The 2025 conference of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) is being held at McGill University in Montreal May 7 – May 10. This year’s theme is “Confluences”. Several of our faculty and graduate students will be presenting this year.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2025
WED. MAY 7 | 9:30 AM
Mahashewta Bhattacharya: Eating Through a Variegated Tongue: complicating food as a site of confluence among South Asian immigrants in Canada
This paper looks at confluence in food and culinary traditions among first- and second-generation immigrants from South Asia in Canada. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Vancouver, with particular focus on Bengali speaking communities from both Bangladesh and India, it brings to boil a complex flavours of ways of eating that melts together ingredients, processes and infrastructures of cooking as primary components in understanding lives post migration and everyday negotiations in a dissimilar cultural context. Looking into the sensory domains of mouthwork, tactility and emotions around particular flavours, it not only roots taste as an aesthetic paradigm into deeply visceral experiences, it also emerges as an exercise in writing sensory ethnography that is deeply nourished by cross-continental vocabularies, memories and affective intensities. It also offers us unique insights into various forms and flavours of social exclusion, differentiation as well as acceptance as products of food and commensality beyond ethnic communities.
WED. MAY 7 | 11:15 AM
Ryan Gonsalves Smyth: Layers of Ruination: Intersections of ruin and destruction in heritage preservation and mosque demolitions in India
How does reducing sites to ruin within a framework of heritage create the conditions for their later destruction? I situate ongoing mosque demolitions in the context of existing scholarship on the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Muslim religious sites that demonstrate how in its purported efforts to protect heritage, the ASI has effaced the ongoing vitality of these sites and reduced them to ruins. I focus on two sites, the ongoing dispute over the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi and the recent demolition of the Akhoondji mosque in Delhi, drawing mostly on news reports and the ASI report on the Gyanvapi mosque that purports it was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple. I draw connections between these two projects of ruination, one of heritage preservation and another of destruction, to illustrate how multiple these meanings of ruination intersect and conclude by highlighting ethnographic examples that challenge them.
THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2025
THU. MAY 8 | 9:15am
Megan Muller, Post Doctoral Fellow | co-chair the CASCA Medical Anthropology Network: CASCA Medical Anthropology Network Roundtable: Community Confluences around Health, Medicine and Technology: Centring Medical Anthropology’s strengths
Confluences invite us to reflect on convergences at a historical moment of echo chambers and divisive politics. This roundtable, organized by the Medical Anthropology Network of CASCA, is a space to consider and highlight research in medical anthropology that centres the confluences needed for community building or collective care. Roundtable participants will speak about research activities that create social and political connections between researchers and communities. Themes that will be explored in the round table include: joy as research praxis, communicating medical anthropology insights in scientific health research teams, collaborations between health services research and Indigenous communities, and collaborative research and community mobilization for Inuit-led and run health services. Amongst other topics, we hope to have conversations about the labour and creativity needed for this work. A core goal of this roundtable is to strengthen the community of medical anthropology at CASCA.
THU. MAY 8 | 11:00 AM
Leslie Robertson: Collaborative Hermeneutics
“Why do they even care if we are matrilineal? I’d just like to know why it matters to them. Like who were they?” They are a number of prominent anthropologists who worked with Nak’azdli Whu’ten from the late 19thC to the 1960s. This paper looks to their disciplinary predilections, the iterations and classifications that informed theory of their times and of their making. The task is to generate a hermeneutics to decode the academy as they work to produce knowledge for their own purposes.
THU. MAY 8 | 2:45 PM
Felix Giroux: Green Dreams, Hegemonic Machines: Ethnography of Hydrogen Futures
While energopolitical frameworks highlight renewable energy’s entanglements with extractivist and neoliberal logics (Boyer 2019), they ironically flatten the global yet locally situated processes shaping energy transitions. Drawing on Appel’s (2019) methodological insights, I investigate why and how hegemonic approaches to green hydrogen development are generated and sustained, framing these as critical sites for ethnographic inquiry. Through a comparative lens, I examine an Indigenous-led project in British Columbia alongside more corporate-driven approaches generally promoted in global energy conferences, revealing how these contrasting perspectives both reinforce and reimagine dominant paradigms of green energy development.
THU. MAY 8 | 2:45 PM
Tracey Heatherington: Islands of Speculation: Anthropocene Imaginaries in the Mediterranean Sea
How do the new energy infrastructures of the Anthropocene transform living landscapes of cultural identity? The latest European policies promoting sustainability and adaptation to climate change seek a shift away from dependence on carbon-based fuels. The power to fuel European fantasies of modernity, however, must come from somewhere. Focusing on a large Mediterranean island in Italy, this paper considers projects to implant renewable power sources that could profoundly alter its historical trajectory. Local protest movements leverage narratives of natural and cultural heritage against the monstrous technologies that would transform beloved landscapes and seascapes into a giant battery, powering the mainland.
FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2025
FRI. MAY 9 | 9:15 AM
Helena Zeweri: Reimagining the Ethics of Refuge Across Borders: Afghan Hazara Refugee Advocacy in Australia
Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on refugee rights advocacy in Australia, this paper examines the social world of Afghan Hazara refugee rights advocates in the era of offshore detention and ‘stop the boats’ immigration policies. Since the early 2000s, Afghan Hazara migrants have constituted the majority of boat arrivals to Australia. As a result of oscillating policies toward boat migration, some have been subject to prolonged offshore detention and temporary status while others have been granted permanent refuge. Many of those who have been resettled have gone on to become powerful advocates for immigration policy reform and sources of support for newcomers released from detention into the mainland. Having witnessed the legal precarity and carceral violence newcomer communities are subjected to as well as the enduring violence of ethno-racial persecution and civil conflict in Afghanistan, Afghan Hazara advocates have developed unique philosophies around the right to refuge.
Such philosophies view the effects of Australia’s border regime as transnational, impacting kin and community in Afghanistan and other transit countries where refugees face prolonged wait times. By extension, advocates reimagine the ethics of ‘refuge’ not only as an individual right administered by the state but also as a collective responsibility of those who have experienced the intersecting violence of borders, war, and ethno-racial persecution. This ethics of rights and responsibilities invites an unsettling of liberal state and activist discourses which view refuge as an object of individual desire, aspiration, and struggle. Examining the historical specificity of the Afghan Hazara experience of crossing borders can unearth alternative philosophies around refuge that consider collective experiences of structural violence.
FRI. MAY 9 | 2:30 PM
Connor Sziklasi: The Slow Burn of Fetishization: The Mediation of Culture and Capital in the Village of Field, BC
British Columbia, renowned for its accessible natural spaces, is home to protected areas designed to safeguard these spaces while promoting access. This dual objective creates tension rooted in a “radical separation” of humans and “nature” that has defined protected areas since their inception. For the residents of Field, BC, whose homes lie within Yoho National Park, this separation threatens their community, cultural heritage, and village’s existence.
My paper explores how Parks Canada’s Field problem reflects the fetishization of protected areas, where their value becomes increasingly tied to generating capital. This process, as anthropologists James Igoe, Katja Neves, and Dan Brockington argue, causes the ecological and sociocultural values of these spaces to “fade into the background or disappear altogether.” Using ethnographic data, I analyze how this fetishization impacts the daily lives of Field residents and how their village is leveraged to rationalize the process.
FRI. MAY 9 | 2:30 PM & SAT MAY 10 | 4:00 PM
Olivia Brophy: Reconsidering Youth Pregnancy in the Willamette Valley: Engaging Adult Support Providers
Youth pregnancy is generally seen as detrimental to the life chances of young parents and their children. In the United States, it is painted as a drain on government resources and a threat to collective social wellbeing. This poster uses medical anthropological perspectives to discuss the ways in which such negative framings are confronted by support providers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley through their work. While negotiating a variety of socio-economic, religious, and political affiliations, these support professionals coalesce around a belief that young people are worthy of care. Understanding the support systems young people draw upon provides important insight for those seeking to address the actual human impact of restrictive reproductive health realities in the United States.
FRI. MAY 9 | 2:30 PM
Jan Lim: Embodiment as Imperial Contour: Migrant and Refugees’ Experiences of Stress and Wellbeing in St. James Town, Toronto
Canada’s position as an empire is contested amongst anthropologists and empire studies scholars. Based on one year of fieldwork conducted from September 2022-2023 in St. James’ Town, Toronto, I argue that migrant and refugees’ embodied experiences of stress and well-being evidence Canada’s role as an empire which 1) enacts neocolonial and imperial violence, and 2) possesses high levels of cultural capital and international influence. Research participants include resettled refugees from the Middle East (i.e., Syria, Palestine) and East Africa (i.e., Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia). They also include international students (i.e., migrants) from Colombia and Mexico. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1987) keystone essay on the mindful body, or the three bodies (i.e., individual, social, and body politic), is used to demonstrate how embodied experiences of stress and well-being illuminate how Canada-as-empire impacts migrants and refugees; specifically, through revealing Canadian imperialism’s specific impact on individuals’ interpersonal relationships, physiology and psychology.
SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2025
SAT. MAY 10 | 9:00 AM
Diana Moreiras Reynaga, Honorary Research Associate: Current Approaches in Mesoamerican Archaeology from Canadian Institutions (Roundtable)
This roundtable brings together scholars conducting Mesoamerican archaeological research through Canadian institutions to explore their methodologies, ethical practices, and the diverse impacts of their work. Archaeologists in Canada have contributed to the field by blending technological advances with robust theoretical frameworks, while encouraging collaborative approaches with Indigenous communities and local stakeholders. The panelists will present case studies ranging from chemical and microscopical analysis to settlement patterns on a regional scale, showcasing how these projects illuminate complex dynamics of migration, identity, and cultural heritage.
A central theme of this dialogue is a critical reflection on the positionality of Canadian-based researchers and institutions in Mesoamerican archaeology. Participants will discuss the enduring legacies of colonization and how these shape contemporary archaeological practices and collaborations. By examining their own roles as scholars from a settler-colonial state conducting research in post-colonial contexts, the panelists aim to highlight the challenges and responsibilities of navigating these intersections.
