Daniel Fisher has been awarded a Global Urban Humanities - Townsend Fellowship for Spring 2017 for his project "Understanding Aboriginal Cities: Indigeneity, Urbanization, and Intervention in Northern Australia."
Daniel Fisher is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department whose research is broadly concerned with questions of mobility, media, and urbanization in Aboriginal Australia. My current research centers processes of Indigenous urbanization in the Northern Territory, drawing on ethnography, collaborative media production, and archival research to better understand new forms of Indigenous urban life and related forms of policing and spatial segregation this has entailed. This ongoing work foregrounds the place of mobile media and infrastructure in the Aboriginal negotiation of cities and analyzes the reconfiguration of Indigenous sovereign claim that such urbanization has entailed. Fisher also pursues ethnographic video, photography, and sound production as a focus of his teaching and also as research methods and representational practices in the context of his fieldwork.
In addition to work in Northern Australia, he has conducted research in New York City and Peru, and in 2001 produced an ethnographic documentary under the auspices of the Program in Culture and Media titled "A Cat in a Sack."
The Global Urban Humanities Initiative is a joint venture between the UC Berkeley Arts & Humanities Division of the College of Letters & Science and the College of Environmental Design. It brings together scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, city and regional planning, and multiple humanities disciplines - ranging from East Asian languages & culture, comparative literature, and history of art to theater, dance and performance studies. Together, faculty and graduate students are developing new theoretical paradigms, research methods, and pedagogical approaches in order to help address the complex problems facing today's global cities and regions.