Stead
Biographic Data
| ID | 54117 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stead |
| FAMILY NAME | Stead |
| SIGNATURE | STEAD |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0014-3189 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 106 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Brokering Pacific labour mobility
Since 2008, temporary labour migration schemes have brought growing numbers of Pacific Islanders to work on Australian farms. The space between these workers and the farmers for whom they labour is organised through a complex ecology of brokerage relations, entailing diverse actors, processes and institutions. While the role of corporate labour‐hire agencies and the technocratic strictures of labour and migration regimes shape the brokerage of Pa…
Equalising power imbalances or a trail of broken promises? A qualitative study on engaging people with diverse lived experience of marginalisation in food policymaking in Australia
We provide a list of practical recommendations to guide more inclusive, equitable and fit-for-purpose food policymaking into the future. These recommendations seek to challenge dominant systems of discrimination by demonstrating how we can tangibly shift to ways of working that value and elevate the power of people who are often excluded from many decision-making systems, specifically when it comes to food and nutrition
Architectures of un/belonging
How are historical instances of transitory places of accommodation and work represented? How should specific migrant histories be located within the shifting terrains of settler-colonial states? In reviewing an exhibit about life in migrant camps in post-war Australia, this paper considers three tensions: first, between the exhibit’s intended focus on the built environment, and the lack of material traces of the camps themselves; second, the ambi…
In Pursuit of Ethical and Inclusive Research
Across disciplines, qualitative researchers have documented epistemological and practical tensions in the ethical review of community-based and participatory research, with many arguing that ethics committees' decisions perpetuate the exclusion of marginalised communities from research engagement. In the existing literature, the research team and the ethics committee are often characterised as staunch opponents. Conversely, in our recent qualitat…
Beyond the 'Triple Win
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the global horticultural sector’s reliance on migrant workers. Within Australia, public attention was focused particularly on Pacific Islanders employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) guestworker scheme. With national border closures resulting in significant labour shortages for the horticultural industry, special-purpose exemptions allowing limited groups of SWP workers to enter the country were cel…
Feeling the (post)colonial
The Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea's Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to "do" the 96-km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda-denoting both the track and the place where the track commences-is also a site of intense feelin…
Temporariness made interminable
Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south‐east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID‐19 …
Making place in a place that doesn't recognise you
Race and place-making in the rural Global North
Big Data won’t feed the world
Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories
The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of…
Precarity's reach
The temporary labour migrations of Pacific Islanders to work in the orchards and packing sheds of the Australian horticultural industry feed the demands for flexible labour that are marks of the precarious present. At the same time, their labour experiences call attention to the diverse, historically situated, and racialized configurations of power and risk that converge in the present moment within particular places and within the intersecting l…
Labour Lines and Colonial Power
The Government's policy of buying stations and building large settlements-at considerable cost to the taxpayers-and then encouraging large numbers of natives to congregate on these places enjoying Government sustenance with a minimum of work has not helped the employment problem It would be easier, in our opinion, to 'blackbird' a boat load of Kanakas, than to pry loose a couple of native stockmen from some of these
Moral Horizons of Land and Place
A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land…
History as Resource
Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu.…
Landownership as Exclusion
Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of communities living in the vicinity of industrial tuna fishing and processing facilities in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), this chapter explores and critiques some of the claims which are made by proponents of land formalisation in PNG. Far from securing people’s access to the promises of development, globalisation, and statehood, it argues, mechanisms of land formalisation for these communities hav…
Doing ‘social cohesion’
The emergence of ‘social cohesion’ as a policy concept in various Western states has been widely understood as part of a backlash against multiculturalism. This article applies an anthropological lens to the implementation of an Australian project to engage young people in order to ‘strengthen social cohesion’ in outer metropolitan Melbourne. Ethnographic analysis of the project lends empirical support to key critiques of the social cohesion para…
Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea
On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, …
Recognition, power and coloniality
Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Wri…
Not ever fully unconscious
Mobility and emplacement in north coast Papua New Guinea
On the north coast of Papua New Guinea, the construction of the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone is catalysing movements of people, capital and things, as well as of the ideas and imaginings which accompany and make them meaningful. Drawn from literary and postcolonial studies, the concept of worlding offers a narrative framework through which to think through these movements and the ways in which they complicate prevailing narratives of globalisat…
Homeland, territory, property
Belonging in Oceania
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in movement and its related forms—mobility, travel, transnationalism, migration, diaspora, displacement and so on. In the context of this burgeoning
Greeting the State
In May 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village on the country's north coast to receive a petition against proposed mine activity. The encounter between the politicians and the villagers who had invited them involved two very different articulations of power and authority, and two competing cartographies of centrality and marginality. The encounter speaks to the need to approach the concepts of custom and …
Embedded in the land
Drawing on a case study of Cacavei, a rural subsistence community in Timor‐Leste, this article explores the mutually constitutive relationship between people and land within customary forms of society. Patterns of land use and connection to land are not simply reflective of genealogical modes of social organisation, but are also enabling of them. Particularly, the embedding of ancestors within the land offers a means of accessing kinship relation…
Recognition, power and coloniality
Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Wri…
Precarity's reach
The temporary labour migrations of Pacific Islanders to work in the orchards and packing sheds of the Australian horticultural industry feed the demands for flexible labour that are marks of the precarious present. At the same time, their labour experiences call attention to the diverse, historically situated, and racialized configurations of power and risk that converge in the present moment within particular places and within the intersecting l…
Race and place-making in the rural Global North
Making place in a place that doesn't recognise you
Homeland, territory, property
Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories
The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of…
Beyond the 'Triple Win
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the global horticultural sector’s reliance on migrant workers. Within Australia, public attention was focused particularly on Pacific Islanders employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) guestworker scheme. With national border closures resulting in significant labour shortages for the horticultural industry, special-purpose exemptions allowing limited groups of SWP workers to enter the country were cel…
In Pursuit of Ethical and Inclusive Research
Across disciplines, qualitative researchers have documented epistemological and practical tensions in the ethical review of community-based and participatory research, with many arguing that ethics committees' decisions perpetuate the exclusion of marginalised communities from research engagement. In the existing literature, the research team and the ethics committee are often characterised as staunch opponents. Conversely, in our recent qualitat…
Embedded in the land
Drawing on a case study of Cacavei, a rural subsistence community in Timor‐Leste, this article explores the mutually constitutive relationship between people and land within customary forms of society. Patterns of land use and connection to land are not simply reflective of genealogical modes of social organisation, but are also enabling of them. Particularly, the embedding of ancestors within the land offers a means of accessing kinship relation…
Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea
On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, …
History as Resource
Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu.…
Doing ‘social cohesion’
The emergence of ‘social cohesion’ as a policy concept in various Western states has been widely understood as part of a backlash against multiculturalism. This article applies an anthropological lens to the implementation of an Australian project to engage young people in order to ‘strengthen social cohesion’ in outer metropolitan Melbourne. Ethnographic analysis of the project lends empirical support to key critiques of the social cohesion para…
Greeting the State
In May 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village on the country's north coast to receive a petition against proposed mine activity. The encounter between the politicians and the villagers who had invited them involved two very different articulations of power and authority, and two competing cartographies of centrality and marginality. The encounter speaks to the need to approach the concepts of custom and …
Architectures of un/belonging
How are historical instances of transitory places of accommodation and work represented? How should specific migrant histories be located within the shifting terrains of settler-colonial states? In reviewing an exhibit about life in migrant camps in post-war Australia, this paper considers three tensions: first, between the exhibit’s intended focus on the built environment, and the lack of material traces of the camps themselves; second, the ambi…
Feeling the (post)colonial
The Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea's Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to "do" the 96-km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda-denoting both the track and the place where the track commences-is also a site of intense feelin…
Embedded in the land
Drawing on a case study of Cacavei, a rural subsistence community in Timor‐Leste, this article explores the mutually constitutive relationship between people and land within customary forms of society. Patterns of land use and connection to land are not simply reflective of genealogical modes of social organisation, but are also enabling of them. Particularly, the embedding of ancestors within the land offers a means of accessing kinship relation…
Light intervention
Light intervention: Lessons from Bougainville , by Anthony J. Regan. Perspectives Series, United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington, DC, 2010, xvi + 197pp., abbreviations, maps, chronology
Greeting the State
In May 2010, a delegation of Papua New Guinean politicians travelled to a remote village on the country's north coast to receive a petition against proposed mine activity. The encounter between the politicians and the villagers who had invited them involved two very different articulations of power and authority, and two competing cartographies of centrality and marginality. The encounter speaks to the need to approach the concepts of custom and …
Homeland, territory, property
Belonging in Oceania
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in movement and its related forms—mobility, travel, transnationalism, migration, diaspora, displacement and so on. In the context of this burgeoning
Mobility and emplacement in north coast Papua New Guinea
On the north coast of Papua New Guinea, the construction of the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone is catalysing movements of people, capital and things, as well as of the ideas and imaginings which accompany and make them meaningful. Drawn from literary and postcolonial studies, the concept of worlding offers a narrative framework through which to think through these movements and the ways in which they complicate prevailing narratives of globalisat…
Landownership as Exclusion
Drawing on an ethnographic analysis of communities living in the vicinity of industrial tuna fishing and processing facilities in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), this chapter explores and critiques some of the claims which are made by proponents of land formalisation in PNG. Far from securing people’s access to the promises of development, globalisation, and statehood, it argues, mechanisms of land formalisation for these communities hav…
Doing ‘social cohesion’
The emergence of ‘social cohesion’ as a policy concept in various Western states has been widely understood as part of a backlash against multiculturalism. This article applies an anthropological lens to the implementation of an Australian project to engage young people in order to ‘strengthen social cohesion’ in outer metropolitan Melbourne. Ethnographic analysis of the project lends empirical support to key critiques of the social cohesion para…
Violent histories and the ambivalences of recognition in postcolonial Papua New Guinea
On the 23 July 2009, in a ceremony at the Bomana War Cemetery near Papua New Guinea’s capital city Port Moresby, 86-year-old Wesley Akove was awarded the first of a series of ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel commemorative medallions’ given by the Australian government to PNG civilians who had assisted Australian troops during the Second World War. If the awarding of Mr Akove’s medallion is in many ways an archetypal enactment of the ‘politics of recognition’, …
Recognition, power and coloniality
Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Wri…
Not ever fully unconscious
Moral Horizons of Land and Place
A recent ‘moral turn’ in anthropology has cast new light on morality as a subject of ethnographic inquiry, and on the making of moral meaning and judgment. This article, and the special issue it prefaces, contribute to this emergent literature through foregrounding and examining the moral dimensions of land and place. Taking up Didier Fassin’s injunction for a critical moral anthropology – rather than an anthropology of morality – we look to land…
History as Resource
Located in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, Higaturu Station is a place marked by multiple intersections of violence. Originally established as an Australian colonial headquarters, in 1943 it was the site of execution of 21 local Orokaiva men convicted – by the Australian administration – of treason during the Second World War. Eight years after the executions, the nearby Mount Lamington volcano erupted, killing thousands and devastating Higaturu.…
Labour Lines and Colonial Power
The Government's policy of buying stations and building large settlements-at considerable cost to the taxpayers-and then encouraging large numbers of natives to congregate on these places enjoying Government sustenance with a minimum of work has not helped the employment problem It would be easier, in our opinion, to 'blackbird' a boat load of Kanakas, than to pry loose a couple of native stockmen from some of these
Big Data won’t feed the world
Unfree Labour and Australia’s Obscured Pacific Histories
The passage of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018 received bipartisan support and was heralded within both Houses of Parliament as a significant step towards addressing Australia’s complicity in modern slavery. Political discourse surrounding the legislation, however, exhibits a profound and disconcerting dehistoricisation, emphasising particularities of global supply chains and contemporary transnational capitalism. Australia’s own histories of…
Precarity's reach
The temporary labour migrations of Pacific Islanders to work in the orchards and packing sheds of the Australian horticultural industry feed the demands for flexible labour that are marks of the precarious present. At the same time, their labour experiences call attention to the diverse, historically situated, and racialized configurations of power and risk that converge in the present moment within particular places and within the intersecting l…
Temporariness made interminable
Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork with Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) workers in south‐east Australia, I reflect in this paper on the experience of interminable temporariness and on its implications for the structural conditions underpinning contemporary horticultural labour in Australia. Although in many ways reflective of the specificities of a unique historical moment, the interminable temporariness experienced through the COVID‐19 …
Making place in a place that doesn't recognise you
Race and place-making in the rural Global North
Beyond the 'Triple Win
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the global horticultural sector’s reliance on migrant workers. Within Australia, public attention was focused particularly on Pacific Islanders employed through the Seasonal Worker Programme (SWP) guestworker scheme. With national border closures resulting in significant labour shortages for the horticultural industry, special-purpose exemptions allowing limited groups of SWP workers to enter the country were cel…
Feeling the (post)colonial
The Kokoda Track, which spans Papua New Guinea's Oro and Central Provinces, has become a site of profound Australian national feeling. Each year, thousands of Australian trekkers travel to Papua New Guinea to "do" the 96-km hiking trail, in remembrance of the battle waged along it during the Second World War. For Oro Province people, meanwhile, Kokoda-denoting both the track and the place where the track commences-is also a site of intense feelin…
In Pursuit of Ethical and Inclusive Research
Across disciplines, qualitative researchers have documented epistemological and practical tensions in the ethical review of community-based and participatory research, with many arguing that ethics committees' decisions perpetuate the exclusion of marginalised communities from research engagement. In the existing literature, the research team and the ethics committee are often characterised as staunch opponents. Conversely, in our recent qualitat…
Equalising power imbalances or a trail of broken promises? A qualitative study on engaging people with diverse lived experience of marginalisation in food policymaking in Australia
We provide a list of practical recommendations to guide more inclusive, equitable and fit-for-purpose food policymaking into the future. These recommendations seek to challenge dominant systems of discrimination by demonstrating how we can tangibly shift to ways of working that value and elevate the power of people who are often excluded from many decision-making systems, specifically when it comes to food and nutrition
Architectures of un/belonging
How are historical instances of transitory places of accommodation and work represented? How should specific migrant histories be located within the shifting terrains of settler-colonial states? In reviewing an exhibit about life in migrant camps in post-war Australia, this paper considers three tensions: first, between the exhibit’s intended focus on the built environment, and the lack of material traces of the camps themselves; second, the ambi…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Colonialism (10 works) · History (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Archaeology (8 works)