---- Postponed until 2021 ----

It is with great regret that we inform you of the postponement of the 2020 joint conference of the Australian Anthropological Society and the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa New Zealand. Our conference was to be held in December of 2020, but the NZ organisers, in consultation with the AAS Executive Committee and our conference manager Nomad IT, have made the difficult decision to postpone the event to the end of 2021.

With the unprecedented impacts of COVID-19 worldwide, there is great uncertainty about international travel. Strong travel restrictions and self-quarantine requirements are being implemented by governments and health authorities worldwide. Simultaneously, we are aware of the need for AAS and ASAANZ members, as well as our colleagues in anthropology around the world to focus on the health and safety of their families, students, and colleagues, not to mention their own. Though it is our greatest hope that we are all able to regain a sense of normalcy by December, we are mindful of the many risks that people would need to consider participating in a conference this year.

We will announce new plans for the joint AAS+ASAANZ conference in Wellington in early 2021. Meanwhile, the AAS will plan to hold a virtual (online) annual general meeting (AGM), in keeping with our association's constitution. We will announce details about that AGM and how you can participate later this year.

2021 AAS+ASAANZ Conference Theme:

Unsettling Peripheries

What does an anthropology for these unsettled, often unsettling, times look like? What does it mean to do anthropology in a world where old models of cores and peripheries have been broken apart? What role does the periphery, edge, or margin play in unsettling ossified social, political, or economic forms? How can peripheral anthropologies contribute to the unsettling of the discipline? In asking these questions, the combined AAS+ASAANZ 2021 conference aims to foment conversation around the sites, spaces, actors, and practices taking shape on the periphery to understand the ways they are actively making and remaking the contemporary world.
“Unsettling Peripheries” will bring together international scholars to provoke new thinking on the forces driving social change from the outermost reaches of socio-political life. Unsettling might refer to shaking the status quo; to the uncanny, eerie, disturbing, or challenging; or to unsettling practices and debates about decolonisation in settler societies. Working from the antipodean perspectives of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, we see the periphery as a space of active unsettling that has always been fertile for anthropological thinking. “Unsettling Peripheries” also asks: how do disciplinary traditions forged on the edges of empire helped push anthropological research in new directions, and where might our edgy locations challenge anthropology to go next?