About the seminar:
Povinelli presents her current research on the ancestral present of two areas undergoing dramatic changes in their water-based political-ecologies: Carisolo her ancestral village in the Italian Alps and the Anson Bay coastlands of her Indigenous colleagues. Each place suffered  the dispossession of their common lands and social forms in the 19th century. But the purpose of dispossession was starkly different. European commons were dispossessed to create forms of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has called the white possessive. The dispossessions of Indigenous peoples were intended as a form of eradication. Povinelli's talk presents preliminary empirical results and new conceptual approaches to understanding the differential effects of dispossessions in Europe and Australia in the context of climate change and the surge of white nationalisms in Europe and its settler colonies.

About the presenter:
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an academic, artist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Antwerp/Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts.

Her eight academic and books include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, winner of the Lionel Trilling Prize, and The Inheritance, a graphic nonfiction memoir. She has made over ten films with the Karrabing Film Collective. The Collective has received multiple prizes including: Eye Award, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; the Visible Award; and the Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival.

Povinelli’s drawings have been shown in multiple galleries. A collection of her drawings is on permanent display at the Museo della Civiltà, Roma.

🗓️ Wednesday, 21 October 2026
🕤 10:30 am - 11:30 am (ACST)
📍 In-person: Level 3, Room 08, CDU Danala
⏺️ Online via Teams Webinar
👉 For registration and more details: http://go.cdu.edu.au/fs7q