Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology

The Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology was introduced by the AAS in 2009 and has continued on a mostly biennial basis as an important feature of the AAS Annual Conference.

2024 Lecture

The Australian Anthropological Society welcomed Loretta Baldassar as a Distinguished Lecturer at the State Library of Western Australia, 28th November 2024.

  • In this public lecture, leading migration scholar, Professor Loretta Baldassar, explores how the revolution in travel and communication technologies has transformed our ability to care – for people and places – across time and distance. Drawing on 40 years of research and hundreds of migrant family stories, she examines over a century of Australian migration history. Baldassar’s research is widely acknowledged as foundational to the field of transnational family studies. By comparing the forms of caring and kin work experienced by different cohorts and generations, she maps the ways our experiences and understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing migration and social policy. In the past, the migration of a loved one was often experienced as a kind of ‘social death’. In contrast, today’s polymedia environments allow us to experience co-presence across distance in virtual, proxy, ambient and imagined ways. These forms of digital care and “digital kinning” challenge the normative and ontological privileging of proximity in caregiving and kinship relationships. Of particular importance is the special role of visits home and how, over time, they become a window on relationships and identities. Baldassar’s research findings inform her more recent applied anthropology work in the increasingly important and contested spaces at the intersections of migration, ageing and aged-care. Older adults’ support networks are often reduced due to the mobility of their family and friends. At the same time, many embark on their own mobility trajectories to give or receive care, like the growing number of ‘flying grannies’. And what of migrants who can no longer travel, or who are living in residential care? Baldassar’s work with migrants living in residential care highlights how in the absence of the ability to visit home, digital technologies can provide the capacity to share a mutuality of being that safeguards the forms of belonging that make us human.

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    Loretta Baldassar is a leading migration scholar and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology. She is currently Vice Chancellor Professorial Research Fellow, Director of the Social Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab, and co-convener of the TRACS Migration Research Network at Edith Cowan University. In 2020, 2021 and 2022 she was named Australian Research Field Leader in Migration Studies (Social Sciences) and in 2021 and 2022 she was also named Research Field Leader in Ethnic and Cultural Studies (Humanities, Arts and Literature) (The Australian, 23 09 2020; 8 12 2021; 10 11 2022). Professor Baldassar has published extensively and her widely-cited work is foundational to the field of Transnational Family Studies. She is an award-winning supervisor with over 30 PhD completions and 9 postdoctoral fellowships. She has led many large research projects with a total grant income of over 10 million dollars. Among her many current projects she leads a Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) project, Befriending with Genie, trialling an intervention to support people living with dementia and their carers from migrant communities. She is social support stream lead on an MRFF Fittest Trial, National Frailty Project and co-lead investigator on the longitudinal YMAP Project (Youth Mobilities, Aspirations and Pathways), funded by the Australian Research Council. Her career has been devoted to better understanding the impact of migration on families and communities, with a focus intergenerational relations, the ageing process and the social uses of new technologies. Her SAGE Futures research team at ECU is leading innovation in social care across the life-course, contributing social science perspectives and arts-based methodologies to the creative and caring profession

Previous Lectures

  • Photos in [Worimi] Biscuit Tins: Exploring the relationship between Anthropology and Aboriginal Studies, with Kathleen Butler

    As an Aboriginal undergraduate student more than thirty years ago, the first piece I read in which I saw myself reflected was Dr Gaynor McDonald’s Photos in Wiradjuri Biscuit Tins. My title pays homage to that moment and the subsequent shaping of my belief that Aboriginal cultures could be reflected in the academy. 

    This presentation gives voice to the ongoing tensions between the disciplines of Aboriginal Studies and Anthropology. Acknowledging my own place leading a School of Aboriginal Studies, I remain hopeful that there can be meaningful dialogue between disciplines, and the vast repository of Anthropological research can be both repatriated to, and interrogated by, Aboriginal communities for their benefit. I argue that this has the potential to contribute to both a decolonising and Reconciliation/Truth-Telling agenda for the tertiary sector and more broadly. Recognising my position as both insider and outsider to this process, I frame my analysis using the Fish Trap Methodological Framing developed by the Wollotuka Institute, which recognises that the sharing of resources for the good of Country and Peoples is critical in our current environment/s. 

  • Native title: implications for Australian senses of place and belonging

    September 12, Australian National University

    In 2019 the AAS Distinguished Lecture was decoupled from the annual conference and was presented instead as part of Social Sciences Week (9-15 September, 2019).

    On the evening of the Public Lecture, two discussants - Mr Kevin Smith, CEO, Queensland South Native Title Services & Professor Tim Rowse, Western Sydney University - were invited to provide comment.

  • Inside Out: Indigeneity in the era of Native Title in Australia

    December 13, University of Adelaide

    Dr Suzi Hutchings is of Arrernte descent. She is a social anthropologist with a doctorate from the University of Adelaide. For the past 20 years Suzi has worked as an anthropological consultant and expert witness on native title claims and Aboriginal heritage protection across Australia. She has also provided expert cultural evidence in the Federal Magistrates Court, the Supreme Court and the Magistrates court in family law, criminal law and injury compensation cases involving Aboriginal families. Suzi is currently a senior lecturer in the Indigenous Studies Unit in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne.

    Abstract

    In 2011 former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, in his Lowitja O’Donohue Oration, revisited the history of the implementation of native title law and the passing of the Native Title Act in 1993 by the Australian Federal Labor Government. The most telling message in his speech was the level of change in intent of the Act, as it has been enacted during the past 22 years. Originally native title was an existing title recognized by the common law of Australia, now the burden of proof of native title is firmly the responsibility of Aboriginal people. For those whose lands lay in areas of intense rural and urban colonisation the level of proof of prior occupation required to obtain native title rights has been almost insurmountable.

    Many urban and rural communities have suffered a history of removals of knowledgeable members variously disrupting a lineage of the laws and customs needed to show a continuous connection to the lands they once occupied. But it is within the social and intellectual spaces created by the requirements of native title that many claimants and community members have re-interpreted and combined the often-fragmented knowledge they have learnt from their elders into a comprehensive Indigenous knowledge that they believe does meet the requirements of the burden of proof. Invariably, what they have faced is skepticism among practitioners including lawyers, judges and anthropologists, as to whether their knowledge is authentic, or fabricated to suit a new political game in the face of oppression from the dominant society.

  • DescrOther Times, Other Customs: Islands of Nostalgia and Hope

    December 1, The University of Melbourne

    Martha Macintyre is an honorary Associate Professor in Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Melbourne. A former president of the Australian Anthropological Society, she was editor of its flagship journal, TAJA, from 2008–2015. In 2012 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Initially an historian, her early anthropological research focused on the economic and social effects of colonial intrusion in Tubetube, Milne Bay Province. More recently she has concentrated on gender inequality and the broad social changes associated with resource extractive industries in Melanesia. She has published on land tenure and resource management, human rights and the status of women and local responses to environmental change and degradation. From 1986–2005 she also worked as an independent consultant, preparing social impact reports over several years on two major PNG gold mining projects – Misima and Lihir. Her academic and applied research interests are all concerned with the effects of economic change on local communities.