PLENARY SPEAKERS

Depth, Layers, Lines - Indigenous Knowledge and Theory in Translation

Chair: Tess Lea Panel: Amanda Kearney, Ben Scambary, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Josie Douglas, Suzi Hutchings, Tim Neale

Tess Lea

Tess is an anthropologist who is interested in organisational ethnography, the study of policy and bureaucracy, and Indigenous endurance under ongoing settler occupation. These concerns are angles to also understand conditions of the present and future challenges, such as global boiling. She has worked on education (schooling and literacy programs), housing and infrastructure, climate mitigation, and mobility issues.

Amanda Kearney

Amanda’s career has been shaped by more than two and a half decades of commitment to ethnography and collaborative, co-designed research with Indigenous families in northern Australia. With the generous support and intellectual leadership of Yanyuwa, Marra, Garrwa, and Gudanji peoples whose lands and waters are located in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia, she has contributed to work on land and sea rights, kincentric care, plural science approaches to marine protections, and digital animations that communicate and safeguard Yanyuwa Ancestral Law and songlines for younger generations.

Ben Scambary

Ben has worked for the Northern Land Council as a senior anthropologist, undertook his PhD at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU and then served as the CEO of the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority (AAPA) from 2008 – 2025. During this time, he oversaw Australia’s first case of sacred site desecration, when OM Manganese destroyed a site at Bootu Creek, and has been praised highly for his skill in balancing the intersection of Northern Territory law, industry and Aboriginal cultural law.

Josie Douglas

Josie is a Wardaman woman based in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). She is a General Manager at the Central Land Council. Josie has held executive management positions in community-controlled organisations as well as senior research positions at the CSIRO and the Charles Darwin University. In 2017, she was awarded the W.H. Stanner Award for her PhD research on young people and intergenerational transmission and acquisition of ecological knowledge.

Suzi Hutchings

Suzii is a Central Arrernte woman. After completing her PhD in 1995, she worked as a consultant anthropologist for 18 years and now is the Professor for Indigenous Research Development at the Moondani Toombadool Centre (Swinburn University). Previous positions saw her at Yunggorendi Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Program (Flinders University ), at the David Unaipon Centre for Indigenous Research (University of South Australia); at Wirltu Yarlu (University of Adelaide), and as Associate Professor at RMIT University.

Tim Neale

Tim is an anthropologist and STS scholar whose research addresses two overlapping fields of inquiry. The first focuses on the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to lands and waters, and the second examines natural hazards and disasters with a particular interest in the social and cultural life of their technical infrastructures.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

Kauanui is a budding art curator, seasoned radio producer, and established scholar with an activist background who serves as the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies and Anthropology at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Prior to her appointment there, she taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for 24 years. She holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Kauanui is the author of: Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018). Kauanui co-edits a book series with Jean M. O’Brien called “Critical Indigeneities” for the University of Carolina Press.

Kauanui is currently in the midst of three scholarly projects: 1) completing a monograph book provisionally titled “Hawaiian Decolonization and the Dilemma of Feminism”; editing a book on Settler Colonial Fascism”; and guest-editing a special issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, which explores the theoretical, generic, historical, and cultural dimensions of life writing, on “Global Indigeneities.” She has guest-edited a number of special issues of academic journals, including (most recently): “Unsettling Exceptionalisms: Thinking with and Through Israel-Palestine,” with Ather Zia for Fieldsites/Theorizing the Contemporary for Cultural Anthropology (2025); “Enduring Palestine: Critical Interventions in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” for NAIS (2025); and “The Politics of Indigeneity, Anarchist Praxis, and Decolonization,” for Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies (2021). Kauanui’s articles and essays appear in a range of edited books, and academic journals. She also serves on several editorial and advisory boards for a diverse array of journals.
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She is the recipient of the 2022 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award by the Western History Association. She is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and has held numerous fellowships, including from:SAR, Smithsonian Institution, Rockefeller Archives Center, National Science Foundation, Fulbright (Māori Studies, University of Auckland), and Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury. And she has held an appointment as an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer. Kauanui is one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).
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From 2007-2013, Kauanui served as the sole producer and host for a public affairs radio show, “Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond,” which aired on WESU and was widely syndicated across a dozen U.S. states on Pacifica radio affiliate stations. Episodes are archived online: www.indigenouspolitics.com. In addition, with students Kauanui co-produced & co-hosted an anarchist politics program that ran from 2010-2013 called “Horizontal Power Hour.” All 59 past episodes are archived online: https://horizontalpowerhour.wordpress.com/. In 2014, Kauanui helped launch another program, “Anarchy on Air,” which aired through early 2020. Past episodes are archived here: http://anarchyonairwesu.tumblr.com/.
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Invited Speakers