends to assessing potential impacts to such features and, where avoidance is not achievable, developing mitigation outcomes with the Indigenous community. This panel presents case studies and emerging lessons to inform practical guidance for future assessments and management of intangible Indigenous heritage values.

Anton Sidorov (Macquarie University)

Anthropology has long argued that the senses are not just biological inputs but culturally moulded ways of knowing, and sensory classifications are “fundamental structures of social life” (Classen). Yet synaesthesia and cross-modal perception press on a lingering question: What if an individual’s sensory world does not align with shared sensoria? When colour is heard, music is felt as texture, and emotion gets literally coloured, how do ethnographers avoid explaining them away as metaphor or neurological pathology?

Sensory anthropology posits that “there is no universal sensorium” (Howes), while ecological approaches explicate perception as emerging through situated engagement with environments (Ingold). Juxtaposing these perspectives on sensory socialisation, this session asks: what counts as a legitimate perceptual world? How do conceptual categories constrain cross-modal experience? How are the sensory norms implicated? What follows for anthropological theories of evidence, shared reality, and epistemic authority?

This forum invites a moderated open discussion of these tensions moving from first-person accounts toward collective reflection with short provocations and invited commentaries. Engaging the theme Lines, Layers, Depth, we treat perception as layered and relational, and, therefore, never immediately transparent. Thus, synaesthesia becomes a lens on perceptual plurality, situated cognition, and the depth of anthropological engagement with experience.

Sophie Pascoe (Menzies School of Health Research)

Anthropology and Indigenous health have a long and intertwined history. In Northern Australia, current health research projects may not be explicitly framed as ‘anthropology’ but may sit at the margins of and weave through the discipline, engaging ethnographic methods and wrangling with settler-colonialism and social determinants of health. This panel is an invitation to apply an anthropological lens to see lines of discussion and layers of understanding across diverse health research projects. Thinking through enduring topics of agency, structure, culture and systems, as well as more recent debates around ontological politics, this panel provides an opportunity to look at health and wellbeing from multiple angles. Drawing together anthropology, ethnoecology, public health, health policy and systems research, this panel is about the permeable boundaries between and across disciplines. How can we foreground Aboriginal ways of being and knowing and reflect the strength and tenacity of communities in the face of devastating health inequities? How can anthro-adjacent research be translated to inform culturally-responsive, socially-accountable health systems? Grounded in current research projects in Northern Australia, this panel will be an exploration of lines of convergence and points of divergence in the Indigenous health research space.

James Rose (The University of Melbourne), Liddie Perrurie (Strehlow Research Centre), Jason Gibson (Deakin University)

This panel brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal experts in Central Australian cultural heritage protection to discuss their joint work investigating, recording, and sharing with traditional owner communities cultural knowledge believed to be currently at risk of loss, or previously thought lost. The panel will describe programs and initiatives currently active across Central Australia, which harness the collaborative leadership of senior and emerging experts from local communities, and expert social anthropologists. Drawing on extensive archives recorded by past collaborations between the cultural and intellectual ancestors of the panel convenors, presentations will highlight the successes and struggles that they have experienced in this work, together with their recommendations for future enhancements. Specific programs and initiatives under discussion will include those of the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs, the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority working across the Northern Territory, academic studies funded by the Australian Research Council, and other community-based projects. Throughout the panelists’ presentations and ensuing discussion, a focus will be kept on the ethics of social anthropological work, and best-practice partnerships between expert community members, expert social anthropologists, and institutions.

Holly High (Deakin University), Cynthia Sear (Melbourne University)

The anthropology of Australia' once meant the anthropology of the world's oldest living cultures, the First Nations and indigenous groups of this continent. It was core disciplinary reading, inspiring intellectuals such as Freud, Levi-Strauss and Mauss. When such scholars mentioned 'Australian culture,' we knew they meant Indigenous Australia.

But this gloss no longer holds. 'Australia' is not an indigenous word or concept. Indeed, 'Australia' is often used in ways that exclude indigenous experience--as, for instance, on 'Australia Day.' At the same time, anthropologists working in Australia grapple with a sense of marginality to the discipline as a whole, with publishers wondering what the 'broader relevance' work on Australia might have. Meanwhile, studies of Australia as a social, cultural and political construct exist, but fragmented across indigenous studies, migration studies, settler-colonial critique, and urban ethnography. What, if any, lines, layers or depths unite 'the anthropology of Australia' today?

Using the playful form of a hypothetical undergraduate essay question as a prompt, this panel questions what is meant by 'Australia' now and tests the proposition that an anthropology of such is worthwhile. We invite essays, literature reviews, surveys of 'the classics', ethnographic work and creative responses to the provocation, for or against.

Kari Dahlgren (Monash University), Fabio Mattioli (University of Melbourne)

Anthropology in Australia is currently taught under a set of layered pressures: larger and more diverse classrooms, demands for “job-ready” graduates, changing reading practices and attention spans, generative AI, increasingly interdisciplinary programs, and ongoing efforts to decolonise curricula. These conditions are often framed as challenges to some of anthropology’s disciplinary history and form, and its commitments to ethnographic depth, slow thinking, and situated knowledges. However, rather than treating these shifts as only a loss or a crisis, this panel asks how we can respond to them and harness the opportunities they also present for our discipline. We are particularly interested in practical and reflective accounts of pedagogical experiments such as redesigning reading and assessment in response to changing student engagement; teaching with or about AI or other emerging technologies; embedding Indigenous and decolonial knowledges into disciplinary histories; and sustaining anthropological ways of thinking in large or digitally mediated classrooms.

By sharing concrete teaching practices and critical reflections, this panel aims to open a collective conversation about how anthropology’s depth is produced, negotiated, and reworked through teaching under contemporary conditions.

Sam Williams (Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University)

Across Australia, First Nations groups have interacted with anthropologists from the earliest days of settler colonialism. Occasionally, generations of Indigenous landowners have engaged with generations of anthropologists, whether in academic or applied anthropological work. Lines of doctoral supervision can be traced like genealogies, younger anthropologists inheriting relationships from their forbears. In Land Councils and NTRBs, an anthropologist may be one in a long line of anthropologists with regional responsibilities.

This panel invites contributions from anthropologists working in contexts of these ‘layered’ anthropological encounters, whether early-career, mid-generation or older anthropologists. The panel seeks to explore what contemporary good faith research partnerships with Indigenous communities entail given these anthropological shadows. Panelists might consider the following questions:

• What legacies have we inherited – relationships, expectations, but also theoretical orientations, methodological limitations?

• How is fieldwork by younger anthropologists ‘authorised’ within their anthropological genealogy? To whom is it accountable?

• Where fieldwork is undertaken in ‘layered’ contexts, how is archival research reactivated?

• Can tracing anthropological genealogies with our Indigenous collaborators shed light on anthropological research that offer insight into our discipline?  

The panel encourages co-authored contributions with Indigenous research partners, and presentations that facilitate dialogue between older and younger anthropologists working in the same field sites.

Kim McCaul (Flinders University)

This panel explores relationships between humans and significant places and invites case studies and theoretical reflections from around the world and different cultural contexts.

Notions of a ‘sacred landscape’, including an intimate, emotionally and spiritually charged relationship between humans and places, are an element of cultures globally, as is the presence of narratives (‘myths’, ‘Dreamings’, ’stories’), which encode the source of geographic significances. In many colonial countries, Indigenous people are continuously advocating for the protection of places and their stories against pressures from cultural outsiders. In other countries, both sacred landscapes and place-based narratives may have been seemingly forgotten but are seeing a revival as relationships with sacred places are deliberately rebuilt. Sometimes the bases for this are old stories and traditions, sometimes more recent ones.

Questions explored for this session may include (among others): Can relationships to significant places support people deal with feelings of power- and hopelessness in the face of environmental changes? Can relationships with natural places meet fundamental human needs often not met in modern societies? What are the different ontological foundations of human-place relationships? A focus on the emotional depth and embodied layers of human-place relationships is encouraged.

Adele Millard (The University of Western Australia), Loretta Baldassar (Edith Cowan University)

This panel invites papers that critically engage with notions of remoteness. What does it mean to be “living remotely”? For some, a so‑called remote location may be the centre of their world. With expanding transportation options, ‘remote medicine’, and new communication technologies, the boundaries of remoteness have become increasingly blurred.

Around the world, individuals—including migrants—live remotely from loved ones, from speakers of their first language, or from communities that share their cultural values and practices. Over the last 30 years, technological and policy developments have enabled new forms of meaningful engagement for people who live far from family, care providers, employers, financial institutions, and education systems. Yet these same technologies are used by those who remain “in place” to access identical networks and services.

How have these changes reshaped the lived experience of “being remote”? Do our theories of remoteness require rethinking? Physical proximity offers clear benefits—access to specialist care, diverse social worlds, or the simple comfort of a hug. But distance can also offer advantages, including relief from family demands, rigid work expectations, or institutional surveillance.

We welcome papers that offer ethnographic insights and theoretical provocations about what remoteness means today.

Damien Bright (University of Chicago), Roy Kimmey (University of Notre Dame)

“I’d prefer not to.” “Unbelievable!” “They’re not like us.” Boycotts. Refusal. Carbon bombs. Silence. How does negation show up in the world? What are its pragmatics and poetics? What happens when it becomes a desiring force? Negation is vital to the human condition. It is a psychic mechanism for sorting affect from concept and so the basis for interpreting experience. It underwrites collective transformation by helping cleave necessity from ideology. Negation also limns our ordinary lives, in the form of subverted expectations, minor obstacles, and missed connections.

While welcoming discussion of resistance, this panel seeks to examine negation as a social kaleidoscope, a thing of layers, lines and depths often articulated through prepositions (un-, in-, an-, de-, dis-, non-, anti-, etc.). We welcome submissions on negation as a process, in line with scholarship on the modern drive to abandon (Povinelli 2011), deplete (Bessire 2021), or disavow (Zupančič 2024). Alert to the ordinary (Das 2006; Berlant 2011; Lepselter 2016), we invite work on the unwanted, unlikely, or unspoken. In a time of surging populisms, we welcome studies of anti-political, anti-crisis, or anti-science movements. Finally, submissions may take unconventional approaches and employ visual ethnography, ficto-criticism, audience participation, etc.

Georgia Curran (University of Sydney)

Early Australian anthropology of the late 1800s and much of the 1900s was significantly focused on recording ‘traditional Aboriginal culture’. These efforts were somewhat of a paradox as they were mostly conducted with dominant colonial mindsets of ‘primitive societies’ and seen as the documentation of a ‘dying race’, yet at the same time produced descriptions of detailed societal and kinship structures, sophisticated ceremonies, language, song structure and form, amongst many other aspects. For many Indigenous peoples across Australia this has created a tense relationship with these documentary records. On one hand they often capture information which can contribute to and support the maintenance and reclamation of practices central to cultural identity. On the other they are permeated with ideologies set within the assimilationist policies that disempowered Aboriginal people throughout this history. This panel invites papers by researchers working in collaboration with Indigenous Australian communities on song and ceremony to share on the issues and challenges of this space. We invite papers which reflect on the ways in which anthropological documentation can and has been used for maintenance and revitalisation of song and dance and to support activities which empower people and communities.

Lisa Stefanoff (Northern Institute)

What forms are experiments in ethnography taking in Australia today? Why and how are they being created, and who are they involving?

This panel invites the creators of films, digital media, performances, installations, photography, sound works, and texts that embody experimental intention, modes of collaboration, and ideas, to come together to discuss the lines, layers, and depth of their work.

Works that have connection to the desert and other ‘remote’ zones of Australia encouraged but not essential.

The form, content and location of this panel will be co-curated with participants, based on their offerings and theoretical priorities.

note : This panel could require more than one slot, to allow for looking, listening, experiencing of works and discussion.

Andrea Whittaker (Monash University)

Frontiers evokes the crossing of boundaries, be they geographical, biological, epistemological, conceptual, technological or methodological. Accordingly, in this panel we invite papers representing the latest medical anthropology research and lines of enquiry in Australia, to consider how frontiers define and limit, challenge and provoke and who lives in the margins. It also engages with imaginaries of frontiers in the life sciences and medicine. Implicit in the notion of frontiers lie anticipations of the future: how we envisage a thriving society, what technological advances will be available to assist us and how future generations will be supported.

Hedda Askland (The University of Newcastle), Randi Irwin (The University of Newcastle)

Extraction is, by definition, the act of removing or obtaining something from somewhere. It is often imagined as a rupture of the surface, unravelling resources beneath what was previously visible. As a surface act, extraction produces lines, layers and depth: lines drawn on maps, pits dug into the earth, resources removed and exported. Yet extractive industries operate through layered processes that extend beyond material extraction. They generate stratified landscapes, sedimented histories, and overlapping temporalities of labour, value, harm, and hope. These layers are not only physical and geological, but also social, political, cultural and affective.

This panel invites papers that examine extraction and post-extractive transitions through the lenses of layers, lines and depth. We welcome ethnographic and theoretically engaged contributions that explore how extractive economies shape stratified landscapes and social worlds; how infrastructures, and governance regimes produce lines of inclusion, exclusion, and responsibility; and how depth—geological, historical, affective—structures experiences of harm, care, and futurity.

Papers may engage with mining, energy, agriculture, forestry, or other extractive practices, as well as processes of closure, rehabilitation, and transition. The panel traces how extractive histories are layered into the present, and how post-extractive futures are imagined, contested, and lived within deeply marked terrains.

Mira Käkönen (Australian National University), Tuomas Tammisto (Tampere University)

Infrastructures are often incremental, as Anand, Gupta and Appel (2018) famously note. Railroads may follow existing paths, abandoned infrastructures can be revived and existing systems may be retrofitted. Discarded infrastructures also frequently persist long after their abandonment, producing socio‑political effects and offering affordances that shape future possibilities (e.g. Carse and Kneas 2019; Ramakrishnan et al. 2021).

This, we argue, applies also to various standardisation systems and other ‘knowledge infrastructures’, from laws to the data infrastructures of contemporary environmental governance schemes. While the temporality, incrementality and forceful afterlives of ‘hard’ infrastructures has been extensively studied, this is less the case for knowledge infrastructures (though see Cohn 1996, Lampland and Star 2009).

We invite papers that reflect upon the incremental and temporal characters of infrastructure and standardisation systems – understood, following Brian Larkin, as networks established to facilitate the circulation of things, people and ideas. We emphasise that such networks are also built to control and regulate movement – and are hence always also about power.

We are particularly interested in papers that discuss the articulations between hard and knowledge infrastructures, the significance of their multiple temporalities, and how people use, live with and shape them, while also being shaped by them.

Klara Hansen (PBC Link), Emily Sexton (PBC Link)

An accessible panel: informal and experience-based presentations encouraged.

While there are many forms of legal determination, this panel focuses specifically on native title determination. We invite practitioners working across all areas of the post-determination sector to contribute. We welcome proposals including (but not limited to) short talks, reflections on practice, works-in-progress or papers. Presentations can address any aspect of native title post-determination work. Contributions may draw on community-based work, professional experience, research, artistic or other forms of practice.

The panel aims to bring together people working in different post-determination settings to explore the intersecting issues that arise in post-determination contexts. It will provide a space for critical discussion, reflexive engagement, and networking among participants. We will work together to identify shared themes, challenges and strategies that can strengthen our collective practice.

Emily Sexton (PBC Link)

This panel seeks to look beyond the traditional domains of anthropological practice in Australia, within academia, cultural heritage, and native title, to examine anthropology at the intersection of entrepreneurship, business, and applied social innovation. Bringing together anthropologists working in business and entrepreneurial contexts, this panel will explore the possibilities and challenges of engaged anthropological work in these spaces.

Rather than formal academic papers, this Q&A-style panel centres lived experience and reflexive practice. Panellists will address key questions: What does anthropology look like when it is practiced entrepreneurially? How can rigour, depth, and ethical commitment be sustained outside conventional academic settings? What kinds of value does anthropology generate in business contexts, and what tensions emerge in the process?

The panel will also move beyond diagnosis to consider potential creative solutions. By mapping the broader system of incentives, supports, and exclusions shaping anthropological participation, the discussion aims to identify leverage points for change within universities, professional bodies, and the wider economy. At a moment when anthropologists are urgently needed to address complex social and organisational problems, this panel asks participants to rethink the relationship between anthropology and entrepreneurship, and how the discipline might more confidently inhabit this space.

Yi Li (University of Otago)

Migration studies are often narrated through water. In transnational movements across oceans, or in Indigenous resettlement along rivers, territories of water track the trace of human movements. Lines of water function as both political borders and regional lifebloods. As scattered waters gather into rivers that merge with the ocean, these aquatic trajectories connect land, body, and spirit, carving out physical islands and symbolic boundaries.

This panel explores how water—paralleling human transformations—acts not merely as a conduit for movement across ridges and vertical layers, but as a formative force that shapes belonging, memory, identity, and the embodied experiences of Indigenous emplacement and contemporary displacement. We examine people’s lived migratory experiences through narrative, sensescape, aqueous metaphor, and materiality. Our inquiry asks: How does crossing water imprint itself upon the sensory landscape, the body, and across generations? How does resilience flow through conditions of climate uncertainty, ecological degradation, and diasporic memory? Bridging anthropology, cultural studies, human geography, and postcolonial critique, we propose a conversation immersed in the fluid intersections of ecology, mobility, embodied perception and emplaced creativity in the Anthropocene.

AAS 2026 Conference Committee

This year's multimedia stream features an audio-visual media loop of recent and classic central Australian productions, including highlights of current animation productions, Desert Alliance and Land Council clips about Country, classic episodes of Manyu-wana (the Warlpiri adaptation of Sesame Street), and many more. 

We are also seeking submissions for the streaming of audio-visual works accompanied by talks and/or Q&As.

Mardi Reardon-Smith (Monash University), Laura McLauchlan (University of Technology Sydney), Kirsty Wissing (Australian National University)

In a world reshaped by layers of agro-industry, colonial-capitalist resource extraction, biodiversity loss, a changing climate, and increasing toxicity, humans continue to make lives in relation to our environments. Human-environment relations have long been a focus for anthropology, with an increasing attunement to the roles that more-than-human entities (like plants, animals, rivers or rocks) play in social and cultural worlds. While much multispecies scholarship has been interested in convivial relations, this panel will explore the impasses and practical binds of more difficult human-environment relating. We invite papers that stay with the trouble not only as an analytic gesture but as a lived, situated process. We ask: what happens when we take seriously the materialities of environments layered with power imbalances, incommensurable knowledges and values, and unsatisfying compromises within which humans unharmoniously live? What unfolds when people attempt to act—rather than merely critique—in complex socio ecological assemblages? What can an engaged environmental anthropology do in instances where there is an ethical imperative to “not not act”? We invite contributions that consider difficult human-environment relations across a range of contexts including, but not limited to: invasive species management; harmful or contaminated environments; future-oriented ‘technofixes’; and extreme weather events or disasters.

Nellie Reinhard (Alice Springs)

This panel aims to engage speakers in an ontological and epistemological enquiry into the lines that define social and political conceptions of space.

Song lines embedded in Country and territorial lines rigid in colonial structures. Ephemeral lines of ecological process, tidal changes and retracting and expanding rivers; geological lines, cartographic lines. Family lines, ancestral lines. Tree line, fence lines - a cat proof fence, power lines, property lines, legislative lines, are subjective to the listener.

We seek papers that ask: Who tells the stories about lines, and how do these narratives translate into our spatial politics and realities?

On the frontier of territorial politics, when land management operates on a colonial premise and sovereignty is unceded, how are these lines legitimised and who are they legitimised for? While some lines seek to protect what is sacred, they simultaneously distinguish what is not.

Lines are contested, and if they are not fixed, and space, place and Country is understood to be layered, fluid and temporal what would a dissolving or merging of them look like.

Stefanie Puszka (The Australian National University), Narrelle Warren (Monash University), Ruonan Chen (The Australian National University)

Chronic conditions produce signs in bodies and minds which are culturally interpreted as indicators of health, illness and disability. They can transform people’s engagements with their worlds by reconstructing layers of embodiment, kinship, identity, personhood, caregiving, biomedicine, economy and government. These reconfigured intersections can alter a normative lifecourse and invoke non-linear temporalities, inciting uncertainty, precarity and biographical disruption. Yet, the intersecting worlds of chronicity can also provide new insights into what it means to inhabit physical, social and political bodies. These dynamics can lead to a ‘paradox of recognition’, in which a biomedical diagnosis is a gateway to treatment and services, but may require downplaying alternative ways of making sense of bodily experience and identity; and this can be further complicated through entanglements with additional forms of identification such as Indigeneity, queerness, ethnicity and more. Recent interdisciplinary dialogues have generated new approaches to understanding the ways chronicities can shape people’s engagements with their social, cultural and material worlds, and how bodily experience is emplaced in complex contexts. We invite papers that consider the interacting layers of chronicity in various local worlds, and the implications for treatment, healing and care.

Natasha Fijn (The Australian National University), Muhammad Kavesh (The Australian National University)

For more than a decade, multispecies anthropology has moved from the disciplinary margins to the centre, foregrounding Indigenous and local knowledges to deepen our understanding of co-existence with more-than-human beings. Yet how do we move beyond entrenched categorical binaries such as nature versus culture, domestic versus wild, and native versus feral? The global movement and entanglement of genes, viruses, breeds and species require renewed attention to new forms of social, economic, and ecological engagement. This panel takes into consideration the layered encounters between humans and other beings to examine different forms of multispecies connection in greater depth. By treating encounters with other species as openings for methodological experimentation, contributors will have the opportunity to consider how multispecies anthropology can engage with new forms of analytical, collaborative, and ethical reorientations within the discipline. In doing so, this panel asks how multispecies studies might not only unsettle disciplinary and methodological boundaries but also expand anthropology’s capacity to engage with complex depths of relationality that shape lives across cultures and species.

Sabine Mannitz (Peace Research Institute)

Justice discourses shape memories of political violence, tracing lines of blame and responsibility and revealing layered, deep colonial systems. The panel explores struggles for restitution, recognition, and memory politics as well as escalation, and the role of transnational justice networks.

Papers are invited on justice discourses, networks, and changing concepts across international criminal justice, anti-racism mobilisations, restitution and reparations, and related arenas: How is justice expanding beyond material compensation to include recognition, rights, and representation? How do such demands redraw lines of inclusion and exclusion? Contributions may also address memory politics: the roles of marginalised groups in justice movements, intergenerational trauma, and contested public histories (monuments, archives, official narratives, ongoing silencing). Another theme concerns escalation, asking how struggles for justice can both respond to and also intensify political violence—for example in land-rights conflicts—when demands meet refusals of recognition, equal rights, or resources. Analyses of transnational networks, norm entrepreneurs, and media that connect local justice struggles across sites are likewise welcome, from Black Lives Matter to decolonial protests.

Overall, the panel seeks to map the lines, layers, and depth of the justice–violence nexus in ongoing struggles for redress for colonial violence.

Mahnaz Alimardanian (University of Melbourne), Timothy Heffernan (Australian National University)

This panel examines how lines, layers and depth have conventionally been used as structuring agents through which narratives are produced and made legible. Long associated with the ordering of perception, they bring socio-cultural, historical and political worlds into perspective, holding together multiple magnitudes and scales while also producing contexts and pretexts. But what lies behind them and what happens if we view them not as stable forces but as intensities that precede form?

Expanding on recent work on ambiguity (Alimardanian and Heffernan, 2024), this panel explores the tempo and rhythm of these intensities: the fields, knowledges and alliances they create; the tensions they escalate or deescalate; the ways these intensities unfold in events and how actors and processes respond to them; and how they are projected in public hype, moral perplexity, or in the contemporary dominant tempo of acceleration in major systems (e.g. technology and science). We invite participants to reflect on a range of topic areas: the rhythms and tempo of selfhood, time and history; relationality, identity and health; operational and policy cultures; crisis and rupture; concepts of ‘slowing down’, stillness and anti-action; mechanisms for safeguarding and regulation; and of motivation and decision-making.

Courtney Boag (RMIT), Lisa Given (RMIT)

Anthropologists routinely perform complex translational work, moving between social worlds, institutions, and systems of meaning under conditions of uncertainty, contestation, and unequal power. Yet this labour is rarely recognised as “research translation”, particularly within contemporary frameworks that favour linear, technical models of engagement and impact. This panel reframes translation as an ongoing, relational, and ethically situated practice.

Building on Boag’s (forthcoming) concept of translational capital, the capacity to render complex, contextually embedded knowledge intelligible and actionable across audiences while navigating competing epistemic and institutional regimes, the panel explores how this capital is enacted cognitively, affectively, and structurally across diverse anthropological settings.

Contributions examine translational practice in legal contexts (e.g., Native Title), health and medical settings, government and policy environments, museums and cultural institutions, public anthropology, entrepreneurial and design contexts, and conflict mediation. Across these sites, anthropologists broker meaning between communities, institutions, and publics.

The panel argues that anthropology’s methodological commitments to ethnography, reflexivity, and sustained relational engagement position the discipline uniquely to translate across difference without collapsing nuance. By making this work more visible, the panel highlights anthropology’s relevance across contemporary social and institutional life and invites renewed attention to how the discipline values and supports its translational practices.

Australian Network of Student Anthropologists

This panel provides space for any student anthropologist to engage with and reflect upon their own research. Postgraduate students who are still exploring varying theoretical and thematic avenues are especially vulnerable to exclusion from themed annual conferences as they may not yet have found their niche. ANSA aims to provide students at various stages of their research journey the opportunity to propose a paper that relates to their developing research interests, even if it does not necessarily align with the theme of the conference. 

In the past years, HASS disciplines have had to deal with budget cuts and the dissolution of entire departments. This has put HDR students in increasingly precarious positions. Involvement in an encouraging disciplinary community is invaluable to any level of student or early-career academic, yet access to conferences and other career-development opportunities are increasingly limited by funding and travel-grant restrictions. In line with ANSA’s goals and the pre-conference workshop, this panel encourages the expression of student voice and student work and looks forward to proposals from presenters which explore their own exciting and enriching research for feedback and discussion. Co-authored papers will also be accepted.

AAS 2026 Conference Committee

We welcome submissions on any aspect of the AAS 2026 Conference theme or any anthropological topic.* The AAS Conference Committee will review general submissions and assign accepted papers either to existing panels or to newly created panels around emergent themes. For each newly created panel, we will request one panelist to take on the role of session convenor.

*Note: Before selecting the 'General Submissions' option, please consider submitting your paper proposal to one of the themed panels. Only where you cannot find a suitable panel should you consider using the General Submissions option.