Susanna Trnka
I am a social anthropologist whose primary research areas are the body, citizenship, and subjectivity. My specific interests include the politics of the body; embodiment and affect; citizen-State relations, the politics of Covid-19 responses, new health technologies; gender and family; childhood and youth; history, memory, and the senses; and political violence. I have long-standing research interests in the Czech Republic, also conduct research in New Zealand, and have in the past worked in Fiji.
My Major Areas of Research include:
* citizen-State relations in light of Covid-19 responses in New Zealand (2020 - present)
* New Zealand youths’ use of digital healthcare technologies, especially for promoting mental wellbeing (2016–present)
* The body/embodiment, science, medicine and health in the Czech Republic (2010–present)
* The politics of childhood asthma and global health policies, based on case studies in New Zealand and the Czech Republic (2010–2015)
* Historical memory and contemporary identity in the Czech Republic (2006–present)
* Political transformation in Fiji, including the 2000 Fiji Coup (1999–2006)
* Gender and family in Indo-Fijian society (1999–2006)
* Patient and doctor perspectives of chronic pain in Fiji (1999–2000)
* Gender, healthcare, and political transformation from the perspective of Czech nursing graduates (1996–1997, with Professor Alena Heitlinger)
* Gender, civic activism and political transformation in the Czech Republic (1993, 1996–97, 2006– present)
Address: The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
My Major Areas of Research include:
* citizen-State relations in light of Covid-19 responses in New Zealand (2020 - present)
* New Zealand youths’ use of digital healthcare technologies, especially for promoting mental wellbeing (2016–present)
* The body/embodiment, science, medicine and health in the Czech Republic (2010–present)
* The politics of childhood asthma and global health policies, based on case studies in New Zealand and the Czech Republic (2010–2015)
* Historical memory and contemporary identity in the Czech Republic (2006–present)
* Political transformation in Fiji, including the 2000 Fiji Coup (1999–2006)
* Gender and family in Indo-Fijian society (1999–2006)
* Patient and doctor perspectives of chronic pain in Fiji (1999–2000)
* Gender, healthcare, and political transformation from the perspective of Czech nursing graduates (1996–1997, with Professor Alena Heitlinger)
* Gender, civic activism and political transformation in the Czech Republic (1993, 1996–97, 2006– present)
Address: The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
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Books by Susanna Trnka
When New Zealand embarked on its Covid-19 lockdown, the world saw the emergence of a new social form: the “bubble.” This chapter examines bubbles for the social dynamics they enabled and elided, as well as for what the bubble metaphor suggested but did not always deliver. During level 4 lockdown, most New Zealanders (with exceptions such as essential service workers) were restricted to physical contact with members of their residence – a social unit the government referred to as the members of one’s “home,” “household,” or “bubble.” Not all care relations can, however, be reduced to a single home or household, nor are all households units of care. Regulations enabling bubble expansions in specific circumstances provided some means of addressing care needs that superseded households (e.g., singletons becoming “bubble buddies” to mitigate loneliness). But little was done for those consigned to bubbles whose members were unattached to one another, much less antagonistic. There is thus a need for bubble regulations to match more closely the flexibility inherent in the bubble as a concept when planning for future crises.
In particular, Traversing scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic "others"; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on.
Above all, Traversing focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.
One Blue Child examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but approach children's health according to very different cultural, political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results.
CONTENTS:
1. Introduction: Senses and Citizenships
Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park
2. Visibly Black: Phenotype and Cosmopolitan Aspirations on Simbo, Western Solomon Islands
Christine Dureau
3. Blood, Toil, and Tears: Rhetorics of Pain and Suffering in African American and Indo-Fijian Citizenship Claims
Susanna Trnka
4. Movement in Time: Choreographies of Confinement in an In-Patient Ward
Sarah Pinto
5. Modern Citizens, Modern Food: Taste and the Rise of the Moroccan Citizen-Consumer
Rachel Newcomb
6. Smelling the Difference: The Senses in Ethnic Conflict in West Kalimantan, Indonesia
Anika König
7. Gender, Nationalism, and Sound: Outgrowing "Mother India" Gregory D. Booth
8. Embodied Perception and the Invention of the Citizen: Javanese Dance in the Indonesian State
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
9. Off the Edge of Europe: Border Regimes, Visual Culture, and the Politics of Race
Uli Linke
10. Seeing Health like a Colonial State: Pacific Island Assistant Physicians, Sight, and Nascent Biomedical Citizenship in the New Hebrides
Alexandra Widmer
11. Painful Exclusion: Hepatitis C in the New Zealand Hemophilia Community
Julie Park
12. Sensory Nostalgia, Moral Sensibilities, and the Effort to Belong in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia
C. Jason Throop
13. The Look: An Afterword
Robert Desjarlais
Contents:
Introduction: Observing Anthropologists: Professional Knowledge, Practice and Lives
Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka
Chapter 1. Suffering, Selfhood and Anthropological Encounters
Michael Jackson
Chapter 2. Anthropology, Ontology and the Maori World
Anne Salmond
Chapter 3. Building Bridges: Maori and Pakeha Relations
Joan Metge
Chapter 4. 'Culture’, ‘Race’ and ‘Me’: living the anthropology of Indigenous Australians
Gillian Cowlishaw
Chapter 5. Finding One’s Way in Arnhem Land
Nicolas Peterson
Chapter 6. Art as Action: The Yolngu
Howard Morphy
Chapter 7. Rethinking Nature and Nativeness
David Trigger
Chapter 8. More than Local, Less than Global: Anthropology in the Contemporary World
Christopher Pinney
Chapter 9. Beyond Selling Out: Art, Tourism and Indigenous Self-Representation
Nelson Graburn
Chapter 10. Sovereign Individuals and the Ontology of Selfhood
Nigel Rapport
Chapter 11. Hidden Histories and Political Transformations
Susan Wright
Chapter 12. Gender Ideology, Property Relations and Melanesia: The Field of “M”
Marilyn Strathern
Conclusion: Looking Ahead: Anthropology, Past Connections, Future Directions
Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka"
Describing the myriad social processes through which violence is articulated and ascribed meaning-including expressions of incredulity, circulation of rumors, narratives, and exchanges of laughter and jokes-Trnka reveals the ways in which the community engages in these practices as individuals experience, and try to understand, the consequences of the coup. She then considers different kinds of pain caused by political chaos and social turbulence, including pain resulting from bodily harm, shared terror, and the distress precipitated by economic crisis and social dislocation.
Throughout this book, Trnka focuses on the collective social process through which violence is embodied, articulated, and silenced by those it targets, making this ethnography a valuable addition to the global conversation about the impact of political violence on community life."
Papers by Susanna Trnka
When New Zealand embarked on its Covid-19 lockdown, the world saw the emergence of a new social form: the “bubble.” This chapter examines bubbles for the social dynamics they enabled and elided, as well as for what the bubble metaphor suggested but did not always deliver. During level 4 lockdown, most New Zealanders (with exceptions such as essential service workers) were restricted to physical contact with members of their residence – a social unit the government referred to as the members of one’s “home,” “household,” or “bubble.” Not all care relations can, however, be reduced to a single home or household, nor are all households units of care. Regulations enabling bubble expansions in specific circumstances provided some means of addressing care needs that superseded households (e.g., singletons becoming “bubble buddies” to mitigate loneliness). But little was done for those consigned to bubbles whose members were unattached to one another, much less antagonistic. There is thus a need for bubble regulations to match more closely the flexibility inherent in the bubble as a concept when planning for future crises.
In particular, Traversing scrutinizes three kinds of movements we make as embodied actors in the world: how we move through time and space, be it by walking along city streets, gliding across the dance floor, or clicking our way through digital landscapes; how we move toward and away from one another, as erotic partners, family members, or fearful, ethnic "others"; and how we move toward ourselves and the earth we live on.
Above all, Traversing focuses on tracing the ways in which the body and motion are fundamental to our lived experience of the world, so we can develop a better understanding of the empirical details of Czech society and what they can reveal to us about the human condition.
One Blue Child examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but approach children's health according to very different cultural, political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results.
CONTENTS:
1. Introduction: Senses and Citizenships
Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, and Julie Park
2. Visibly Black: Phenotype and Cosmopolitan Aspirations on Simbo, Western Solomon Islands
Christine Dureau
3. Blood, Toil, and Tears: Rhetorics of Pain and Suffering in African American and Indo-Fijian Citizenship Claims
Susanna Trnka
4. Movement in Time: Choreographies of Confinement in an In-Patient Ward
Sarah Pinto
5. Modern Citizens, Modern Food: Taste and the Rise of the Moroccan Citizen-Consumer
Rachel Newcomb
6. Smelling the Difference: The Senses in Ethnic Conflict in West Kalimantan, Indonesia
Anika König
7. Gender, Nationalism, and Sound: Outgrowing "Mother India" Gregory D. Booth
8. Embodied Perception and the Invention of the Citizen: Javanese Dance in the Indonesian State
Felicia Hughes-Freeland
9. Off the Edge of Europe: Border Regimes, Visual Culture, and the Politics of Race
Uli Linke
10. Seeing Health like a Colonial State: Pacific Island Assistant Physicians, Sight, and Nascent Biomedical Citizenship in the New Hebrides
Alexandra Widmer
11. Painful Exclusion: Hepatitis C in the New Zealand Hemophilia Community
Julie Park
12. Sensory Nostalgia, Moral Sensibilities, and the Effort to Belong in Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia
C. Jason Throop
13. The Look: An Afterword
Robert Desjarlais
Contents:
Introduction: Observing Anthropologists: Professional Knowledge, Practice and Lives
Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka
Chapter 1. Suffering, Selfhood and Anthropological Encounters
Michael Jackson
Chapter 2. Anthropology, Ontology and the Maori World
Anne Salmond
Chapter 3. Building Bridges: Maori and Pakeha Relations
Joan Metge
Chapter 4. 'Culture’, ‘Race’ and ‘Me’: living the anthropology of Indigenous Australians
Gillian Cowlishaw
Chapter 5. Finding One’s Way in Arnhem Land
Nicolas Peterson
Chapter 6. Art as Action: The Yolngu
Howard Morphy
Chapter 7. Rethinking Nature and Nativeness
David Trigger
Chapter 8. More than Local, Less than Global: Anthropology in the Contemporary World
Christopher Pinney
Chapter 9. Beyond Selling Out: Art, Tourism and Indigenous Self-Representation
Nelson Graburn
Chapter 10. Sovereign Individuals and the Ontology of Selfhood
Nigel Rapport
Chapter 11. Hidden Histories and Political Transformations
Susan Wright
Chapter 12. Gender Ideology, Property Relations and Melanesia: The Field of “M”
Marilyn Strathern
Conclusion: Looking Ahead: Anthropology, Past Connections, Future Directions
Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka"
Describing the myriad social processes through which violence is articulated and ascribed meaning-including expressions of incredulity, circulation of rumors, narratives, and exchanges of laughter and jokes-Trnka reveals the ways in which the community engages in these practices as individuals experience, and try to understand, the consequences of the coup. She then considers different kinds of pain caused by political chaos and social turbulence, including pain resulting from bodily harm, shared terror, and the distress precipitated by economic crisis and social dislocation.
Throughout this book, Trnka focuses on the collective social process through which violence is embodied, articulated, and silenced by those it targets, making this ethnography a valuable addition to the global conversation about the impact of political violence on community life."