Research Expertise and Interest
media, music, Indigenous Australia, ethnographic film, cinema, urban studies, fire ecology
Research Description
Across a range of ethnographic and other projects, Daniel Fisher's work focuses on moments of indeterminacy and those aspects of social and material worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. These conceptual interests animate writing and research that concern sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban.
He is currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded in his 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 ecologies, their transformation by climatic instability, and their mediatization via image, story, and market 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, analyze these phenomena from the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. The work approaches fire as companion species and as an analytic for rethinking questions of ecology, sociality, and atmosphere in this northern city and beyond.
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 focused primarily on sound and voice, 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 emergent understandings of relatedness and mediation itself. This research provided the focus for his first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and continues to underpin ongoing research and writing.
In addition to these projects in Northern Australia he has conducted research in New York City and Peru, and in 2001 produced the ethnographic documentary "A Cat in a Sack," focused on the performance practice of New York's Hungry March Band.
At UC Berkeley he is affiliated faculty with the Program in Critical Theory, the Department of Music, Global Metropolitan Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender, and director of UC Berkeley’s Media Studies Program. He also directs 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 he teaches and advises ongoing research projects on experimental ethnographic methods, sound studies, recording practice, animation and materiality, and music- and art-centered ethnography.
Beyond UC Berkeley he holds affiliations with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the Center for Creative Ethnography at Queens University, Belfast.