About event

Livestream: Dr Sophie Chao's keynote address "Eating and being eaten: More-than-human metabolisms on the West Papuan agribusiness frontier"

Please join us for the live stream of Dr Sophie Chao’s Keynote address, which will open the Metabolic Mattering Workshop. ECRS and HDRs who wish to apply for the workshop at Deakin Downtown in Melbourne can learn more here.

The keynote and workshop is sponsored by the CES (Culture, Environment and Society) stream of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, and is supported by Deakin’s Science and Society Network.

Eating and being eaten: More-than-human metabolisms on the West Papuan agribusiness frontier

Abstract

This paper explores how Indigenous Marind communities in settler-colonized West Papua sense and make sense of hunger through the lens of more-than-human metabolism, as it manifests in uneven relations of eating and being eaten that are distributed across human, other-than-human, institutional, and infrastructural entities. The paper examines how the meaning, matter, and morality of more-than-human metabolic processes, both literal and figurative, are experienced and interpreted by Marind in the context of waning forest foodways, histories of settler-colonial occupation, and extractive industrial incursion. Drawing on this ethnographic material, the paper foregrounds how Marind’s situated theories of hunger inform our broader understanding of capitalist modernity itself as a force anchored in the consumption of one people by another. In doing so, the paper invites critical reflection on relations of eating and being eaten in an age of ecological unravelling, when agroindustrial expansion in undermining conditions of life at a planetary scale.

About the Speaker

Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Her research in anthropology and the environmental humanities investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022), which received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award in 2021. She is also co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) with Karin Bolender and Eben Kirksey. Sophie previously worked for the human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their customary lands, resources, and livelihoods. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Watch the keynote:

The seminar will be available to stream on YouTube live. Access the live link here

Date/time: 19 October 2022, 9:30 – 11:00am (Australian Eastern Standard Time, GMT+10)

Q&A with the speaker to follow. To send questions/participate in the chat, you’ll need to sign-in using a YouTube account.

The seminar will be recorded and available to watch on the SSN YouTube channel after the Livestream.

If you have any questions, please send to ssn-info@deakin.edu.au, asassano@deakin.edu. au or ctruyts@deakin.edu.au