From 26-30 August 2024, Southern Deserts 6
will be held in Walvis Bay, Namibia
... where the desert meets the sea
Themes in detail
Southern Deserts 6 (SD6) is the 6th event in a series of international conferences focusing on arid and semi-arid areas of the southern hemisphere, namely in South America, southern Africa and Australia. The conferences bring together scholars, early career researchers, students and local and Indigenous peoples in a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary conversation about diverse dimensions of southern deserts.
Critical content and vibrant discussion at previous Southern Deserts conferences has revolved around cultural landscapes, rock art studies, heritage management, maritime deserts, post-colonial analysis and geomorphology.
Five years after the last Southern Deserts conference in Karratha, Western Australia, we are preparing to hold Southern Deserts 6 in Walvis Bay, Namibia, in the last week of August 2024. This is Namibia’s first opportunity to host Southern Deserts.
Each Southern Deserts meeting since the first in Canberra, Australia, in 2003 (Smith and Hesse 2005) has had its own character, reflecting the location of the meeting, its catchment of participants, and the shifting focus of desert studies. Southern Deserts 6 aims to re-invigorate comparative discussions across the three great southern hemisphere desert regions (Barberena et al. 2017), through a set of four primary carefully selected themes (detailed below).
Normally the Southern Deserts meetings take place every four years. The current meeting was due in 2022 but delayed because of COVID-19. Its scheduling for 2024 in Namibia is thus particularly timely, and keenly awaited.
New research in the deserts of the southern hemisphere
The Southern Deserts conferences provide a forum for new research in the deserts of the southern hemisphere, ranging from palaeoenvironments to mining and the industrialisation of southern hemisphere desert landscapes.
Southern Deserts 6 will be primarily concerned with the idea of deserts as people’s landscapes: peoples of the past; peoples displaced; and people’s voices. In emphasising living in the southern deserts of Africa, Australia and South America, we will be prioritising oral history and ethnography (Haboucha, R. and Jofré; Sullivan and Ganuses 2021, 2022), the archaeological record (J Kinahan 2020; Taçon et al. 2022), and documentary historical records (JHA Kinahan 2017; Paterson et al. 2019).
In focusing on southern deserts as places of memory, history and meaning, we will be emphasising the environment and resources of desert communities, and their archaeological, historical and remembered pasts. As such the conference will make a meaningful contribution to comparative anthropological and archaeological research regarding cultures and histories of desert environments.
In locating Southern Deserts 6 in the Namib Desert, we are implicitly acknowledging its one million year record of human occupation (J Kinahan 2020). Today the Namib is a desert of boundaries. It is one of the world’s largest conservation areas, with large areas also enclosed as vast privately owned landscapes as well as exclusive mining and tourism concessions. As with southern deserts elsewhere, its own people now find themselves crowded into shanty towns or rural outposts of poverty. Recent experiences of dispossession (J Kinahan 2001[1991]), often connected with the maritime histories of southern deserts (JHA Kinahan 1992; Paterson et al. 2019), require sensitive postcolonial analyses, as has always been encouraged through the cross-continental southern deserts conferences.
We are aiming for a series of outcomes from the conference. These will include an open access Special Issue journal from conference contributions published by the Namibian Journal of Environment (https://nje.org.na/index.php/nje), short blog articles about the conference posted on the conference website (www.southerndeserts.net), and a tightly worded “Resolution on mining in southern deserts”:
THE SOUTHERN DESERTS PROTOCOL:
For responsible exploration and mining in southern hemisphere deserts
This resolution will be shared widely, including in Namibia by the Namibia Chamber of Environment which has links with the Chamber of Mines of Namibia.
As noted above, Southern Deserts 6 will be structured around four main themes, with each panel aiming for a set of papers, presentations and posters that are comparative across the southern hemisphere deserts. Each theme will invite and welcome cross-disciplinary approaches to research and engagement.
THEME 1
The deserts and the sea
– maritime encounters
This theme focuses on maritime histories arising due to the ocean proximity of Southern Deserts, and the consequences of these histories and encounters for Indigenous and First Nations peoples.
The Southern Deserts provide rich records of human occupation of arid coastlines, and this theme will welcome diverse approaches to the research of maritime deserts.
THEME 2
Tending the desert
– sustainable land-use
This theme emphasises ways that resources of southern deserts have been utilised, managed and domesticated, focusing on comparative studies for the last 10,000 years. This theme will foreground the specificities of resource use, storage and sustainability practices
in variable desert environments.
THEME 3
Marking the desert
– rock art and beliefs
With this theme we explore how southern deserts have been artistically and symbolically inscribed. Desert art and symbolic behaviours reflect environmental knowledge and unique deserts adaptations. Rock art studies thereby relate to other evidence for human responses to environmental change. We will include here the interpretive relevance of ethnography for understanding rock art representations from the past.
THEME 4
Desert pasts and desert futures
– memory, place and heritage
Here we draw into focus southern deserts as cultural landscapes with deep histories, together with contemporary heritage conservation aims and challenges. This theme is essential for sharing and exchanging experiences of modern communities who still live in the desert regions, all without exception as marginalised peoples.
It will also include the ‘toxic heritage’ remains in southern desert areas due to the impacts and legacies of mining and other infrastructures, and will thereby connect with our proposed “Resolution on Mining in Southern Deserts”
These four session themes and connected panels will allow space for thematic exchanges across the three southern desert regions. We especially welcome discussion of new research in the deserts of the southern hemisphere, ranging from palaeoenvironments to mining and the industrialisation of Southern Hemisphere desert landscapes. To encourage maximum participation of delegates from across the academic spectrum the conference will aim for informal discussion around formal presentation.