Staff Profiles

Introductory Profile:

Jennifer Deger is a visual anthropologist currently working on a three-year ARC Discovery project, Digital Technologies, Mediated Futures: envisaging culture in Arnhem Land.  With a focus on collaboration, experimentation and non-traditional documentary forms, Deger’s practice-based research reveals the primacy of affect, memory and imagination in contemporary Yolngu lifeworlds.  In her recent book, Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), Deger describes how Yolngu are using the ‘power of media’ to sensuously mediate relations between kin, country, ancestral forces—and with non-indigenous audiences.

Jennifer Deger’s ethnographic research explores the dynamic and generative relationships between vision, creativity and power in an Aboriginal community in northern Australia. For the past fifteen years, Deger been developing relationships with Yolngu from the community of Gapuwiyak in Northeast Arnhem Land, as an ethnographer and collaborative media-maker and trainer. Over the years she has worked on a number of video productions with Yolngu including Gularri: That Brings Unity (CAAMA Productions with Warrkwarrkpuyngu Yolngu Media, 1997) a film that tracks the flow of sacred water across northeast Arnhem Land, and Christmas with Wawa (2007), a video-postcard to a dead Yolngu brother.  She is currently co-producing a series of films with the women of the Marrawangu clan, using animation, performance and observational filmic techniques. 

Deger’s research into the perceptual, aesthetic and ontological dimensions of Yolngu engagements with television, video and photography reveals the primacy of the senses in contemporary Yolngu lives and cultural politics.  Her research raises serious questions relating to the potential of media to mediate, and indeed refigure, the spaces of the intercultural.

Deger has published on film, photography and indigenous media in a number of journals including Visual Anthropology and The Australian Journal of Anthropology.  Her recent book, Shimmering Screens: Making Media in an Aboriginal Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), breaks new ground in the study of indigenous media and visual cultures by showing how Yolngu seek to harness the mimetic ‘power of media’ in ways that challenge established theories of representation and resistance.