About me
About me
I am a founding interim co-director of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre, an inter- and trans-disciplinary research hub that endeavours to shape new thinking and practice around three core streams: socio-economic development, human security and governance in the Indo-Pacific region.
I have held several discipline-specific roles including:
- Co-Director, Research for Development Impact network
- Founding executive committee member, Development Studies Association of Australia
- Deputy Editor, Development in Practice, a Taylor & Francis journal
Research Interests
In my role as Associate Professor Development Studies and Sustainability I am interested in the relationship between anthropology and development, particularly how development practices shape and influence social and cultural behaviours. Much of my research these days pertains to gender and rural livelihoods employing participatory research methodologies; I am interested in how development ‘beneficiaries’ experience, embrace, and subvert development interventions. Another research interest of late centres around the intersections between agriculture and mining—particularly the lived experiences of remote and rural communities living adjacent to extractive activities.
My research embodies my commitment to the application of anthropological knowledge to development practice emphasising participatory processes. I draw on my cross-cultural expertise to inform my research with the intention of shaping local development practices. My strengths lie in applying participatory approaches to the design, implementation, and evaluation of development projects that help to inform technical expertise, programming and policy. In this way, my research has significant, applied, real-world outcomes by informing the development policy and processes of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the private sector, government, and development agencies to ensure the inclusion of local perspectives in development.
My rural livelihoods research in Africa focuses on elements such as the decisions that smallholder farmers, pastoralists and livestock herders make about their crops, animals and land. My new research collaboration focuses on road developments in east Africa and western Indian Ocean island states; I'm interested in how the choices of poor farmers are shaped by new road development in terms of access to services, markets, credit, poor governance, weak policies, gender/ethnic/educational barriers, and political instability resulting in few options to maintain secure, or sustainable, food production in the face of crises, climate change, resource extraction and big infrastructure development projects.
Over the past two decades, I have worked and researched with a number of NGOs, including the British Red Cross, Australian Red Cross, Oxfam Australia, Global Exchange, Catholic Relief Services Southern Africa, CARE Australia and CARE Vietnam, and Nuwul Environmental Services – an Indigenous social enterprise in northeast Arnhem Land, Australia.
Currently, I lecture undergraduate units in international aid and sustainable development and postgraduate units in the Masters of Development Studies. My teaching concerns the role of agency in development and the structural inequalities that lead to uneven and unequal development. Students learn critical skills in analysing how development discourses and practices shape the everyday lives of marginalised people, which often have unintended consequences, both positive and negative. They learn about power relations and how change happens. We explore sustainable development approaches for living within a safe and equitable operating space of the planetary boundaries in the Anthropocene. I supervise Masters research theses across several Masters programmes and a cohort of PhD projects in various topics pertaining to processes and practices of development.
Links
Organisational Affiliations
Highlights - Output
Working paper
Measuring performance: A story of 'Closing the Gap' through indigenous social enterprise
Published 2015
Against a backdrop of government efforts to mainstream Indigenous economic participation for achieving Indigenous equality in Australia, examples of Indigenous entrepreneurial activities in rural and remote regions represent more flexible and culturally appropriate approaches. The question remains however as to what the medium or long-term impact of Indigenous entrepreneurial activities on families and the wider community are and whether it is possible to measure them? This paper tells the story of the local entrepreneurial activities of a nonprofit social enterprise in the town Yirrkala in northeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. It analyses these activities against an integrated framework for performance management of nonprofit organizations to demonstrate the social effectiveness of an Indigenous social enterprise as a pathway for community engendered income, employment and social capital. We suggest that this example represents a successful community-based pathway to increasing economic participation on local Indigenous terms at a time when national Indigenous unemployment is high.
Book
Development Tourism: Lessons from Cuba
Published 2010
Tourism in Cuba - described by Fidel Castro as 'the evil we have to have' - has been regarded both with ambivalence, and as a crucial aspect of development and poverty alleviation. The result is a remarkable approach to tourism, one which often compels tourists to become agents of development through solidarity. Drawing on her experiences of working in an NGO in Cuba, the author uses a multi-sited ethnographic approach to investigate tourism motivations and experiences, and to examine the very nature of development. Her analysis covers a wide range of issues including social change, globalization, social theory, and sustainability. Also discussed is the way in which tourism in Cuba relates to broader debates surrounding transformation, capacity building, social action and solidarity.