Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Sophie Chao "Skinship, scarship: Multispecies vulnerabilities and plantation violence in West Papua"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Meetings are Fridays, 11am -1pm Eastern Time.

Meetings will be held in a hybrid format, both on Zoom and in-person at 230 Prospect Street, Room 101.

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Sophie Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Australia. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific, with a particular ethnographic focus on the Indonesian-occupied region of West Papua. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papuaand co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice, both published by Duke University Press.Chao’s current research examines Indigenous experiences and theories of hunger in West Papua and wildlife-human entanglements in settler Australia. At the University of Sydney, Chao is co-lead of the Sydney Environment Institute’s Biocultural Diversities Research Theme and Executive Committee Member of the Sydney Southeast Asian Centre. She previously worked for the human rights organization Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their customary lands, resources, and livelihoods.