Professor Amanda Kearney

Amanda is an Australian anthropologist, whose academic career has been informed by the disciplines of cultural geography, hertiage and ethnic studies. Her career is distinguished by a near 20 year committment to ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative research with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia and New South Wales. The particularity of her theoretical innovations around contemporary race relations and Indigenous lived experiences in Australia, born of collaborative fieldwork, defines her professional standing as a leader of praxis based and applied Australian and Indigenous Studies, and Anthropology. Her research is addressing themes of Indigenous experience, ways of knowing, land rights and the prevailing impact of settler colonial violence on Indigenous lives and lands and waters. Her research has developed with the kind support of Yanyuwa families, the Indigenous owners of land and sea in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. Since 2008 Amanda has also undertken research in Brazil on the rise of affirmative action movements, racial quotas, and African Brazilian cultural expressions.