I am a social anthropologist with wide ranging interests in visual culture. I co-ordinate the Centre for Visual Anthropology at the ANU, and convene the Master of Liberal Arts postgraduate program in Visual Culture Research. I teach courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in visual anthropology methods, visual culture research, media anthropology and the history of anthropological theory.

My teaching is informed by and helps shape my research interests. Much of my ethnographic research has been undertaken with Warlpiri people in central Australia, where I have worked since the mid-1990s on various local and regional media projects.

I am currently working on a project (with ethnomusicologist Stephen Wild) based around a collection of drawings produced by Warlpiri people in the 1950s. The drawings, made for anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt, cover diverse themes. The project involves returning the drawings to the descendents of the men and women who produced them nearly sixty years on and establishes a series of contexts for comprehending their significance. Taking the drawings as a prism for considering the ways in which a community of people remember who they were and how they see themselves in the present, as well as a springboard for examining continuities and changes in image making, the project will result in an exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2013.

I am interested in the complex intersections between ethnographic research and analysis of the wider public cultural environment in which social life occurs in the present. To this end I have undertaken some early research towards a new project on the relations between persons and images in contemporary Australian society under the working title ‘Living Images’. The aim of the project is to flesh out through a series of case studies the kinds of cultural attitudes to images that accompany the expanding reach of screen-based visual culture and digital image-making and distribution processes.

In recent years I have also been preoccupied with the processes at work in the federal government’s Northern Territory Emergency Response Intervention and with the debates among activists, anthropologists and commentators around the past, present and future circumstances of remote Aboriginal communities. Other projects include biographical research on aspects of the lifework of Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner who worked across the fields of Aboriginal affairs and anthropology in Australia and abroad from the 1930s until his death in 1981; work with Aboriginal communities in and around metropolitan Sydney regarding their historical and abiding relationships to place; and with Kuninjku people of north-west Arnhem Land on their contemporary harvesting practices, art production and gender relations.