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 on long term 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 new Australian ecologies, focusing in part on urban fire, its transformation by climatic instability, and its mediatization via image, story, and market logics of carbon capture and exchange. This accompanies ongoing research into forms and figures of the urban in relation to sound and audio media. My new book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of photography and sound-based projects under the shared title of Fire’s Image, address these different phenomena from the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory.
Earlier research addressed the efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the still unfolding entailments of that success across northern Australia. This work focused primarily on sound and voice (and increasingly smart phones and related applications and platforms), relating these to enduring and emergent Australian understandings of relatedness and mediation itself, and led to my first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (Duke UP, 2016).
https://mediastudies.ugis.berkeley.edu/people/daniel-fisher/
Sound, Music, Media, Photography and Cinema, Australia, Climate Change, Fire
