Academy Fellow

I have worked in several countries and continents as researcher and academic, pursuing interests in development, religion and ritual, ethnomedicine, ethnographic film, environmental change and energy transitions. In recent years my work has focussed on the anthropological study of anthropogenic climate change, and energy transitions, with research undertaken and supervised in Australia, Indonesia, and Nepal, and with current collaborators in Germany and India. The co-authored bookThe End of the Coal Rush: A Turning Point for Global Energy and Climate Policy? (2020) reports on my research as part of an ARC funded cross-national team.

Through my own research and supervision of PhD students, I have fostered a strong program of ethnographic research in the Asia-Pacific region including Australia. This work provides an invaluable comparative perspective for studies of development and change that I have undertaken since 2003 in the Hunter Valley and Northwest of NSW, and the cross-national research in my current projects.

Major publications that are an outcome of these research interests are a series of works including ethnographic films on culture, power and social transformation in relation to ritual and healing, citizenship, activism and self-identity in Australian and Asian societies, and a more recent group of writings based on anthropological approaches to the phenomena of climate change impacts, place-based conflicts over coal mining, and environmentalism, based on ethnographic research in Southeast Australia. Books include Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in the Twentieth Century (edited with Raechelle Rubinstein, University of Hawaii Press 1999) and Healing Powers and Modernity: Shamanism, Science and Traditional Medicine in Asian Societies (edited with Geoffrey Samuel, Bergin and Garvey 2001). I have contributed to the application of ethnographic and qualitative approaches to the study of health and healing in Australia. The book Health Social Science: A Transdisciplinary and Complexity Perspective (Oxford U.P. 2001), co-authored with Nick Higginbotham and Glenn Albrecht, outlines our transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to teaching and research in the social sciences. My monograph, (Climate Change and Anthropos: Planet, People and Places), based on my Hunter Valley research, takes up broad questions of changes to localities and lives in the Anthropocene, arguing for the important contribution of ethnographic research and anthropological theory. Problems of environmental change and future worlds are interrogated from interdisciplinary social science standpoints in my co-edited book with Jonathan Marshall, Environmental Change and the World’s Futures: Ecologies, Ontologies, Mythologies.

My current research takes the focus from fossil fuel to energy transition, and is being carried out as part of an ARC funded team on the project: Decarbonising Electricity: A comparison in socio-ecological relations.

As an anthropological researcher, at this stage of my career I am committed to being an active and innovative member of teams where my ethnographic skills and anthropological insights will contribute to interdisciplinary projects and demonstrate the value of anthropology in understanding major societal challenges such as climate change and energy transitions.

Emeritus Professor of Anthropology

University of Sydney

Australian Anthropological Society

1.Goodman, J., Connor, L., Ghosh, D., Morton, T., S., Marshall, J., Mueller, K., Menon, M., Kholi, K. Pearse, R. and Rosewarne, S. 2020. Beyond the Coal Rush: A Turning Point for Global Energy and Climate Policy? Cambridge University Press.

2.Connor, Linda H: Climate Change and Anthropos: Planet, People and Places. Routledge, London 2016

3. Marshall, Jonathan Paul and Connor, Linda H: Environmental Change and the World’s Futures: Ecologies, Ontologies, Mythologies. Routledge, London 2016

4.. Connor, Linda H: Energy futures, state planning policies and coal mine contests in rural New South Wales. Energy Policy, 99, 233-241, 2016.

5.. Connor, L., Higginbotham, N. Natural Cycles in lay understandings of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 23(6), 1852-1861, 2013