I have worked in several countries and continents as researcher and academic, pursuing interests in development, religion and ritual, shamanism and healing, and environmental change. These interests have converged in recent years in the study of anthropogenic climate change, culture and place, with research undertaken and supervised in Hunter Valley NSW, Indonesia, and Nepal. In Indonesia, I have researched and published on the transformations wrought by nationally promoted tourist development in Bali, and more recently on notions of citizenship, decentralisation and local communities in the post-Suharto era. In North India in the mid-1990s, I was part of an Australian Research Council-funded team that investigated questions of displacement, identity, and the global context of cultural innovation, through a study of healing in diasporic Tibetan communities. Nine of my completed PhD students have also taken up related questions in various Southeast and South Asian fieldwork contexts, and current students are carrying out research that extends these questions in various ways, in Australia and Asia. Through my own research and supervision of PhD students, I have fostered a strong agenda of ethnographic research in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia. This work provides an invaluable comparative perspective for studies of development and change in the Hunter Valley of NSW, and I am currently an investigator on an Australian Research Council-funded project on Climate Change, Place and Community: A Regional Ethnography of the Hunter Valley (see Recent Publications below).
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