Doctoral Dissertation: Aboriginal Radio: A Political Economy of Speech and Sound in Indigenous Australia

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Under the direction of Dr. Fred Myers and Dr. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Mr. Daniel Fisher will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. His field work will include participant-observation research on Aboriginal media production and reception, audio recording of conversational interaction and broadcast speech genres in Aboriginal English, and archival research on Australian multicultural and media policies. He will investigate correlations among emergent practices and institutions of Aboriginal media with ways of speaking, poetic and aesthetic strategies, and changes in the political and economic circumstances of Indigenous people. Three questions organize the project: (1) Why have indigenous media and art achieved great success where other state-sponsored social initiatives are assessed as failures? (2) How are new relationships to the past and to place mediated through speech and music on the radio, both within and across diverse Aboriginal communities? (3) How do particular linguistic, poetic, and aesthetic strategies relate to state policies on multi-cultural participation and Aboriginal self-determination? This research is significant in several domains. Mr. Fisher's studies inform the anthropology of both Australian Aboriginal cultural practices and the appropriation of electronic audio and visual media by Indigenous and 4th world peoples. These developments have received increasing interdisciplinary attention as Indigenous communities around the world pursue engagements with media production to ensure their material survival and cultural futures. This project also contributes to anthropological and sociolinguistic research on electronically mediated speech practices, the strategic mobilization of register, dialect stylization, and code-switching in multilingual and/or socially stratified language contact zones. Finally, this work will interest scholars of pidgins and creoles by contributing to our general understanding of the social and linguistic specificity of Aboriginal English.