This year the Anthropology and Development Studies (ADS) Seminar Series invites scholars to consider the theme ‘Crucial Upgrades’:
ADS Seminar Series 2025 Theme: Crucial Upgrades
For this year’s ADS seminar series, we take inspiration from the major infrastructural projects currently sweeping across our campus as an opportunity to reflect critically on narratives of progress and modernity. From Labour’s Big Build to the University of Melbourne’s Estate Master Plan, such upgrades evoke mixed feelings. While suggestive of advancement and transition for some, they may stoke fears of violence and neoliberal adjustment for others. Indeed, upgrades can conjure images of techno-utopian futures and algorithmic dreams, while discourses of continual improvement turn such visions into an existential imperative: leaner workplaces, leaner selves. All the while, of course, universities are facing substantial obstacles, from rampant cuts and austerity to punitive crackdowns on free speech. As each new update brings “progress”, who or what is left behind?
Taking these infrastructure projects as metaphor, we ask our speakers to consider the politics and poetics of progress at play within their own fieldsites or within their work in the academy. What visions of the future sit behind such endeavors and what less-than-ideal collusions are made in their creation? What disruptions and disadvantages are incurred when making ‘crucial upgrades’, and who bears the brunt of these? What discourses are enacted when progress is proposed or challenged, and what is (or could be) the role of the academic and our disciplines in such movements?
The ADS Seminar Series Committee includes Dr Cynthia Sear, Dr Adrian Watts and Dr Lenka Hadravova. We can be contacted at ads-seminar@unimelb.edu.au