Lorena Gibson

What does an anthropology for these unsettled, often unsettling, times look like? What does it mean to do anthropology in a world where old models of cores and peripheries have been broken apart? What role does the periphery, edge, or margin play in unsettling ossified social, political, or economic forms? How can peripheral anthropologies contribute to the unsettling of the discipline? In asking these questions, the combined AAS/ASAANZ 2019 conference aims to foment conversation around the sites, spaces, actors, and practices taking shape on the periphery to understand the ways they are actively making and remaking the contemporary world. ‘Unsettling Peripheries’ will bring together international scholars to provoke new thinking on the forces driving social change from the outermost reaches of socio-political life. Unsettling might refer to shaking the status quo; to the uncanny, eerie, disturbing, or challenging; or to unsettling practices and debates about decolonisation in settler societies. Working from the antipodean perspectives of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, we see the periphery as a space of active unsettling that has always been fertile for anthropological thinking. ‘Unsettling Peripheries’ also asks: how do disciplinary traditions forged on the edges of empire helped push anthropological research in new directions, and where might our edgy locations challenge anthropology to go next?