Melinda Hinkson is Associate Professor (Research) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow based in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. She is a social anthropologist with wide ranging interests in visual culture. Her current research centres on post-colonial placemaking and builds on long term research with Warlpiri people of Central Australia. She explores intersections between modes of governance, cultures of seeing and creative practice in central Australia. The first stage of this project resulted in her book Remembering the Future: Warlpiri Life Through the Prism of Drawing (Aboriginal Studies Press 2014) and an associated exhibition for the National Museum of Australia. The next phase of the fellowship project explores the turbulence of displacement.
Her interests also include the politics of intercultural recognition and the conceptualisation of person-image relations in contemporary society. She has published on Aboriginal placemaking in Sydney, on the life work of Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner, and on the complex cultural politics around the Northern Territory Emergency Response Intervention.
Prior to joining the Alfred Deakin Institute in late 2015 Melinda was based at the Australian National University where she taught courses in the history of anthropological theory, anthropology of media and visual anthropology and convened a masters program in interdisciplinary visual studies.