SESSÃO PLENÁRIA II

Dia 17 de Julho / 11:00 - 12:45 / Auditório Francisco Sampaio (ESTG/IPVC)

ITINERANCIES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE: EXTRACTIONS, EXTINCTIONS, REPARATIONS [Sessão em Inglês]

Organizer & Chair: Cristiana Bastos
Presenters: Sarah Meltzoff, Gísli Pálsson and Olga Ulturgasheva
Invited Discussant: Gonçalo D. Santos

For this plenary session we invited three distinguished anthropologists with innovative and impactful work on anthropocenic itinerancies involving human-animal interactions, social inequalities, environmental changes and collaborative partnerships. The session is organized along the axis of extraction, extinction, and reparation. Sarah Meltzoff will revisit her early work on dolphin hunting in the Solomon Islands in the 1970s and update it with a contemporary perspective on dolphin protection and sustainability in the same society. Gísli Pálsson will address colonialism, extinction, and memory, drawing upon his recent books The Man Who Stole Himself and The Last of its Kind, while discussing the hunches, insights, and surprises in anthropological practice. Olga Ulturgasheva will address the encounter between Siberian reindeer herders and permafrost researchers and the fragile yet promising alliances that emerge when Indigenous principles of co-operation (bilaek) and human–reindeer partnership (nyamnin) encounter permafrost science, bringing in a decolonial ethic for reimagining research relations and reciprocal, accountable gatherings of scientists, Indigenous experts, and non-human kin, while also opening new paths for risk mitigation, repoliticising science as a situated practice of care, and sketching possibilities for more-than-human climate resilience across plural Arctic worlds.

Sarah Meltzoff is an anthropologist of coastal cultures from the Solomon Islands and Spain to Galapagos and Chile. Her stories of grassroots conservation, fisheries decision-making and management reveal global patterns from 40 years of fieldwork. As a professor in Marine Ecosystems and Society, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, she has considered climates of change and impermanence, exploring interrelationships among fisheries, tourism, and conservation. She uncovers the shifting alliances and rivalries, showing the strange bedfellows angling for control over marine resources. Her key book is Listening to Sea Lions: Currents of Change from Galapagos to Patagonia (Alta Mira Press 2013). Meltzoff first lived among the Lau of Small Malaita in the Solomon Islands in 1973 on a Watson Fellowship, participating in their custom dolphin hunt and over the next half century watching their island world transform with “civilization”—Pidgin English for industrialized society. She joined The Ric O’Barry Dolphin Project team to lend her expertise in grassroots community education and conservation fueled by geo-tourism and voluntourism. Meltzoff co-founded IOI–the Intercultural Outreach Institute of Isabela http://www.ioi.ec/ —focusing on Galapagos grassroots community education and social development. Now emeritus, she is living in Lisbon.

Gísli Pálsson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Iceland, formerly a professor at the University of Oslo. Pálsson has worked in environmental anthropology, fishing communities, extinction studies, and arctic cultures. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction (2024)-- Finalist for 2025 PROSE Award for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, listed by The Guardian as one of the best books of 2024 on Science and Nature, and shortlisted for The Royal Society of London Science Book Prize, 2024; The Human Age: How We Created the Anthropocene Epoch and Caused the Climate Crisis (2020), Anthropology and The New Genetic (2007), and Nature, Culture, and Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Life (2016). He is the recipient of the Rosenstiel Award in Oceanographic Science from the University of Miami. Pálsson is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland and, formerly, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). He authored the guest editorial titled "Anthropologies of Extinction" for Anthropology Today in 2023.

Olga Ulturgasheva is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research explores the lived experiences of climate change, Indigenous sovereignty, and collaborative world-making. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork, her work reflects a sustained commitment to collaborative knowledge production across disciplinary, cultural, and epistemic boundaries. She is the author of three books, including the most recent co-edited volume, Risky Futures: Climate, Geopolitics and Local Realities in the Uncertain Circumpolar North (Berghahn Books, 2022). This volume examines shifting conceptions of environmental risk and highlights emerging forms of interdisciplinary collaboration in response to the accelerating impacts of climate change in the Arctic. Dr. Ulturgasheva has served as Principal Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator on two major international research projects, funded respectively by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Research Council (ERC). These projects focus on the effects of climate change on knowledge systems, epistemic collaboration, and Indigenous adaptive practices across circumpolar regions and beyond.

Gonçalo D. Santos 江紹龍 is a sinologist and a professor of social-cultural anthropology at the University of Coimbra. He is also a senior researcher at CIAS – Research Centre for Anthropology and Health, University of Coimbra, where he coordinates the Laboratory of Critical Anthropocene Studies and the Research Cluster “Technoscience, Society and the Environment”. He held previous professorial and research positions at the London School of Economics, the University of Hong Kong and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He is the author of Chinese Village Life Today (University of Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming Patriarchy (UWP, 2017) and of Making People, Sustaining Life: Rethinking Reproductive Labor and Technology in East Asia (UWP, Forthcoming). He is a member of the Culture and Society Research Group of the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, and is the director of the Sci-Tech Asia International Research Network. He is interested in Discard Studies and is currently working on a book on the anthropology of shit.
Personal Website: https://gdsantos.com/
Network Website: https://www.scitechasia.org

Cristiana Bastos is an anthropologist and a research professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, ULisboa. Intersecting the disciplines of anthropology, social history, and social studies of science, technology and medicine, her research addresses population dynamics, colonial biopolitics, health and well-being, mobilities, plantation societies, racializations, and plant-people interactions. Her recent edited and co-edited volumes include: Medicina e Império em Goa; Migration and Mill Work; Post-Emancipation Indenture and Migration; Plant-Anthropo-Genesis; she is preparing two monographs that resulted from the research The Colour of Labour. Currently the president of APA, she has served previously on the executive board of EASA, and on the International Relations Committee of ABA and of the AAA.
Her publications are available at https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/pessoa/cristiana-bastos, https://cristianabastos.org/ and https://colour.ics.ulisboa.pt/