Across a range of ethnographic and other projects my work focuses 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 undecidabilty. These conceptual interests animate writing that concerns sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban.
I am currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded in my long term ethnographic work in Australia and more recent work in North America. The first concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure, 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. My current book manuscript 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 work addressed the efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the still unfolding entailments of that success for communities across northern Australia. This focused primarily on sound, voice, and audio media (and increasingly smart phones and related applications and platforms), relating these to enduring and emergent Australian understandings of relatedness and mediation itself. This provided the focus for my first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (link is external)(2016), and continues to underpin ongoing research and writing.
At UC Berkeley I am affiliated faculty with the Program in Critical Theory, the Department of Music, Global Metropolitan Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender, and I am director of UC Berkeley’s Media Studies Program. I also direct the Experimental Ethnography Lab, a teaching and research studio housed in the Department of Anthropology and dedicated to ethnographic media in all forms. In this capacity I teach and advise ongoing research projects in domains of experimental ethnography, sound studies, animation and materiality, cinema, and music- and art-centered ethnography. Beyond UC Berkeley I hold affiliations with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the Center for Creative Ethnography at Queens University, Belfast.