We are excited to share that Professor Tess Lea will be joining our 2025 conference as one of our keynote speakers.
Professor Tess Lea is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Dean, School of Communication, Society and Culture, Macquarie University, Australia. Her research explores infrastructure, sewer pipes, roads, housing, and policy, as a means of exploring modes of existence in extractive worlds.
Keynote address: Policy ecology, infrastructure and endurance
Buried within many descriptions of anthropogenic apocalypse, in accounts of what an unchecked desire for extractive existence has imperilled beyond return, lie two key concepts: 1. Indigenous lifeworlds represent an alternative, an otherwise, that teaches us how to live more attuned to, more in harmony with, in good relations with, the non-human universe; and 2. The state needs to determine the policies and funding inducements and fines to reroute our techno-capital regimes into eco-friendly, ‘sustainable’, modes and provide a decent blueprint for action. If written as a genuflection, the first concept positions Indigenous people as mnemonics for a possible otherwise, and as people who do not also have infrastructural needs. In the second framing, Indigenous people disappear within metropolitan imaginaries, while densely populated settlements continue to be nourished from margins, albeit through acts of kindness and repair. Using a framing of policy ecology, I revisit the ugliness of concrete and infrastructure, the messiness of policy and politics, to tether calls for action to a pragmatics of existence.
