Wendy Larner is Provost at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa/New Zealand, having moved from the University of Bristol where she was the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law and Professor of Human Geography and Sociology. Her work has explored the shifting dynamics of globalisation, governance and gender and has underpinned a wide range of publications, including Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces(2006, edited with William Walters); Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy(2013, with Maureen Molloy) and Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects(2017, edited with Vaughan Higgins).

I met Wendy for the first time in 2004 at a conference on Contemporary Governance and the Question of the Social at the University of Alberta (along with the other Wendy, see Chapter Three). We continued our conversations when she moved to the UK at the University of Bristol and I think myself fortunate that, despite her move to New Zealand, we have found ways to carry on talking.

More biographical information is available on the Victoria University of Wellington's Senior Team page: www.victoria.ac.nz/about/ governance/senior-leadership.

This conversation was recorded in Edmonton on 6 May 2017, during a Festschrift conference to which we had been invited to celebrate the work of Janine Brodie, Canada Research Chair and Distinguished University Professor in Political Economy and Social Governance at the University of Alberta.

Themes and topics

• • Conversations within and beyond disciplines

• • Changing institutions

• • Unorthodox formations

• • On discourse as the practice of articulation

Conversations within and beyond disciplines

Wendy: I presupposed conversations were easier within disciplines, because you had the shared words, the shared go-to references, the shared languages. But I wonder whether for people like you and I, because we are undisciplined, and we sit on the edges, it makes you work harder. So one of the things that I have been thinking about is the reflection that Catherine [Kellogg] made yesterday, which I think characterises both of our works. I think there is something about looking really hard at what is in front of you, and then seeking the language and conceptual registers that help you make sense of that.