Associate ProfessorVictoria Stead

The common thread running through all of my research is a concern with the diverse ways in which relations of power are experienced, negotiated, and contested in the lives and places of everyday people. Much of my research has a focus on Australia and the Pacific region, and is concerned with themes of labour, race, place-making, and postcoloniality. I use ethnographic methods to understand and describe the richness and complexities of human experience, and I often do this in dialogue with archival and oral history research.    

My current research coheres around four key programs of interest and activity. The first of these seeks to understand contemporary transformations to relations of labour/power. This includes a long-term ethnographic project examining intersections of race and labour in the Australian horticultural industry, with a 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 other racialized migrants, refugees from Asia and the Middle East, European backpackers, and socio-economically marginalized white workers. My publications from this project include a 2019 edited book Labour Lines and Colonial Power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander Labour Mobility in Australia (ANU Press, 2019, co-edited with Jon Altman), which brought together an innovative collaboration of geographers, historians, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars in order to re-evaluate labour mobility practices in both historical and contemporary contexts.

A second key program of research focuses on Australia-Pacific relations. This includes another long-running project looking at the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, and the postcolonial relationships between Australians and Papua New Guineans in the context of the war tourism industry surrounding the Kokoda Track. You can listen to two award-winning podcasts about this work, including interviews with PNG locals and Australian trekkers, here, or read my article in American Ethnologist, ‘Feeling the (post)colonial: Affective encounters and enduring regimes of territorialization along the Kokoda Track, Papua New Guinea’.

The third key program of research I am involved in centers on the pursuit of just food systems – for workers, communities, and environments. My 2022 edited book Beyond Global Food Supply Chains: Crisis, Disruption, Regeneration (Palgrave, co-edited with Melinda Hinkson) takes the COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard to interrogate a larger set structural, environmental and political fault lines running through the global food system. I also collaborate with scholars in health, on projects looking at inequities in food distribution systems in rural Australia.

Finally, the fourth program of research I am involved in seeks to understand contestations over regional and rural place-making. I am part of teams working with the Country Fire Authority (CFA) and Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) to improve community engagement related to planned burning. A 2022 special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies, led by myself, Dr Rose Butler and Dr Chris Mayes, brought global Indigenous, POC, migrant and settler scholars together to interrogate how race has informed rural place-making in the Global North.