Care and Responsibility: Ethics and ethnography in trying times

Description

This event has been postponed. The confirmed date is now Wednesday 23 September.

Dr Catherine Trundle will give a brief reflection on the last 17 years of her research, asking how and why certain intellectual questions came to the fore, changed or have persisted across diverse ethnographic contexts. In doing so she’ll engage from a wide angle view with the anthropology of ethics, asking how her ideas of care and responsibility have evolved. How have they shifted as intellectual concerns, as personal, scholarly, and political commitments, as demands made upon her by interlocutors, as a set of competing and circulating commitments between work, family and self?

In the second half Dr Trundle will briefly outline her new research question, which explores the ethics of responsibility, agency, care, culpability, and narrative in climate change action. In doing so she'll explain why she is currently sitting with Ricoeur’s ideas about time and narrative, why poetry and a poetic sensibility have become so essential to her craft, and what it means to recast ones relationship to research in trying times, where COVID-19, personal loss, and motherhood all demand new modes of being.

Dr Trundle will speak for 25-30 minutes, then would like to invite others in the anthropology community—staff, students and friends—to share glimpses into how their own purpose, ethics, and labours as anthropologists and ethnographers have shifted or endured, and how our current political/ecological moment reshapes or might reshape the anthropologist in Aotearoa.