The Australian National University

Post-Doc, Archaeology and Anthropology

College of the Arts and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow

College of the Arts and Social Sciences

Thesis Title: Living with Herds in Mongolia

About

My work crosses often preconceived boundaries between domestic-wild, human-nonhuman, nature-culture, ethnography-ethology, and written ethnography-visual anthropology.  I completed my PhD thesis in June 2008, entitled Living with Herds in Mongolia, within the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra.  The field research for the thesis, and footage for the film that formed an integral part of this research, was obtained over twelve months in 2005, while I lived with two extended herding families in the Khangai mountains of Mongolia.  The manuscript from this research is in the process of being published as a book by Cambridge University Press.  Segments of my video footage and photographs from Mongolia will be linked online to supplement relevant sections of the book. As an integral part of my PhD thesis I made an independent film entitled Khangai Herds (90 mins), an observational film about ‘significant others’. 

I have a background in both wildlife and ethnographic filmmaking, including a postgraduate diploma in Natural History Film and Communication.  Previously, I have worked for the BBC, Natural History New Zealand and Green Umbrella Productions on documentaries that have been distributed worldwide via National Geographic and Discovery Channels.  I completed a Master of Science in ethology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, focusing on animal cognition, predator-prey interactions and animal communication.  I was subsequently employed by the University of Vienna to conduct field research as part of a research team investigating social learning in a mountain parrot, the kea.  This fieldwork was based mainly in the remote Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand.  While conducting this research I wrote three natural history books for children on native New Zealand birds: one on the kea and two on the pukeko.  During this time I assisted with the filming of a BBC documentary on the kea, entitled Kea: the smartest parrot? (2003).  Because the kea are such curious parrots and insist on engaging with humans I became fascinated by the social interactions between humans and other animals.  I realised that my primary research interest is in cross-species, cross-cultural social engagement and communication: how human and non-human socially influence one another.  I am passionate about communicating cross-species, cross-cultural ideas, not only in written form but also through other media, using film and photography as an integral part of my research.

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