I am associate professor of anthropology and director of the Media Studies Program at UC Berkeley. My earliest long term ethnographic work addressed the enormous success and efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the entailments of that success for communities across northern Australia. I focused primarily on music and sound in this research, analyzing the power of audio media (and increasingly smart phones and related applications and platforms) as everyday presences in Indigenous lives, and relating this to both enduring and historically emergent Australian understandings of relatedness and mediation itself. This ethnographic research provided the focus for my first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and continues to animate my ongoing research and writing. My current work concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure in Northern Australia, focusing especially on urban fire ecologies, their transformation by climatic instability, and their mediatization via image, story, and market logics of carbon capture and exchange. At UC Berkeley I also direct the Anthropology Department's Experimental Ethnography Lab, a teaching and research studio dedicated to ethnographic media in all forms.

Research

Supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, my current research concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure in Northern Australia, focusing in part on urban fire ecologies, their transformation by climatic instability, and their mediatization via image, story, and market logics of carbon capture and exchange. A book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of photography and sound-based projects under the shared title of Fire’s Image, analyze these phenomena in dialogue with people living in the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory. Through a place-specific focus on fire, music, movement, and law, these projects pursue an ethnographic account of urban Darwin that begins with Indigenous institutions, communities, and the many long grass camps that populate the city’s inner margins, and from there considers the politics of apprehension that accompany climate change and the key role that Indigenous Australians have begun to occupy in its remediation