Daniel Fisher

My research interests bring together concerns with media, music's materiality, and the close ethnography of urban life, with a specific focus on northern Australia. My earliest ethnographic work addressed the enormous success and efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the entailments of that success for communities across northern Australia. This focused primarily on music, sound, and voice, 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 work provided the focus for my first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and continues to underpin my ongoing research and writing.

I’m currently pursuing several additional projects that continue my long term research in northern Australia. Supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, the first concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure in Northern Australia, focusing in part on urban fire ecologies, their transformation by climatic instability, and their mediatization via image, story, and market logics of carbon capture and exchange. My book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of photography and sound-based projects under the shared title of Fire’s Image, analyze these phenomena in dialogue with people living in the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory. Through a place-specific focus on fire, music, movement, and law, these projects pursue an ethnographic account of urban Darwin that begins with Indigenous institutions, communities, and the many long grass camps that populate the city’s inner margins, and from there considers the politics of apprehension that accompany climate change and the key role that Indigenous Australians have begun to occupy in its remediation.

A second area of current research interest grows directly from my first book and concerns relations between musical practice, technology, and place. This research centers a critical organology, focused on the remediation of place in relation to Indigenous audio media, pursuing a history of amplification and recording in the Northern Territory that foregrounds the plasticity of auditory realism. The project proceeds in dialogue with a broader, disciplinary interest in creative ethnographic praxis to center recording practice, composition, and photography as generative modes of inquiry and platforms for knowledge production. As with much of my prior writing on audio media, musical practice and performance are central components of this research.

In addition to these projects in Northern Australia 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.

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, and since 2023 have been director of UC Berkeley’s Media Studies Program. Since 2018 I have also directed 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 also teach and advise ongoing research projects on ethnographic and documentary history, experimental ethnographic methods, recording practice, animation and materiality, sound studies, and music-centered ethnography.

Beyond UC Berkeley I hold affiliate positions with the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, and the Center for Creative Ethnography at Queens University, Belfast.