This week we bring you a special collaboration between The Familiar Strange and the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists or ANSA. In this special collaboration, Familiar Stranger Alex sits down with Hanne Worsoe and Dr Romy Listo to discuss some of the difficulties that arise from working in particularly intense or distressing field sites. Throughout the conversation they model some of the methods that can benefit new PhD students who are potentially entering into their field work. 

It was a really interesting conversation and thank you again the ANSA for collaborating with us on this project! 

Just a note on sound quality: We conducted this chat over Zoom so the internet and audio quality might vary in some spots. The podcast editing team is working on a solution!

Quotes 

“It was very effective in helping and supporting people who were about to go into fieldwork or who had just come back from fieldwork” 

“You feel very supported by one person, because you are being listened to and someone’s bearing witness to your experience” 

“I think using these kind of things was really very helpful for me in being able to process some of distress that I felt while I was in the field” 

“It is tough and you really need that capacity to  be able to share with someone when you are going through those things it really does help” 

“I think there’s a fear in academia of being able to express vulnerability and difficulty” 

“Everyone had some kind of “war story” so to speak” 

“Everyone had stories from the field that they would often shrug off and minimize” 

“There wasn’t this space or the words to be able to talk about that in the context of research” 

“I think academia needs to acknowledge its vulnerability at a number of different levels, but certainly at a fieldwork level and being affected by fieldwork”

Humours

Special ANSA Collaboration: Hanne Worsoe and Romy Listo on Fieldwork Trauma and Outsider Witnessing

Before we dive into today’s episode we’d just like to add a content warning for this episode for sexual assault and drug use.

This week, Familiar Stranger Carolyn sits down with Adrian Watts, a PhD Candidate from the University of Melbourne. Adrian spent his fieldwork in a London squat called The Black Stag. 

Throughout this conversation, Carolyn asks questions around the lifestyle of a squatter, and Alex helps to paint a vivid picture of the lives that the people living in the Black Stag lived. 

It was a great chat with some thought provoking ideas. 

Head over to our website for a list of links and citations.

Ep # 87: Squatters in The Stag: Adrian Watts on Activism & Squats

Vijayendra Rao, an economist with the World Bank, talks with anthropologist Ian Pollock about the theory and practice of development, anthropology’s relationship to development, and how ethnography might help the disenfranchised engage with powerful institutions and effect social change.

All the colors in the world

43. AnthroPod Crossover: The Familiar Strange with Vijayendra Rao

“We don’t look back enough to go forward, I don’t think. We need to look in the rear view mirror everyday.” 

Professor Mick Dodson AM, a Yawuru Aboriginal man, Australian barrister, academic and recently retired Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU, talks to our own Julia Brown about some of the ongoing struggles for Indigenous Australians. They discuss education and language, calling out everyday racism and unacceptable behaviours toward women, the role of anthropology in Indigenous Australian affairs, the Northern Territory Intervention, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and self determination. The Native Title Act (or Settlement) is also mentioned, along with the Stolen Generations and the 2008 Apology. Their conversation concludes with a reflection on Indigenous meanings of health and well-being. 

QUOTES 

“These are probably the oldest languages in the world. There’s something wrong with your values if you don’t think that that heritage is of any worth.” 

“The thing that troubles me about anthropologists is that there’s a level of preciousness that seems to afflict the discipline.” 

“I think the great thing that’s happened in research of any sort but particularly anthropology is the ethical clearances processes... how are you going to be impartial, independent - that’s where preciousness gets in the way.” 

“Maybe we should select people to study anthropology with greater scrutiny.” 

“‘Going native’ ought to be frowned upon. You know, you can understand it but don’t try and become it.” 

“In its essence self determination is having control of your destiny, as a group. It’s a right of peoples... coupled with social justice it means that you as a group are in control of the decisions that affect not just your daily lives but what happens to you as a group, into the future.” 

“With the Uluru Statement, it’s been framed in a negative way ... The response is really mean-spirited, and unfair, unjust, and a perpetuation of the colonial project really - ‘we’ll decide what’s best for you black fellas, cause we have the power and whatever you dish up we can say yes or no to.’" 

"The black armband is going to be worn until there's reason to take it off. And we haven't given, as a nation, any reason to take it off. And it's not about blaming the present generation. But we can blame them if they refuse to accept this history." 

"Subsection 26 of section 51 [of the Australian constitution] allows the parliament to pass laws that can be racially discriminatory. And they have. Since 1967, they have, at least five times, used that power to discriminate against Australia's Indigenous people and only Australia's Indigenous people." 

“There is a connection between culture and identity confusion... connecting the young with the broader family, clan, nation, universe, has broken down, through colonisation and dispossession.” 

“Yawuru people have a notion of Liyan, which is a feeling of well-being... health is not just a physical condition, it’s also a spiritual and intellectual and cultural condition." 

CITATIONS 

Dodson, M. 1994. ‘The End in the Beginning: Re(de)finding Aboriginality’ Wentworth Lecture. 

On the Northern Territory Intervention: https://www.monash.edu/law/research/centres/castancentre/our-research-areas/indigenous-research/the-northern-territory-intervention/the-northern-territory-intervention-an-evaluation/what-is-the-northern-territory-intervention 

The Uluru Statement from the Heart: https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF 

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. 

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com 
Show notes by Julia Brown

#20 Wearing the black armband: Mick Dodson talks ongoing colonisation in Australia

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The Familiar Strange is a podcast about doing anthropology: that is, about listening, looking, trying out, and being with, in pursuit of uncommon knowledge about humans and culture. Find show notes, plus our blog about anthropology's role in the world, at https://www.thefamiliarstrange.com. Twitter: @tfsTweets. FB: facebook.com/thefamiliarstrange. Instagram: @thefamiliarstrange.

Brought to you by your familiar strangers: Ian Pollock, Jodie-Lee Trembath, Julia Brown, Simon Theobald, Kylie Wong Dolan; produced by Deanna Catto and Matthew Phung, and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society, the Australian National University’s Schools of Culture, History and Language and Archeology and Anthropology, and the Australian Centre for Public Awareness of Science, and produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. 

We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we record this podcast, and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, past, present, and emerging.

Special ANSA Collaboration: Hanne Worsoe and Romy Listo on Fieldwork Trauma and Outsider Witnessing

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