The 2019 Executive Committee
President
A/Prof Jennifer Deger
Email: jennifer.deger@jcu.edu.au
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A/Prof Jennifer Deger is a Tropical Leader (Research) in the College of Art, Society and Education, James Cook University and the thematic leader of Creativity and Innovation at The Cairns Institute. She is also a founding member of Miyarrka Media, an arts collective based in the community of Gapuwiyak, NT. Dr Deger specialises in the study of visual culture and digital worlds. In collaboration with her Yolngu colleagues from Miyarrka Media, she has co-directed several award-winning films and co-created artworks and exhibitions held in Denmark, the US, Australia and Taiwan. These collaborative and practice-led research methods inform Dr Deger’s writing on aesthetics, film, art and photography, including her book Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (2006). Since graduating from Macquarie University’s Department of Anthropology in 2004, Dr Deger has been awarded post-doctoral fellowships at Macquarie University and UNSW, has taken up Visiting Research Fellowships at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media (2011-2012), the Eye and Mind Research Group at Aarhus University (2016), and the Aarhus University Research Group on the Anthropocene (2017-2018) where she is collaborating on a digital humanities project on the more-than-human agents of ecological ruin. Dr Deger is currently completing a co-authored manuscript with Miyarrka Media on anthropology, mobile phones and social creativity that has been supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2012-2016).
President Emeritus
Dr Richard Vokes
Email: richard.vokes@uwa.edu.au
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Richard Vokes is Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Development at the University of Western Australia. He holds a BA (Hons) and MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent, UK, and a D.Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He was previously employed at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2005-2012), at the University of Adelaide (2013-2017), and has also taught anthropology at Mbabara University of Science of Technology, Uganda, and at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Richard has been conducting fieldwork in the African Great Lakes region, especially in South-western Uganda, since 1999. His research interests include: Ethnicity, violence and political patronage; Charismatic authority and new religious movements, and; Visual and media anthropology. He has also published on the history of anthropology, and on ethnographic methods, and has a new project on the Anthropology of Antarctica. Richard’s publications include: Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa (James Currey, 2009), which won an African Studies Association Melville J. Herskovits Finalist Award in 2010; Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives (edited, James Currey, 2012); Charisma, Creativity and Cosmopolitanism: A Perspective on the Power of the New Radio Broadcasting in Uganda and Rwanda (JRAI, 2007), which won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Curl Essay Prize for 2006; and Media and Development (2018).
President Elect
A/Prof Lisa L. Wynn
Email: lisa.wynn@mq.edu.au
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Lisa L. Wynn is an associate professor and Head of the Anthropology Department at Macquarie University in Sydney. She is a medical anthropologist who writes about reproductive health technologies, gender ideologies, affect, and sexuality. She also writes about research ethics and served on the NHMRC Working Committee to revise the sections of the Australian National Statement that pertain to qualitative research. She is the author of the book Pyramids and Nightclubs (University of Texas Press, 2007) and Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability (Texas, 2018) and co-editor of, most recently, Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Exploring Reproductive and Sexual Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt University Press, 2017). She serves on the editorial board of the journal Maternal and Child Health. Lisa received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University in 2003. Subsequently she held postdoctoral research positions in Princeton's Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing. In Australia, her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Australian Research Council and the Office of Learning and Teaching (National Teaching Fellowship), and her teaching has been recognised with a national Teaching Excellence Award from the Office of Learning and Teaching.
Secretary
Dr Caroline Schuster
Email: Caroline.Schuster@anu.edu.au
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Dr Caroline Schuster is an early career researcher and a member of the teaching faculty in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her sustained research interest in economic anthropology is focused on the intersection of gender and finance, and especially the social life of community-based economic projects in hyper-liberalized Latin American free trade zones. Caroline completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2012, where her thesis was awarded the annual Richard Saller Prize for most distinguished dissertation in the Division of Social Sciences. Before joining the ANU, she previously completed a post-doctoral research appointment at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Throughout, she has been active member of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago, where she also received a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and is now a member of the Gender Institute at the ANU. In addition to developing a keen interest in ideologies of domesticity, labour, and production, Caroline pursues an ongoing passion for knitting, especially animal-themed hats.
Treasurer
Dr Patrick Guinness
Email: patrick.guinness@anu.edu.au
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Patrick Guinness is Reader in Anthropology and Convenor of Development Studies at the Australian National University. He has previously taught at La Trobe University and UI, UGM and UNAIR in Indonesia. His research has focused on Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, particularly on urban society and industrial developments in Indonesia and Malaysia and on the oil palm expansion into West New Britain, PNG.
Ordinary Director
Dr Marcus Barber
Email: marcus.barber@csiro.au
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Marcus Barber is an anthropologist and Senior Research Scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) based in Brisbane. He has been involved in research, teaching, and policy advising for almost twenty years, focused on Indigenous Australian rights to natural and cultural resources, and on the livelihood and development opportunities arising from those rights. Research partners in this work have included Indigenous Australian communities and land councils across four states, multiple Commonwealth, state, and local government departments and institutions, as well as diverse non-government organisations and corporations. Marcus is currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland and previously taught for several years at James Cook University and at the Australian National University (ANU). He holds a BA and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Melbourne, and a PhD from ANU. He has previously served as Chair of the Accreditation Committee of the AAS. Alongside multiple articles and edited books about Indigenous Australians and environmental issues, he has recently begun generating multimedia research outputs, with one film completed and another in development.
Ordinary Director
Dr Ute Eickelkamp
Email: ute.eickelkamp@sydney.edu.au
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I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. My ethnographic research has been with Anangu families in Central Australia, first in 1995 as a PhD student at Heidelberg University after I had completed undergraduate studies in Berlin (around the rather exciting time of the fall of the wall). Art, children’s imagination, ogres and the nexus of personhood, culture and ontology have been the various foci of my ethnographic analyses. In short, I am interested in the symbolic articulations of a transforming Indigenous cultural imaginary. Drawing on German humanities traditions, philosophy and psychoanalysis, I seek to understand how the Anangu I have come to know accommodate or not the existential pressures they chronically live with. Most recently, as an ARC Future Fellow, I have explored how Anangu thinkers, including vernacular Christians, speak about nature, history and being. We explored these themes during a journey to the Holy Land and in a collaborative workshop, Placing Spirit, Minding the World: Towards an Intercultural Ethic of Care, that brought together Anangu artists and educators, and non-Indigenous philosophers, poets and anthropologists. Presently, I am orienting towards interdisciplinary action research on rapidly changing ecologies beyond Australia – the post-coal world of Germany’s Ruhr Valley where I grew up. Publications include Don’t Ask for Stories: The Women of Ernabella and Their Art (1999); the co-edited Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention (2008); and Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence (2011).