University of Halle-Wittenberg

Senior Researcher, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Other Affiliations: The University of New South Wales, Social Policy Research Centre

Marie Curie Fellow

About

My research project “Dreamings, Songlines and the ‘Cult of Heritage’: Tourism, Development and Aboriginal Culture in the West Kimberley” asks the question of how landscape, nature and culture of the town of Broome and its adjacent region are appropriated for tourism experiences. It is not only tourism developers who are the architects in the marketing of tourism, but also the local community itself. The question remains of how the Indigenous population in the West Kimberley influences and is influenced by related decision-making processes on land-use and development. This change of perspective looks away from the institutional coding of a ‘Multicultural Broome’ towards tourism development as a social practice. The aim is to open up new possibilities for alternate figurations of political subjectivities and a more inclusive concept of heritage tourism in Australia.

General Research Interests

Anthropology of Globalisation, Knowledge and Science, Audio/Visual Media, Creolisation, Entrepreneurialism and Sustainable Development Discourse, Heritage, Human Ecology, Interdisciplinarity in Research and Teaching, Multi-Sited Ethnography, Music and Sound, Postcolonial Theory and Diaspora/Migration Studies, Research Ethics in Ethnographic Work/Writing, Tourism and Transcultural Connectivity, Urban Studies.

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