Messing with Methods
Responding to requests from colleagues, we are delighted to share the the recordings of "Messing with Methods." This symposium was convened by A/Prof Malini Sur & Dr Sophie Chao on July 11, 2024.
This doctoral and postgraduate symposium aimed at encouraging dialogue and debate on the diversity of ways in which social scientists and scholars of humanities, understand, use, and write about research methods in the contemporary world. Panel themes included methodologies in the context of new materialisms and more-than-human care, digital and visual research, eating as a method, and vulnerability in fieldwork. The workshop offered a critical space for broader conversations surrounding ethics, positionality, reflexivity, and power, as these shape our relations with, and accountabilities to, our situated fields and field interlocutors and to our disciplines. The symposium was co-funded by the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University and the Discipline of Anthropology.
We are grateful to the following colleagues across universities in Australia for contributing so generously and the forty-five doctoral and postgraduate candidates who participated with critical questions and commentaries.
Heather Horst is the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture and the mediation of social relations through digital media and technology.
Denis Byrne specialises in critical heritage studies and the archaeology of the recent past. His approach to heritage studies reflects his disciplinary background in archaeology and his research experience in the cultural politics of local and professional heritage practice in Australia and Southeast Asia.
Sophie Chao is a DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research centres on the intersections of ecology, capitalism, Indigeneity, justice, and health, with a particular ethnographic focus on West Papua.
Michael Edwards is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. He is an anthropologist of religious life, media ecology, and political change. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and was a Smuts Research Fellow in South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Ute Eickelkamp is an anthropologist, and most of her ethnographic field research has been with Anangu Pitjantjara families at Pukatja in northern South Australia, with different foci including art, children's play and imagination, monsters, local representations of kinship, and, most recently, the idea of 'nature' in Anangu life as it is emerging via the semantic field of Christianity.
Randi Irwin is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Newcastle. Her research follows the struggle for Western Sahara’s decolonisation, led by the Saharawi state in-exile and Saharawi refugees based in Algeria. Her focus is specifically on the role of natural resources in mediating knowledge production, territorial rights, formations of citizenship, and legality.
Daniel Tranter-Santoso is an anthropologist who recently submitted his PhD thesis and is currently in limbo awaiting examiners’ reports. Alongside his academic pursuits, Daniel is a stonemason apprentice at Sydney's historic Rookwood Necropolis, where he has been conducting anthropological fieldwork for the past three years.
Caroline Schuster is an Associate Professor at the Australian National University College of Arts and Social Sciences. Her areas of expertise include the anthropology of gender and sexuality, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of development, and economic development policy.
Catherine Smith is a medical anthropologist and public health social scientist with a special interest in health and social equity, the socio-political drivers of health and illness, and the development of institutional trust in healthcare.
Malini Sur is the HDR and teaching Director at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Her research and teaching relate to global and local challenges facing transnational migration and mobility. Trained in comparative, historical, and visual methods, Sur is noted for her contributions within and beyond academia.
