HAR editors are pleased to bring you this Special Focus Section, guest edited by Benjamin Heagarty, Shiori Shakuto, and Caroline Schuster. The pieces in this collection will be published on a rolling basis, and the table of contents will be updated accordingly.

This special section brings together seven essays which were originally presented at the roundtable Theory as Reproduction: Reflections on the History of Doing Feminist Anthropology in Australia. It also includes an introduction, co-authored by Benjamin Hegarty, Shiori Shakuto, and Caroline Schuster. The event was held at the annual Australian Anthropological Society conference held on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people (Australian National University, Canberra) on Monday 2 December 2019. Part oral history and part conversation, the organizers brought together a group of women to reflect on their experiences of a politically and intellectually dynamic period in Australian feminist anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s. For this roundtable, held at the campus where Derek Freeman penned his famous series of polemics denouncing Margaret Mead’s research, feminist researchers came together to reflect on the work of producing theory and the labour involved in its reproduction through the maternal line.

Table of Contents

May 2025

Theory as Reproduction: Histories of Doing Feminist Anthropology in Australia

Benjamin Hegarty, Shiori Shakuto, and Caroline Schuster

The “F” Word: Anthropology, Positionality, and Intersecting Lives in Oz

Margaret Jolly

Anthropology as a Feminist Project of Collective Practice

Kathryn Robinson

A Lone Woman in the Jungle

Christine Helliwell

June 2025

Problems and Possibilities of Being a Feminist Anthropologist