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2025 ASAA/NZ Conference:
Edges, Borders, Margins, and Peripheries

Whāingaroa (Raglan), Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand

9-12 December 2025



We are pleased to announce that this year’s annual conference will be held on 9-12 December in Whāingaroa (Raglan), Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand. 2025 marks 50 years since our association was formed and we look forward to welcoming you to this milestone event as we celebrate five decades of annual gatherings in Aotearoa.

  • What role do edges, borders, margins, and peripheries play in shaping social and material worlds? What does it mean to do anthropology in a world where old models of cores and peripheries have been broken apart? How can peripheral anthropologies contribute to the unsettling of the discipline? In asking these questions, the 2025 ASAA/NZ conference aims to foment conversations around the sites, spaces, actors, and practices taking shape on the periphery to understand how they are actively making and remaking the contemporary world. 

    Anthropologists have long considered “remote and edgy” (Harms et al. 2014) places fertile for knowledge production, but we increasingly understand these edges as critical to the making of social, economic, and political orders. This mirrors the intensifying attention that boundaries attract from state and non-state actors, as evidenced by the fortification of many national and regional boundaries. It also reflects tensions in many urban peripheries, as migrants, private enterprise, and rural citizens struggle over social and physical space. From climate refugees in the Pacific to digital diasporas, from special economic zones to informal economies, edges, borders, margins, and peripheries emerge as key sites for understanding contemporary transformations. 

    Working from the antipodean perspective of Aotearoa New Zealand, we see the periphery as a space of active unsettling that has always been fertile for anthropological thinking. “Edges, Borders, Margins, and Peripheries” also asks: How do disciplinary traditions forged on the edges of empire help push anthropological research in new directions, and where might our edgy locations challenge anthropology to go next?


Keynote Speaker:

Professor Tess Lea (Macquarie University)

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.  

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 Speaker:

Dr April K. Henderson (Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington)

Fielding Questions: Articulations and Disarticulations of Pacific Studies and Anthropology

Inspired by genuine curiosity and questions about fields-in-motion, this talk considers articulations and disarticulations between the interdisciplinary field of Pacific studies and the discipline of cultural anthropology as I've known and experienced them, and as others have written of them. I reflect on the interrelated histories of the two fields; review instances where Pacific studies has been named in discussions of the anthropology of Oceania, and where anthropology has been explicitly invoked in discussions of interdisciplinary Pacific studies; and survey the more extensive body of literature that critically interrogates anthropology’s relationships with Pacific peoples. Then, utilizing Teresia Teaiwa’s 2010 prescription for Pacific studies, I attempt to think through whether, where, and how palpable differences emerge between the prerogatives and practices of interdisciplinary Pacific studies and cultural anthropology of Oceania. 

Dr April K. Henderson is a Senior Lecturer in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. Her research focuses on the circulation of music, performing, and visual art forms between the US, Pacific Islands, and Aotearoa New Zealand to understand Pacific aspirations, representations, contexts and practices and to illuminate their political, economic, and social stakes.


Call for papers:

The call for papers for our 2025 conference is now open with two submission opportunities: an open call for papers and a focused plenary panel on "New fascist economics? The extractive politics of economic chaos, a view from the margins” chaired by Associate Professor Caroline Shuster.

ASAA/NZ 2025 plans to offer in person panels and virtual panels, but we do not have the technological infrastructure to offer hybrid panels (e.g. panels with a mix of in person and virtual presentations). If you are organising a panel, please let us know whether you would like it to be in person or online. If you are submitting a paper abstract, please indicate whether you will present in person at the conference or online during a virtual panel.

The deadline for abstracts is 31 August 2025.

Notification of abstract acceptance: 30 September 2025.

  • We encourage submissions of abstracts of no more than 250 words for individual papers, panels, and group sessions that engage with our theme; however, unrelated submissions are also welcome.

    In addition to standard paper presentation panels and sessions, we also would like to encourage a range of innovative modalities such as:

    • Music, film, and multimedia

    • Talanoa, tok stori

    • Dialogic, conversational, or interview sessions

    • Poetry, ethnographic fiction

    • Games and role-playing

    • Multisensory, embodied, and practical engagements

    • Art and sculpture

  • Chair: Caroline E. Schuster

    In his 1935 essay systematising the principles of a new and alarming liberal trend in political and economic organisation, Willhelm Röpke grimly observed that fascist economics tend towards “loquacious vagueness which irritates the admirer of lucidity in style and thought as much as it seems to attract the masses. We are bewildered by an atmosphere of lyrical unreality and of terminological futility” (1935: 86). And yet through the bluster and ambiguity emerges a “heavily monopolistic-interventionist society adorned by terminological and phraseological ornaments,” one where the ‘socialisation of losses’ is extreme and the capitalist institution of bankruptcy is, to some extent, replaced by concentration camps and revenge politics (91). From various points of view across the globe, we might be pardoned for feeling a sense of déjà vu in 2025. While mainstream economists might self-sooth through its TACO principle (Trump Always Chickens Out), the chaotic, acquisitive, and destructive force of the rapid and often contradictory politico-economic shifts means that, even if quickly abandoned, the interventionism has been successful in sewing turmoil and confusion. Locally, the pattern of interventionist monopolies and phraseological ornament feel familiar. In New Zealand, the current right wing coalition government’s removal of treaty partnerships in governance, slashing of research funding outside of “STEM”, and introduction of regulatory bills of ‘principle’s’ bound in circular logics, suggests that a similar playbook is in operation.  Through it all, the powerful classes are left intact, and indeed, profit.

    This panel seeks anthropological perspectives on the vast concentration of wealth enabled by novel configurations of monopolistic and interventionist economies, especially as these are amplified by economic chaos. We suggest that these patterns offer a window onto novel modes of extractivism, particularly at the margins. While the new fascist economics may indeed extend older patterns of centre/periphery exploitation and financial subordination (Alami et al 2023), what exactly is being unearthed, extracted, and removed appears to have shifted. We are especially interested in how these processes intersect with ‘anti-woke’ political realignments that sew chaos along lines of gender, sexuality, diversity, ethnicity, and anti-environmentalism. The panel welcomes ethnographically driven accounts of the extractive politics of economic chaos, with particular attention to material processes of impoverishment and destitution left in their wake.

    Alami, I., et al, 2023. International financial subordination: a critical research agenda. Review of International Political Economy, 30(4), 1360-1386.

    Röpke, W. (1935). Fascist economics. Economica, 2(5), 85-100.

    Papers for this plenary panel might consider:

    1. What new forms of extractivism exist in relation to fascist economics? Novel forms of extractivism include data scraping for algorithmic training, new digital and financial models, contemporary Agribusinesses, profiting off greenwashing, as well as more literal extractivisms such as seabed mining, offshore wind and fish farms.  

    2. How might new forms of extractivism replicate and/or be distinguished from older colonial forms?

    3. What does it mean ethnographically when resources are taken by the few while a “lyrical unreality and terminological futility” unfolds?  What politics of economic chaos can be discerned?


ASAA/NZ 2025 Travel Awards

Thanks to generous support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, we can offer five travel awards of up to NZ$1000 each for conference participants from low- and middle-income countries.* This travel award is to help financially support participants without access to funding, such as precarious scholars and postgraduate students without institutional support. Priority will be given to applicants from Oceania and Southeast Asia given their proximity to Aotearoa New Zealand and travel affordability.

Applications are due by 31 August 2025.

Please note: Travel awards are conditional upon your abstract being accepted by the ASAA/NZ Conference Organising Committee. If your abstract is not accepted for the conference, your travel award application will be automatically withdrawn, and you will be notified accordingly.

* Postgraduate students studying anthropology at a New Zealand university are welcome to apply to our Kākano Fund.

    • Must be a resident of a low- or middle-income country (using the most recent World Bank classification)

    • Must be a precarious scholar and/or postgraduate student without institutional support

    • Must have limited or no access to institutional or other funding sources

    • Must be presenting original research at the ASAA/NZ 2025 conference

  • Please note that funding for this award is limited and competitive. We are not in a position to support all applicants.

    These travel awards will include:

    • A grant of up to NZ$1000 to contribute towards travel and accommodation costs

    • Conference registration fee waiver

    • Complimentary ASAA/NZ membership for three years

  • To apply, applicants must:

    • Meet the eligibility criteria

    • Have submitted an abstract for presentation at the ASAA/NZ 2025 conference (award conditional on the abstract being accepted by the ASAA/NZ Conference Organising Committee)

    • Be present throughout the duration of the conference

    • Submit a complete travel award application via email by the due date

  • To apply for a travel award, please submit your application via email to asaanz2025@gmail.com with the subject line “ASAA/NZ 2025 Travel Award Application – [your last name]”. Your email should include the following information, as an attachment in one document (PDF preferred): 

    • Your 250-word abstract (as submitted to the ASAA/NZ 2025 Conference Organising Committee)

    • A 500-word research summary 

    • A short description (approx. 250 words) of your current funding context and how a travel award would support your conference participation

    • An estimated budget for your travel and accommodation costs, with evidence of those estimated costs (e.g. flight/accommodation screenshots or quotes, where possible)

    Applications will be promptly reviewed, and applicants will be notified of the outcome by 30 September 2025. 

  • Travel awards will be granted based on the following criteria:

    • Significance and clarity of abstract

    • Must be a precarious scholar and/or postgraduate student without institutional support

    • Preference given to applicants from Oceania and Southeast Asia

    • Must be eligible to apply for a visa to enter New Zealand (if not a New Zealand citizen)

    Important: ASAA/NZ can supply official invitation letters to international attendees to help support the visa application process. However, please note that ASAA/NZ does not organise visas on your behalf, and that an invitation letter from us does not guarantee visa approval.

  • By accepting this award, recipients commit to:

    • Attending and presenting at the 2025 conference as scheduled

    • Notifying ASAA/NZ immediately if circumstances change that would prevent attendance

    • Understanding that failure to attend without prior notification may affect future funding opportunities


Registration

Conference registration will open in September 2025. Registration fees are currently being finalised but are expected to be approximately NZ$300 (including morning/afternoon tea plus one meal), with reduced rates available for ASAA/NZ members, students, and unwaged attendees.


Whāingaroa Accommodation

Whāingaroa has accommodation to suit all budgets and styles, from camping and backpackers to self-contained units and boutique options. Please book directly with providers for the best rates and to secure your preferred dates.

Raglan Sunset Motel
The Raglan Sunset Motel offers convenient accommodation just a 5-minute walk from the Raglan Old School Arts Centre and minutes from the Raglan town centre.

  • Special rates for conference attendees of $169 per night - subject to availability. When booking, mention that you are attending the conference to receive the special rate.

  • Regular prices from $189 per night

Solscape
Solscape offers a range of camping, self-contained, and shared eco accommodation options and is an 10-minute drive from the town centre. Prices range from $26 per night (for a non-powered campsite) to $220 per night (for a Family Caboose).

Raglan Backpackers
Raglan Backpackers offers private, shared, and self-contained accommodation very close to the town centre. Prices range from $42 per night (for a dorm room) to $180 per night (for a 4-person room).

Raglan West Accommodation Units
Raglan West Accommodation offers self-contained accommodation (5 rooms, maximum 3 people each) and is a 4 minute drive from the town centre. Prices range from $90 per night (weekdays for 2 people) to $150 per night (weekends for 3 people).

Raglan Holiday Park
Raglan Holiday Park offers tent sites, powered campervan or caravan sites, backpacker accommodation, cabins, self-contained and motel units. It is a 5 minute drive from the town centre and 2 minutes’ walk to the beach. Prices begin from $45 per night and most options require guests to bring their own linen and bedding.

The Silos Apartments
The Silos Apartments offer boutique accommodation in converted cement silos, located a 1 minute drive or 10 minute walk from the town centre. Prices begin from $300 per night.

Other accommodation options
Other privately managed accommodation is also available on AirBnb, Bookabach, Booking.com, and the like.


Conference Organising Committee

Fiona McCormack
Bronwyn Isaacs
Lorena Gibson
Carolyn Morris
Etienne de Villiers

This conference is generously supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Conference and Workshop Grant.