Professor Amanda Kearney was awarded her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2005. Since then she has established a reputation as a leading post-conventional anthropologist and social researcher whose academic career has been richly informed by the disciplines of social anthropology, cultural sociology, cultural geography, and ethnic studies.

Her career is distinguished by an over 24 year commitment to applied practice, ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative co-designed research with Indigenous communities and organisations in remote northern and central Australia, urban Melbourne and Sydney. Since 2008 she has undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in northern Brazil with African descendant communities and affirmative action groups. The particularity of her theoretical innovations around conflict and violence, power and modernity, Indigenous lived experiences in Australia, and African descendant identity and rights in contemporary Brazil, born of collaborative fieldwork, defines her professional standing as a leader of praxis based and applied research aimed at social benefit and better understanding plural knowledges and intercultural ethics. Her research is addressing themes of kincentric ecology, cultural and environmental wounding and healing, violence and trauma, Indigenous experience and ways of knowing, land and sea rights in a time of ecological precarity and the role of affirmative action and activism movements to offset racism and environmental harm.

Anthropological Fieldwork, Anthropology Of Knowing, Anthropology of Ontology, Applied Anthropology, Colonial Process, Cultural Change, Decolonisation, Indigeneity, Indigenous Knowledge, Politics Of Knowing And Not Knowing

Anthropology

European Society for Oceanists (ESfO)

Australia (area)

Ancestral Oceania
Precolonial Australia
The Colonial time
Anticipatory
21st century

Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Mara