In this panel, we will examine how ethnographic and multisensory research with mud, sand, and other shifting, unstable, or ambiguous terrains might generate new insights on land-human relationships.

Mud has been described as “a formless quasi-object” (Cortesi 2018), both substance and state—a state of mixture, flow, and liquefication. As a metaphor, mud often stands for ambiguity, opacity, or confusion. In environments impacted by heavy rainfall, flooding, or landslides, mud can be the material and sensory manifestation of crisis: mud interrupts routines, coats bodies, homes, and land, blocks roads and paths, and overwhelms food crops. But mud can be fertile too: in estuaries, in the riverbed sediment of monsoon environments, and in the human uses of mud in art, ritual, and ceremony. 

This panel welcomes participants interested in engaging with either the symbolic or the material aspects of land in motion. We invite papers that document what happens when “landscapes” become “mudscapes”; how people live in, with, and on unstable ground; and how the ambiguous potential of earth in its more liquid forms impacts human relationships with the world.

The contemporary crisis poses challenges to political theory and action. Does it also offer opportunities to invigorate political anthropology? Diverse efforts to include non-humans in political communities have challenged the onto-epistemic bases of politics. However, while nature has entered the political domain the agency of citizens is increasingly constrained by rising inequality and diminishing civil liberties. Mass movements for social and ecological justice – from the so-called Arab Spring to the Palestinian solidarity and climate emergency movements - are conspicuous for their failure to bring about meaningful political change, except perhaps a hardening of the conditions that inspired them. Crisis appears as the illusion of democracy dissolves, and along with it the normative foundations of international development and sustainability policies beholden to capital. It is reflected in the failure of institutions – including international rights and climate frameworks – to protect humans from slaughter or to curb the unequally distributed socio-ecological violence of accumulation. In the context of this inter-linked social and ecological crisis, what constitutes political anthropology as distinct from political or critical theory and other cognate fields? What responsibility, if any, do anthropologists have to act politically and what forms might this action take? How might anthropology’s unique attunement to responsibility, engagement and interdisciplinary poly-valency, or to micro-macro, nature-culture or subject-object relations, address everyday suffering and foment just and sustainable institutions and communities?

This panel, organised by SfAA Global, invites Australian anthropologists to be part of a session that draws inspiration from the 84^th Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) held in Santa Fe, NM, in March 2024. The panel seeks papers that engage in, share, and reflect upon the work of transformation required of anthropology, and that discuss efforts to radically diversify applied anthropology. Simultaneously, it calls for papers that speak to the enchantment of the discipline and marvel at the wonderful community of people, things and ideas that we call anthropology. It calls for examples of how anthropology can attract and build foundations for knowledge production that support on-the ground transformation, that generates inclusive spaces of those who have historically been excluded – on the base of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity and ability, among others – and focus on dismantling systems and relationalities producing exclusion. The panel is particularly looking for ethnographic case studies from Down Under that illustrate how anthropologists can work to imagine and operationalise opportunities for change in our field, discipline and the spaces in which we work. We invite papers that speaks to points of resistance and potentiality, and that showcase how anthropology can serve as a project for inclusion, autonomy and social change.

Craft practices are under new pressures but are also evolving with new possibilities and resonances. In a market atmosphere increasingly saturated with sophisticated machine-made and synthetic approximations, distinctions between handmade and mass-produced are becoming further blurred.

In this panel we aim to explore reconfigurations that enable the endurance and continuity of craft practices.

Key topics of interest include:

• The impact of scale, cost, and value on craft practices.
• Sensory experiences of different materials, processes, and products.
• The effects of capitalist and market imperatives and temporalities on craft viability.
• Ethical considerations.
• Problematising binaries of authentic/inauthentic, traditional/modern, purity/pollution, and synthetic/natural.
• The role of multispecies collaborations in craft.
• The challenges and opportunities for heritage crafts to adapt to contemporary demands.
• The impact of AI and new technologies on artisanal practices.

We welcome contributions that examine how the stakes and logics surrounding sensory labor and experience are being transformed. How are these changes remaking livelihoods, value, and labor regimes? What innovative alternatives and adaptations are emerging in the realm of craft? How is the creativity of craft both thriving and at risk? What is the role of humans in this transforming landscape? And what is the true value and meaning of the handmade?

This inaugural annual panel is convened by the AAS AnthroSafety Working Group with the purpose of exploring and advancing workplace safety for anthropologists across the spectrum of research and professional engagements. This panel will include presentations from the AAS AnthroSafety Working Group and the CNTA Safety & Risk in Professional Native Title (Anthropology) Working Group (SRPNT(A)). Presentations will include physical and psychological workplace safety and include practical risk mitigation strategies for our research and professional practice field sites. The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion considering specific opportunities for action in a variety of professional settings.

By many accounts, Japan is in decline. The description of Japan as a hyperageing, “hyper-solo society” (Arakawa 2017) is no longer a warning to prompt pronatalist policy and frantic economic reform: it is a reality, accompanied by a brain-drain, labor shortages, wage decline and public health concerns about loneliness and solitary death (kodokushi).  And yet, the failure of idealised models – of life course, of the company, of the citizen-subject – reveals productive spaces and ways of being. As Anne Allison observes, “in the disruption we see to old normativities that were always already exclusive, there is also a glimmer of something new” (2015, 141).

In this panel we explore the capacity of marginal and minoritised subjects to challenge, reconfigure or reprise notions of community, belonging and identity in Japan. From the discursive (but not numerical) minority of the unmarried, to the “chosen poverty” of punks in Hokkaido and the non-traditional career choices of rural men, we introduce case studies of liminal Japan.

We ask: what do the ubiquitous categories (wife/salaryman/rural, etc), historically fundamental to the academic and popular understanding of “Japaneseness” offer, as those outside those categories become more visible, if not more common?

This panel examines social and anthropological reconstructions of migration, migration regimes, and gendered migrant labour informed by colonial histories and its on-going impact. Papers which consider the challenges of migrant dilemmas, duties, and destinies at home and abroad are welcome. Migrant gendered labour includes migration for carework (domestic helpers, eldercare workers, nannies, au pairs, nurse migration), migration for student education, temporary low-skilled jobs, step-wise migration, professional skilled migrations (entrepreneurs, business migration), migration for religious and community service, distress migration, and other types of newer, more privileged mobilities (including digital nomads). How is social memory around migrant contributions produced, maintained, and circulated in an era of increased rural to urban migration, urbanization, transnationalism, and growing overseas communities? How are ideal masculinities and femininities cultivated and celebrated in relation to historical participation, ongoing migration pressures, and continued demand for migrant services? What constitutes migrants’ commitments, callings, and futures? What stereotypes and trials abound for both receiving and migrant communities and nations which are embedded within racial capitalism? The panel welcomes papers which consider various migrant categories, migration infrastructures, and migrant experiences through critical anthropological and social scientific lenses.

Discussions around ‘biological sex’ are weaponised as a method of erasure for gender diverse people. Despite the fact that no one knows (without targeted tests) what their chromosomes actually are, social commentary continues to uphold the gender binary as fact. “Sex” is not a static, discrete, or even strictly biological characteristic and neither is gender which reflects complex social constructions and expressions of individuals and communities. Historians have shown how scientists “sexed” the X and Y chromosomes by glossing over inconsistencies and ambiguities between the two in their research and as Katrina Karkazis (2019: 1899) writes, “science does not drive these policies; the desire to exclude does.” As Wiradjuri Professor Sandy O’Sullivan writes, the gender binary is a colonial construct that needs to be unpacked and critiqued (2021).

This panel welcomes papers that critique the gender binary through a cultural, anticolonial, anthropological and/or sociological lens. We welcome papers that span anthropologies including but not limited to Indigenous representations, medical anthropology, feminist critiques, and gender studies.

Fossil fuel developments, mineral extraction and other major developments such as renewable energy projects are commonly contested. Such disputes may revolve around environmental impacts, social impacts on local communities, heritage concerns, or other salient factors. In these settings, anthropologists are often engaged to facilitate community engagement, undertake heritage assessments, or provide expert opinion and testimony. This is especially the case where development disputes involve Indigenous people.

While ethnographic research, fieldwork and reporting tasks are part of academic training, the roles and practices of anthropologists across Australia are highly variable and may reflect jurisdictional, legislative and even contractual demands. When research conclusions or engagement outcomes are themselves contested, they can be scrutinised in the media or the courts, potentially transforming into crisis points where anthropological practice and expertise may be dismissed as advocacy or activism. Others, however, may critique such engaged practice and expertise as collusion with state and/or extractive industrial power.

This panel seeks papers which explore themes of anthropological practice (be it academic, applied, and/or engaged) as it responds to, or itself falls into, moments of transition or crisis. How do anthropologists reconcile their (personal/environmental) politics with the shifting world, our clients, the courts and our research participants? What does it mean to advocate for the people with whom we work in such settings, and how might this be reconciled with codes of conduct or contracts, and with a critique of, and demand for, accountability of state and industrial power?

Humans across the world are surface-dwellers (bar some notable exceptions) and that which lies beneath—the underground—is a dark realm enticing a wild array of interpretation, from the geological to the mythological. Anthropology has long been overwhelmingly surface-centric, and with this panel we aim to open up new ways of understanding how we as surface-dwellers are intimately interlinked with what is below: the soil, the water, the rocks, the tunnels and caves, treasures and perils, beetles, ants, roots, the dead, monsters, gods, and more. Extending anthropology below the surface, we posit, is essential to 21^st century anthropology and its drive towards grasping planetary interconnections. And yet, we maintain, such extension can only come out of the locally specific, out of fine-grained ethnography. This panel includes contributions which explore different understandings of ‘what lies beneath’ and what that means to different people, in different places, and across time. We invite ethnographically-based papers that examine place- and people-specific types of underground from a variety of approaches. The aim is for these papers to create a web of alluring intersections and cross-connections which deepen anthropological understandings of the underground.

Computational Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a transformational impact in various domains of human endeavour and social experience, including anthropological research, teaching and applied practice. 

Advancements in computational methods such as unsupervised machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing, affective computing and generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) pose challenges to our conceptualisation of intelligence, and what it means to be human. At the same time, AI-based tools have become part of our everyday experience, through their incorporation within software and devices we use daily. AI-based tools offer us respite from routine aspects of our work and augment our human capacity for pattern recognition, opening possibilities for new research methods, and novel and rapid qualitative insights. In teaching, AI offers innovative approaches to pedagogy and learning, such as personalized education and automated assessment.

These advancements pose risks and challenges, including ethical concerns, problems of bias, and a risk of devaluing the up-close, nuanced, insights that arise from slower, interactional research methods. 

We invite papers discussing both the opportunities AI presents for enriching anthropological practice and how anthropologists might address the critical philosophical, ethical, societal and methodological challenges it gives rise to.

(ChatGPT contributed approximately ten percent of the conceptualisation of this abstract.)

This panel seeks to highlight the opportunities and tensions inherent in anthropologists as ecosystem shapers in Aboriginal heritage, native title, the GLAM sector and other applied contexts. What does being at the centre mean for a discipline that has often positioned itself as serving the marginalised and the other? How far can (or should) anthropologists go in aligning differences between project partners and influencing the receiving environment? 

We are seeking submissions that delve into successful or challenging cross-disciplinary collaborations, the insights and contributions that anthropology provides in applied settings, or the practical role of anthropologists in shaping interconnected systems.

We welcome submissions on any aspect of the AAS 2024 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.