In this seminar, Dr Sophie Chao will talk about how indigenous Marind communities experience, theorize and critique the impacts of plantation modernities on their rapidly changing lifeworlds.
- Researcher
- Date
- Monday 1 May 2023, 16:15 - 17:15
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- Room 1.31 and Zoom
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
- Ticket information
Hybrid event - join us on zoom
Recent years have seen a resurgence of anthropological interest in the topic of the plantation – an industrial formation and enduring logic that has been instrumental to the rise of colonial racial capitalism and the construction of modern nations and natures.
In this talk, Dr Sophie Chao will draw on long-term fieldwork conducted on the West Papuan oil palm frontier to examine how iIndigenous Marind communities experience, theorize and critique the impacts of plantation modernities on their rapidly changing lifeworlds.
Central to these experiences and theories, the talk will illustrate, are an array of more-than-human actors whose meaning, mattering and morality are shaped by their alternately indexical, antagonistic or ambiguous relationship to Marind themselves.
Set against the backdrop of West Papua’s regional history of settler-colonial incursion and the plantation’s global history of racializing violence, Chao will argue that Marind philosophies of more-than-human becoming constitute a form of epistemic resistance to the simplifying, hierarchizing and disciplining logic of plantation regimes past and present.
The seminar will be followed by a reception in the Butterfly Bar.
About Dr Sophie Chao
Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in the Discipline of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.
Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health and justice in the Pacific.
Chao is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice. She 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.
Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives and works on unceded Gadigal lands in Australia. For more information, please visit the More than human worlds website.
