Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley

Across a range of ethnographic and other projects Fisher's work has tended to focus on questions of indeterminacy and those aspects of social and material worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. In part this has meant an ethnographic and analytical focus on the political, epistemic and worldly work of undecidability. These conceptual interests animate writing that concerns sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban. Fisher is currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded in long term ethnographic work in Australia and more recent work in North America. Supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, the first concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure, focusing in part on urban fire, its transformation by climatic instability, and its mediatization via image, story, and the logics of carbon capture and exchange. His book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of photography and sound-based projects under the shared title of Fire’s Image, address these phenomena from the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. Earlier ethnographic work addressed the efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the still unfolding entailments of that success for communities across northern Australia. This provided the focus for his first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and continues to underpin ongoing research and writing.