Media Studies

Daniel Fisher

Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of Media Studies

Professor Fisher’s long term ethnographic work addresses the enormous success and efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the entailments of that success for communities across northern Australia. He has focused primarily on music and sound in this work, 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 historically emergent Australian understandings of relatedness and mediation itself. This ethnographic research provided the focus for his first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and continues to animate his ongoing ethnographic research and writing.

Professor Fisher’s current work, supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure in Northern Australia, focusing especially on urban fire ecologies, their transformation by climatic instability, and their mediatization via image, story, and market logics of carbon capture and exchange. He also directs the Experimental Ethnography Lab, a teaching and research studio dedicated to ethnographic media in all forms.

Representative publications:

Books:
2016. The Voice and Its Doubles: Music and Media in Northern Australia. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
2012. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century [co-editor with Lucas Bessire]. New York University Press.

Special Issues:
2021. Witnessing Environments [co-editor with Sarah E. Vaughn]. Special section of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2).
2013. Becoming Like the State [co-editor with Jaap Timmer]. Special issue of Oceania 83(3).

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
2022. “Phenomenological Displacements: Voice, Atmospheric Disturbance, and Mediatized Grief,” in Harris Berger, Friedlind Riedel, and David VanderHamm, eds. Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2021. Smoke’s Screens: Fire, Media and the Politics of Apprehension. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(2).
2021. Witnessing Environments. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory  11(2): 387-394. [co-author with Sarah E. Vaughn]
2020. “Fire,” in Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, eds. Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. Punctum Books.
2019. “Spun Dry: Mobility and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia,” in Marianne Constable, Leti Volpe, and Bryan Wagner, eds. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between. Pp. 62-84. New York: Fordham University Press.
2019. To Sing with Another’s Voice: Animation, Circumspection, and the Negotiation of Indigeneity in Northern Australian New Media. American Ethnologist 45(1).
2018. A Subject Deferred: Exposure and Erasure in an Ethnographic Archive. Oceania 88(3):292-304.
2018. Untidy Times: Alexis Wright, Extinction, and the Politics of Apprehension. Cultural Anthropology 33(2):180-188.
2018. ‘On Sonic Assemblage,’ in Morten Michelsen, Mads Krogh, Steen Nielsen, and Iben Have, eds. Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres. Pp. 49-69. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
2016. Sound and Contingency in Tess Lea’s Darwin (Review Article). Postcolonial Studies 19(1): 100-106.
2016. “Experiencing Self-Abstraction: Studio Production and Vocal Consciousness,” in Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston, eds. Phenomenology in Anthropology: A Sense of Perspective, pp. 153-174. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
2015. “Radio” in Keywords in Sound. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
2015. An Urban Frontier: Respatializing Government in Remote Northern Australia. Cultural Anthropology 30(1): 139-168.
2013. Preface: Becoming Like the State. Oceania 83(3): 153-157
2013. Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation, Intra- Indigenous Relatedness, and the State Effect. Oceania 83(3): 238-258.
2013. Intimacy and self-abstraction: Radio as new media in Aboriginal Australia. Culture, Theory and Critique 54(3): 372-393.
2013. The Anthropology of Radio Fields. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:363-378 (co-author).
2012. Running amok or just sleeping rough? Long-grass camping and the politics of care. American Ethnologist 39(1):171-186
2012. “Radio Fields.” Introduction to Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. NYU Press (co-author).
2012. “From the Studio to the Street: Producing the Voice in Indigenous Australia” in Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. NYU Press.
2010. On Gammon, Global Noise, and Indigenous Heterogeneity: Words as things in Aboriginal Public Culture. Critique of Anthropology 30(3):265-286
2009. Speech that Offers Song: Kinship, Country Music, and Incarceration in Northern Australia.” Cultural Anthropology 24(2): 280-312.