Daniel Fisher

Across a range of ethnographic and other projects, my work focuses on questions of indeterminacy and those aspects of social worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. These conceptual interests animate writing and research that concern sound, image, fire, and the emergent 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, with an emphasis 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 questions of listening more broadly. My new book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of sound-based and photographic 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, 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).

M&D, an ongoing collaboration with Marina Peterson, produces sound, image and installation works that emerge from site-specific investigations. 

In addition to these projects in Northern Australia and Southern California I have conducted research in New York City and Peru, and in 2001 produced the ethnographic documentary "A Cat in a Sack," focused on the performance practice of New York's Hungry March Band. I also continue to pursue improvisation and composition as components of my broader research practice.

At UC Berkeley I am affiliated faculty with the Program in Critical Theory, the Department of Music, Global Metropolitan Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender. I also serve as director of UC Berkeley’s Media Studies Program and as director of the Experimental Ethnography Lab, a teaching and research studio housed in the Department of Anthropology and dedicated to ethnographic media in all forms. In this capacity I teach and advise ongoing research projects in domains of environmental anthropology, experimental ethnography, sound studies, animation and materiality, cinema, and music- and art-centered ethnography. 

Beyond UC Berkeley I hold affiliations with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the Center for Creative Ethnography at Queens University, Belfast. I am Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.