Victoria Stead is an ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute. Her work has an interdisciplinary focus, anchored in anthropology but also engaging the cognate areas of politics, geography, development studies, history, and postcolonial studies.

Victoria’s current research coheres around two key areas of interest and activity. The first of these, ‘Race, Labour and Belonging’, focuses on labour in the Australian horticultural industry, with a geographical focus on the Shepparton region in northern Victoria. Discourses and practices relating to horticultural labour are strongly inflected with considerations of race and class, and have complex histories that are also bound up with Australia’s colonial history. Pacific Islanders are amongst those who travel to the area to work as fruit pickers, and their experiences intersect with the labour experiences of Indigenous communities, as well as migrants and refugees from Asia and the Middle East, European backpackers, and an increasingly marginalized White local underclass. This project is funded through an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), 2018-21. See more about this project here.

The second body of work engages themes of conflict, memory, landscape and development in relation to the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, including the growth of war tourism in Oro and Central Provinces. From 2016-18 Victoria ran a project, ‘Women Remember the War’, as part of the PNG Oral History Project, working with co-researchers from Oro to record interviews about Oro women’s experiences of the War. Currently, she is leading research into the postcolonial relationships between local Oro and Central Province people, Australian trekkers, and Australian and Papua New Guinean state and non-state actors in the region around Kokoda. This current research is funded as part of the ARC Discovery Indigenous project ‘Beyond Recognition: Postcolonial Relationality Across Difference’. See more about this project here.

Connecting these two strands of research activity is a focus on the Australia-Pacific region, a concern with contemporary postcolonialism and the reverberations of the past in the present, and an empirical and theoretical attention to land and landscape.