This seminar will take a different format. The idea behind a super review is to provide HDR students and ECRs with some insights into how a review conversation can be productive and exciting, and leads to stronger work, with the added bonus of making the audience aware of the manuscript, hopefully, soon-to-be-a-book. 

Amanda Kearney, Lucas Bessire, and Sophie Chao will be in conversation with Yasmine Musharbash about her book manuscript 1001 Nights in the Colony. The discussion will move through a series of points addressing structure, voice, argument/question, specific flaws, and so forth. 

The manuscript: Aimed at a general educated audience, not only academics, 1001 Nights in the Colony is a patchwork of narrative ethnography and ethnographic fiction about experiences of settler colonial violence. Set in the Aboriginal settlement of Yuendumu in Australia’s Northern Territory, it tells stories of Yuendumu’s people, dogs, plants, and monsters and how they are variously faring in the colony. Based on three decades of anthropological fieldwork, it reads as a reflexive memoir with deep insights applicable to apocalyptic experiences elsewhere.

Speakers:

Amanda Kearney is a socio-cultural anthropologist who specialises in the anthropology of human resilience and future security, while engaging with these conditions as they map across a range of human experiences, from Indigenous people’s land and sea rights, to trust in ecological management and plural science as a best practice for the intervention and care of precarious/precious environments. She is a tenured professor at San Diego State University and an honorary professor at the Australian National University. Amanda has spent many years undertaking collaborative research with Indigenous families, including Yanyuwa, and Marra language groups in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. Together they have published books, journal articles and have produced 13 digital animations. Amanda is also the Co-Director of the Wunungu Awara Indigenous Animation Program - a registered charity & not-for-profit organisation that works in partnership with Indigenous communities to protect, preserve and sustain knowledge through respectful, community-led storytelling.

Lucas Bessire is an American writer, filmmaker and anthropologist. Drawing on field research in the Gran Chaco, the Arctic and the High Plains, his writing explores the lived experience of contemporary environmental and social changes and seeks ways to communicate social science insights to wider publics. In recent years, he authored the prize-winning books Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (University of Chicago Press) and Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press). Currently, he is co-Director of the Center for Ethnography at the Colorado School of Mines.

Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022), Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025), and Plantations: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence (2026), and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026). Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Yasmine Musharbash is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the ANU. She has been conducting participant observation-based research with Warlpiri people in central Australia since the mid-1990s. Yasmine’s work is focused on the everyday and all that entails, from sleeping arrangements, mortuary rituals, and fighting, via Warlpiri relationships with dogs, monsters, and fire, to Warlpiri ways of surviving in the settler colony. Yasmine is the author of Yuendumu Everyday (2009) and co-editor of a number of volumes, including Monster Anthropology from Australasia and Beyond (2014), Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters (2020), and Living with Monsters (2023).  

In-person: Room TBC

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1