This year the Anthropology and Development Studies (ADS) Seminar Series invites scholars to consider the theme ‘Complicity'

ADS Seminar Series 2026 Theme: Complicity

For this year's ADS seminar series, we confront an uncomfortable and morally disorienting topic: complicity. By complicity, we mean an entanglement with power that refuses the tidy binaries of victim and perpetrator. As complicit subjects, we may occupy positions of power while denying the privileges they confer. We may maintain passive investments in fossil fuels and colonial wars. We may acknowledge historical injustices while continuing to profit from their material legacies. We may witness inequity in hiring, workloads, student treatment, or governance, yet choose discretion over dissent, allowing harm to persist through collegiality, caution, or career strategising. We may also remain within institutions we criticise - tied by contracts, funding, loyalty, or obligation - performing the moral and political accounting that makes such work possible.

Taking the figure of the complicit subject as our analytic lens, we invite speakers to consider: how do we, and/or our interlocutors, reckon with our complicity in banal and everyday ways? What forms of accountability are possible beyond guilt, defensiveness, or paralysis? When complicity seems unavoidable, what modes of refusal, repair, or reimagining become possible?

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

Contact the host of ‘Meet the editor’ with Assoc. Prof Caroline Schuster – publishing in Current Anthropology Q&A