Bridging Polarised Discourses

Anthropological knowledge production has centred on encounters with otherness, and thus offers much towards remedying the spiralling polarisation within our public spheres.

Communications technology enables us to participate in geographically-unrestricted communities of interest to an extent never before possible. Research suggests that our interactions are increasingly channelled and curated into widely polarised or even separate discursive spaces. Consequently, we rarely engage in productive discourse across these polarities. We may even sense that we no longer share a common sphere of civil discourse with those whose public representation signals a politics or moral outlook we find uncomfortable. And we may feel that our respective discursive frames are so divergent that dialogue is not possible. Our experience of hyper-curated niche conversations thus affects how we create our ‘difficult others’, and this shapes our participation in the geographically-constrained, state-bound public spheres that frame our everyday lives.

Reflecting on anthropologists’ preparedness to engage with certain modes of 'distant' otherness, we are concerned by our own hesitance to afford relativistic credence to closer forms of otherness that disturb our moral sensibilities. We invite papers that explore how mutual vulnerability in ethnographic encounters with ‘difficult others’ makes possible a generative and collaborative mutuality across polarising discourses.

Drawing on interviews with six Australian parents of varied vaccine stances, this paper explores how the cultural and medical vaccine narrative shapes the construction of vaccine hesitant and refusing parents as the ‘difficult other’. This construction, and the reception of this construction by these individuals and groups, has had dire consequences for productive discourse across these polarities. 

This paper focuses on the stories shared by these parents, highlighting the complexity and contradiction within – as well as the similarities between – their experiences, and shows how vaccine decisions are a dynamic process, influenced by an array of different sources of knowledge and information available to parents. These stories also reveal the varied ways such knowledge and information is interpreted, made sense of, and resisted by Australian parents. With specific attention paid to embodied and socially constructed knowledge of vaccines, this paper aims to de-centre the polarising, dominant biomedical narrative of vaccine decision making. In it’s place, I seek to reimagine this narrative in a way that facilitates mutual vulnerability, centres the complexity and nuance of human life, and facilitates “generative and collaborative mutuality across polarising discourses”.  

In the lead-up to Australia’s planned referendum in late 2023 to recognize an Indigenous Voice to Parliament within its Constitution, we are witnessing increasingly polarised discourse among advocates for both the Yes and No sides. Tailored news feeds mean people are absorbing radically different information about the Voice. Online forums—both those advocating conspiracy theories and those offering more mainstream advocacy—filter out important contextual information and thus operate as online echo chambers and epistemic bubbles¹. Consequently, forum participants mostly only encounter (and contribute) information that has been filtered in support of a given worldview. Such extreme discourse polarisation challenges complacent assumptions about the reach and operation of the public sphere. Yet bridging disparate worldviews is integral to the method and practice of ethnography. Drawing on examples of discourse arising in the Voice debate, we outline how anthropologists can contribute to reinvigorating dialogic engagement and bridging divergent discourses within the public sphere. We reflect on everyday encounters, the importance of re-entangling contexts, negotiating vulnerability and dignity in ethnographic encounters, the limitations of anthropological practice, and the value of collaborating across disciplinary and practice boundaries.

¹Nguyen, T. 2020 ‘Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles’, Episteme, 17(2):141–161.

I was an over enthusiastic graduate entering an applied anthropological career thinking I could change the world! But I was not prepared for the legal framework within which I am required to work. A framework that sets polarised parameters: a dichotomised objective-subjective paradigm between the objective requirements of an anthropologist working with evidence and the lawyer advocating their client. I felt distanced to what seemed to be the far reaches of objectivity. A stance I had not anticipated and at the time wondered how any form of social justice was possible from this position.

In my paper I reflect on my lived experience during the first few years of working within the native title setting. I provide a phenomenological perspective describing my being-in-the-[native title]world as a phenomenal body within a transcendental field attempting to experience co-transcendence with an other: a navigation and transformation of my intentionality with traditional owners and lawyers whilst maintaining an objective stance. It was from a corporeal state of vulnerability that I began to reflect on my intentionality. A journey of self-discovery that saw the transformation of my phenomenal body and the creation of many symbiotic relationships within an often-vibrant transcendental field.

For contemporary anthropologists, the history of biological research on Indigenous people is something to be left well alone, an embarrassing remnant of racial science largely banished from the discipline since the 1970s. While the sociocultural anthropology of an earlier time has been somewhat rehabilitated with the ontological turn, biological aspects of anthropological research remain beyond the pale. My interest in the history of making biological knowledge about Indigenous people was sparked through my ethnographic engagement with the burgeoning field of Indigenous genomics over the last 15 years, including health research, evolutionary biology research, and direct-to-consumer ancestry testing. My book, entitled “Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia”, explores historical episodes in the history of scientific research on Indigenous Australians in order to make sense of biological knowledge-making in the present. This has involved engaging with the work and lives of anthropological predecessors that many may wish to leave behind, such as W. Baldwin Spencer, Alfred C. Haddon, and A. A. Abbie. Reckoning with historical ‘difficult others’ who made anthropological knowledge about Indigenous people in the past can be uncomfortable but offers important insights for those of us who make knowledge in the present.