Amanda Kearney

Biography

Amanda's recent book, 'Violence in Place, Cultural and Environmental Wounding' (Routledge, UK) explores the greater effects of cultural wounding on the world we live in and strives to elicit care for the places that humans harm and the non human species who also experience trauma as a result of human/ethnic conflict. This builds on her earlier work, 'Cultural Wounding, Healing and Emerging Ethnicities' (Palgrave Macmillan, NY) which introduced the principles of cultural wounding and healing, as a way of better understanding and engaging with the lived experiences of Indigenous families in Australia and African descendants in Brazil. Her primary methodology has been ethnographic research.

Amanda’s research has also addressed themes of Indigenous anthropology, African Diaspora, intangible cultural heritage and the emotional geographies that accompany homelands. In 2000 she began ethnographic collaborations with Indigenous Australian groups in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia, to record the terms of their cultural and social engagements with homelands, and the politics of place. Amanda began working on themes of emerging ethnicities and the rise of affirmative action principles in north eastern Brazil in 2008. By critically engaging with ethnic studies from an anthropological perspective this research sought to define the quality and character of emerging ethnicities, through a comparison of the similarities and differences in ethnic ‘scapes’ found in wounded spaces such as Australian Indigenous communities in remote and urban settings and amongst interethnic groups in northeastern Brazil.

Education

PhD University of Melbourne, Australia

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Sociocultural anthropology
Social and cultural geography
Indigenous studies
Decolonising methodologies
Kincentric ecologies
Phenomenology

Books

Articles