In-person at Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus and online via Zoom.

SCHEDULE

12:30 Welcome address: Chris Mayes and Eben Kirksey, ADI Geelong Co-Conveners

12:40 Holly High, “Cultural Values, Birth, and Parenting”

An ambitious reproductive health initiative is emerging in Laos – The Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child – and this project will be focus of Holly High’s ARC Future Fellowship.

1:00 Miguel Vatter, “Notes on Nature Rights and One Health”

This presentation will address questions about the foundations of nature rights and their connection with some of the presuppositions of the One Health worldview.

1:20 Discussion

This public event will be followed by an orientation session open to all ADI staff members, including school-based members, from 1:30-2:30.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Associate Professor Holly High is an anthropologist trained at ANU who has held postdoctoral positions at Yale, Cambridge and Sydney Universities. She uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to understand the human experience. She has written about debt, power and desire; psychoanalytic theory and anthropology; Lao policy (including cultural, poverty, health and agricultural policies) in relation to lived experience in that country; everyday politics in Laos; emerging infectious disease as an intercultural zone; and religion in Laos. Currently, she is investigating transformations in pregnancy, birth and early childhood in Laos.

Professor Miguel Vatter has a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. He has held academic positions in the United States and Chile and visiting professorships in Germany and China. Miguel’s research interests are in the history of political thought, biopolitics, and politics and religion. His most recent books include Divine Democracy. Political Theology after Carl Schmitt (OUP 2020) and Living Law. Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (OUP 2021).