Research Affiliate
I am Professor in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia; Director of the Ethnography Lab of Western Australia; Director of the UWA Centre for Sustainable Development in the Indian Ocean (CSDIO); Co-Director of the UWA Centre for Human Lactation Research and Translation, and; Research Associate of the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip. I am also a current Trustee and Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
I have been conducting ethnographic and archival research in the African Great Lakes region, and across East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Rim, for over 25 years. Since the completion of my D.Phil in Social Anthropology, from Oxford, in 2004, I have published extensively, especially in visual, media and museum anthropology, and on heritage futures. My research has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Curl Prize, and it has been used by the Office of the Secretary General of the UN.
My current research centres around two projects: 1) ‘Uganda Unseen: Photography and Statecraft, 1875-2025’, which is developing a continuous history of the politics of photography in that country, and which incorporates the work I have been doing on the recently discovered media archives of Idi Amin, and 2) ‘Africa in Australia’, which is examining global circulations of African and Australian heritage, and is exploring models for reconnecting that heritage with source communities, both through experimental ethnographic methods, and through digital platforms.
My books and collections include: Haunting Images (with Benjamin Smith, 2008); Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa (2009); Routes and Traces: Anthropology, Photography and the Archive (with Marcus Banks, 2010); Photography in Africa (2012); The NRM Regime and the 2016 Ugandan Elections (with Sam Wilkins, 2016); Chronotopes of Media in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Katrien Pype, 2018); Media and Development (2018); Photography and African Futures (with Darren Newbury, 2018); Elections in Museveni’s Uganda (with Sam Wilkins, 2018); Photographies in Africa in the Digital Age (2019); Shifting States (with Alison Dundon, 2021); The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin (with Derek Peterson, 2021); Transition, Transformation, and the Politics of the Future in Uganda (with Sam Wilkins, 2023); (Re)Sounding Images (with Paul Basu and Haidy Geismar, forthcoming 2024); Handbook of the Indian Ocean (with Zulfikar Hirji, forthcoming 2025), and; Africa in Australia: The Living Legacies of Collections (forthcoming, 2025).
