T Lea
Biographic Data
| ID | 11927 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Lea |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Lea |
| SIGNATURE | LEA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0444-1466 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 211 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Towards a materialist housing policy: Air conditioners for remote communities
Remote communities in central and northern Australia are hot and getting hotter. Housing is crowded and not fit for purpose. Residents face increasing temperatures under the climate crisis while investment in housing supply is insufficient to address crowding or improve infrastructure to national minimum standards. Mechanical air conditioning is one obvious technical intervention to address the poor thermal performance of housing, but it is incon…
Policy ecology as concept and method
This article offers a policy ecology approach to assist with apprehending policy's dispersed operations across matter, time, and space. I argue that policy is soaked into almost everything we care to analyze. Accordingly, policy analysis should not be confined to traditional artifacts and practices of governance and regulation. The primary reorientation comes with adopting an ecological approach to policy over normative understandings of what pol…
Sustaining housing through planned maintenance in remote Central Australia
Once housing is constructed, its sustainability depends on the efficacy of property maintenance. In remote Indigenous communities in Australia, responsive or reactive approaches to property maintenance dominate over planned and preventive attention, leaving housing in various states of disrepair. By documenting an approach that is succeeding in this wider context, this article shows the commonplace situation of poorly maintained social housing is…
Beyond “Pressure”: Peer Influences on e-Cigarette Use in Young Australian Narratives of Vaping
Background In the early 2020s, Australian media and public health organizations described the rapid rise in youth e-cigarette uptake, portraying this as a “peer pressure” problem wherein vulnerable young people were being led or bullied into vaping by the “cool” kids. Yet, the peer pressure framing of vaping fails to account for young people's rituals of nicotine consumption and ways social drug economies are organized. Methods In 2023, we conduc…
Intermittent urgency and states of deferral—Or, how many houses for a mine
This paper traces the temporal tactics of continually renewed coloniality—where some impasses are made to appear insurmountable while others demand swift solutions—in relation to housing and mining at Borroloola in Australia's Northern Territory. Distinct policy and regulatory regimes encourage analyses that set housing and mining apart. Yet together they signal the settler state's simultaneous remedial and extractive orientations to remote Abori…
Washing and White Goods
On the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in northwest South Australia, an environmental health worker salvages discarded washing machines to reinstall in remote community homes. Tracking the fate of washing machines and householder well-being, this essay traces the militarized genealogies running contemporary settler colonial occupation in Australia. We are particularly interested in how the colonizing project decants militarized …
Intersections Between Housing and Health Vulnerabilities: Share Housing in Sydney and the Health Risks of Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed complex connections between housing and health vulnerabilities. By investigating the share housing market in Sydney, Australia during the COVID-19 period, this paper examines these connections, highlighting health risks associated with shared facilities, overcrowding, and rental insecurity. Using data from Flatmates.com.au, Australia’s dominant share housing platform, the paper analyses advertisements offering or…
Covid‐19, commuter territories and the e‐bike boom
The appearance and integration of e‐bikes in public space is a source of much debate worldwide. This paper offers insights to these debates by reflecting on how Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage as territory helps us to understand the uptake of e‐bike commuter cycling during the Covid‐19 pandemic through empirical material from a study conducted in Sydney, Australia. Here we conceptualise commuter journeys in terms of processes of dete…
The languishing bike: Depleting Capacities of Cycling-Bodies
This article focuses on what may be depleting people’s capacity to ride a bike in cities. ‘Capacity to cycle’ is here understood not as a behavioural trait or in terms of infrastructure provision, but, taking our lead from Deleuze and Guattari, as a desiring cycling-machine. We argue this offers a way to envisage depleting, or enhancing, capacities to cycle as a working socio-material arrangement that make, remake, and unmake cycling-bodies and s…
Ungrievable lives and the ensemble of opinions
Cyclists are understood as vulnerable road users, but when cyclists are killed by drivers, media reports shared to social media are often accompanied by comments that aggressively rearticulate hierarchies of automobility. This article explores the news reporting, public social media sharing, and public social media comments about the deaths of two cyclists – Mike Hall and Cameron Frewer. To assemble an archive of relevant media material, we have …
Desiring Bureaucracy
This review presents new perspectives on the anthropology of bureaucracy. Since Weber's account of the importance of this organizational mode to the functioning of contemporary socioeconomic systems, the inescapability of bureaucracy has been repeatedly theorized to show its good and ill effects. Yet anthropologists retain an ambivalent relation to this topic and can struggle to move beyond critique. I consider this ambivalence, suggesting that i…
Sensing the State in Hot Houses
Liam Grealy and Tess Lea examine the sensory effects of sweltering heat in Australian Indigenous housing as the outcome of both climate catastrophe and the infrastructural neglect of settler colonial geographies
Embodied spatial mobility (in)justice: Cycling refrains and pedalling geographies of men, masculinities, and love
This paper seeks to better understand spatial mobility justice with reference to the bodily sensations of cycling, discerned here as different pedalling rhythms in emergent territories that our participants narrate as “love.” Differential or striated mobility is not just the result of gendered, classed, and racialised social norms but is productive of the frictions and affordances of these social hierarchies. We build on these arguments by asking…
Critical antagonisms: Cycling and Territory
Slower speed limits and regulated passing distances between motor vehicles and bicycles are now taken-for-granted in policies aimed at increasing cycling participation rates by addressing safety concerns in societies dominated by cars. Rather than understanding distance as a measurement between two points, this paper addresses the sensibilities of proximity. This paper draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and the related concepts of assembla…
Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention
Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly 'wild people' of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores naturalized policy: policy unplugged, gone live, ramifying in everyday life, to show that it is policies that are wild, not the people being targeted. Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head to reveal a policy-driven world dominated by short term political in…
Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis
Decolonizing Trauma Theory by Way of Housing Disrepair: The Case of Santa Teresa, Australia
What happens if, instead of the Holocaust being the baseline event for understanding cultural trauma, settler colonial examples are recruited to decolonize cultural trauma framings? Here, a partly successful tribunal hearing lodged by Arrernte residents in Santa Teresa, central Australia, over neglected repair and maintenance issues, shows how settler state deployments of the traumatic and the traumatizing also pivot on event models. Such contain…
Can Indigenous Land and Knowledge Solve the Twin Curse of Racism and Environmental Exploitation
Waging Paperfare: Subverting the Damage of Extractive Capitalism in Kakadu
Drawing on campaigns waged and administrative burdens managed by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation (GAC) in Kakadu National Park to manage the effects of existing uranium mining and further proposed mining, this article draws attention to some of the techniques and coalitions that GAC has created to manage its would‐be managers. It uses the case of monitoring the operations and particularly the rehabilitation of the Ranger Uranium mine and of…
Rabies response, One Health and more-than-human considerations in Indigenous communities in northern Australia
Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth
This essay introduces Visual Anthropology Review’s Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth,’ a special collection of essays on new media art, ceremony, animation, sensory immersion, and other hyperreal interventions by Aboriginal and First Nations artists, curators, and academics. This essay introduces the contributing Indigenous and non‐Indigenous authors who are working across this emergent field of cultural product…
Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords
Using forms of “improvisational realism,” the north Australian‐based Karrrabing Indigenous Film Collective mimics and plays with strategies of fabulation and faux realism to provoke audiences into new ways of understanding the multileveled worlds Indigenous families inhabit and think about. Successful as their filmography has been, Karrabing works nonetheless enter a culturally saturated visual contract that threatens to tip their productions bac…
Beyond the north–south cultural wars: Reconciling Australia's recent past with its future
Beyond the north–south cultural wars: reconciling Australia's recent past with its future." Australian Geographer, 47(1), pp. 123–124
Senses, ethnography and spatial politics: Storying Darwin
Notes1 Phillip Larkin, ‘Talking in Bed’ in Archie Burnett (ed), The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, London: Faber and Faber, 2012.2 Paul Carter, ‘Lines’, Postcolonial Studies 19(1), pp 94–96.3 Lynette Russell, ‘Darwin, a city on the edge’, Postcolonial Studies 19(1), pp 97–99.4 Russell, ‘Darwin’, pp 97–99.5 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint : The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham and London: Duke University Pre…
Sharing the Wealth: By-roads and Hidden Treasures
A review of Paul Ashton, Chris Gibson and Ross Gibson (eds), By-Roads and Hidden Treasures: Mapping Cultural Assets in Regional Australia (UWA Publishing, 2015
When looking for anarchy, look to the state: Fantasies of regulation in forcing disorder within the Australian Indigenous estate
This article questions the foundational binary 'anarchy-bureaucracy' and the multiple articulations at play in the state's refraction of anarchic qualities onto Indigenous Australians. Launching from the Northern Territory Emergency Response of June 2007, in which the Australian government assumed direct control of 73 Aboriginal communities in the north of Australia, it asks why bureaucracy is considered the antonym of anarchy and not its synonym…
This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing
This essay describes the surreality of Aboriginal housing in Australia, where images reroute remedial concern from the literal conditions toward a pathologization of the indigenous householder. Using governmental data against governmental interpretation, the essay shows how a pragmatic issue of substandard original construction, undersupervised repairs, poor to nonexistent maintenance, and rapid shifts in policy attention is hidden to reinsert ho…
Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also site…
Healthy Country, Healthy People: Policy Implications of Links between Indigenous Human Health and Environmental Condition in Tropical Australia
Investment in programs that help Indigenous people undertake work maintaining the environmental health of their country has benefits for the environment as well as the physical, mental and cultural health of the Indigenous people involved. For health these findings have direct implications for some national health policies, service provision to homelands, health promotion and Indigenous health research. There are also direct implications for envi…
Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis
Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords
Using forms of “improvisational realism,” the north Australian‐based Karrrabing Indigenous Film Collective mimics and plays with strategies of fabulation and faux realism to provoke audiences into new ways of understanding the multileveled worlds Indigenous families inhabit and think about. Successful as their filmography has been, Karrabing works nonetheless enter a culturally saturated visual contract that threatens to tip their productions bac…
Being Moved (On)
It is in the contemporary period of Indigenous cultural recognition that the biopolitical system of policing Aboriginal walkers in Australia's frontier towns has become so normalized that it takes place without public notice, using universally accepted mechanisms for shedding metropolitan areas of the unsightly and unwanted. Ironically, the hypermarginalized hunter-gatherer population can be identified by their perambulation - they walk - a form …
Policy fuzz and fuzzy logic: Researching contemporary Indigenous education and parent–school engagement in north Australia
‘Engagement’ is the second of six top priorities in Australia's most recent Indigenous education strategy to ‘close the gap’ in schooling outcomes. Drawing on findings from a three‐year ethnographic analysis of school engagement issues in the north of Australia, this article situates engagement within the history of Indigenous education policy, followed by considerations of how many of the issues faced by Indigenous families both match and can be…
Embodied spatial mobility (in)justice: Cycling refrains and pedalling geographies of men, masculinities, and love
This paper seeks to better understand spatial mobility justice with reference to the bodily sensations of cycling, discerned here as different pedalling rhythms in emergent territories that our participants narrate as “love.” Differential or striated mobility is not just the result of gendered, classed, and racialised social norms but is productive of the frictions and affordances of these social hierarchies. We build on these arguments by asking…
Policy ecology as concept and method
This article offers a policy ecology approach to assist with apprehending policy's dispersed operations across matter, time, and space. I argue that policy is soaked into almost everything we care to analyze. Accordingly, policy analysis should not be confined to traditional artifacts and practices of governance and regulation. The primary reorientation comes with adopting an ecological approach to policy over normative understandings of what pol…
Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth
This essay introduces Visual Anthropology Review’s Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth,’ a special collection of essays on new media art, ceremony, animation, sensory immersion, and other hyperreal interventions by Aboriginal and First Nations artists, curators, and academics. This essay introduces the contributing Indigenous and non‐Indigenous authors who are working across this emergent field of cultural product…
The work of forgetting: Germs, aborigines and postcolonial expertise in the Northern Territory of Australia
The languishing bike: Depleting Capacities of Cycling-Bodies
This article focuses on what may be depleting people’s capacity to ride a bike in cities. ‘Capacity to cycle’ is here understood not as a behavioural trait or in terms of infrastructure provision, but, taking our lead from Deleuze and Guattari, as a desiring cycling-machine. We argue this offers a way to envisage depleting, or enhancing, capacities to cycle as a working socio-material arrangement that make, remake, and unmake cycling-bodies and s…
Covid‐19, commuter territories and the e‐bike boom
The appearance and integration of e‐bikes in public space is a source of much debate worldwide. This paper offers insights to these debates by reflecting on how Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage as territory helps us to understand the uptake of e‐bike commuter cycling during the Covid‐19 pandemic through empirical material from a study conducted in Sydney, Australia. Here we conceptualise commuter journeys in terms of processes of dete…
Critical antagonisms: Cycling and Territory
Slower speed limits and regulated passing distances between motor vehicles and bicycles are now taken-for-granted in policies aimed at increasing cycling participation rates by addressing safety concerns in societies dominated by cars. Rather than understanding distance as a measurement between two points, this paper addresses the sensibilities of proximity. This paper draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and the related concepts of assembla…
Problematising school space for Indigenous education: Teachers’ and parents’ perspectives
This interpretive study explores the relationship between spatial qualities and school-parent engagement in three primary schools which serve low income periurban Indigenous families in north Australia. Drawing from interviews with educators and parents, school-based observations and community fieldwork conducted over the course of two years in two different towns, we found that educators are very concerned that schools, as western institutions, …
Rabies response, One Health and more-than-human considerations in Indigenous communities in northern Australia
Development, heroism and the indigenous life project
Sustaining housing through planned maintenance in remote Central Australia
Once housing is constructed, its sustainability depends on the efficacy of property maintenance. In remote Indigenous communities in Australia, responsive or reactive approaches to property maintenance dominate over planned and preventive attention, leaving housing in various states of disrepair. By documenting an approach that is succeeding in this wider context, this article shows the commonplace situation of poorly maintained social housing is…
Ungrievable lives and the ensemble of opinions
Cyclists are understood as vulnerable road users, but when cyclists are killed by drivers, media reports shared to social media are often accompanied by comments that aggressively rearticulate hierarchies of automobility. This article explores the news reporting, public social media sharing, and public social media comments about the deaths of two cyclists – Mike Hall and Cameron Frewer. To assemble an archive of relevant media material, we have …
Sensing the State in Hot Houses
Liam Grealy and Tess Lea examine the sensory effects of sweltering heat in Australian Indigenous housing as the outcome of both climate catastrophe and the infrastructural neglect of settler colonial geographies
The work of forgetting: Germs, aborigines and postcolonial expertise in the Northern Territory of Australia
Housing for Health in Indigenous Australia: Driving Change when Research and Policy are Part of the Problem
The failures of social policy in Indigenous Australia are legion, to the current point where the former national government declared a national state of emergency in its own borders. In calmer times, recommendations for solutions almost inevitably include a call for more practice-oriented research to increase the evidence base informing social interventions. Just as inevitably, researchers bemoan the difficulties of influencing policy and the cul…
Mosquitoes in the mix: How transferable is creative city thinking
This paper contributes to recent debates about whether urban policy discourses are transferable and what is at stake in their translation. It draws on discussion of Darwin (Northwest Territory, Australia), a tropical savanna location that the local government wants to promote as a ‘creative city’, without quite knowing what this might require. We discuss relevant debates on research knowledge construction, the creative city and the path‐dependent…
Healthy Country, Healthy People: Policy Implications of Links between Indigenous Human Health and Environmental Condition in Tropical Australia
Investment in programs that help Indigenous people undertake work maintaining the environmental health of their country has benefits for the environment as well as the physical, mental and cultural health of the Indigenous people involved. For health these findings have direct implications for some national health policies, service provision to homelands, health promotion and Indigenous health research. There are also direct implications for envi…
Development, heroism and the indigenous life project
This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing
This essay describes the surreality of Aboriginal housing in Australia, where images reroute remedial concern from the literal conditions toward a pathologization of the indigenous householder. Using governmental data against governmental interpretation, the essay shows how a pragmatic issue of substandard original construction, undersupervised repairs, poor to nonexistent maintenance, and rapid shifts in policy attention is hidden to reinsert ho…
Using computer-based instruction to improve Indigenous early literacy in Northern Australia: A quasi-experimental study
The effectiveness of a web-based reading support tool, ABRACADABRA, to improve the literacy outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students was evaluated over one semester in several Northern Territory primary schools in 2009. ABRACADABRA is intended as a support for teachers in the early years of schooling, giving them a friendly, game and evidence-based tool to reinforce their literacy instruction. The classroom implementation of ABRACADABRA…
Problematising school space for Indigenous education: Teachers’ and parents’ perspectives
This interpretive study explores the relationship between spatial qualities and school-parent engagement in three primary schools which serve low income periurban Indigenous families in north Australia. Drawing from interviews with educators and parents, school-based observations and community fieldwork conducted over the course of two years in two different towns, we found that educators are very concerned that schools, as western institutions, …
Policy fuzz and fuzzy logic: Researching contemporary Indigenous education and parent–school engagement in north Australia
‘Engagement’ is the second of six top priorities in Australia's most recent Indigenous education strategy to ‘close the gap’ in schooling outcomes. Drawing on findings from a three‐year ethnographic analysis of school engagement issues in the north of Australia, this article situates engagement within the history of Indigenous education policy, followed by considerations of how many of the issues faced by Indigenous families both match and can be…
Babidge, Sally: Aboriginal Family and the State. The Conditions of History
Anthropos , Seite 222 - 223
Contemporary Anthropologies of Indigenous Australia
This review covers sociocultural ethnographies of indigenous Australia from the 1970s to the present. It explores three trends: ethnographic reckonings with indigenous encapsulation within a liberal-settler state; the influence of international theoretical emphases; and movements toward an anthropology of the otherwise. The advent of land repossession, and the ethnographic and employment opportunities this created, indelibly shaped the discipline…
Being Moved (On)
It is in the contemporary period of Indigenous cultural recognition that the biopolitical system of policing Aboriginal walkers in Australia's frontier towns has become so normalized that it takes place without public notice, using universally accepted mechanisms for shedding metropolitan areas of the unsightly and unwanted. Ironically, the hypermarginalized hunter-gatherer population can be identified by their perambulation - they walk - a form …
When looking for anarchy, look to the state: Fantasies of regulation in forcing disorder within the Australian Indigenous estate
This article questions the foundational binary 'anarchy-bureaucracy' and the multiple articulations at play in the state's refraction of anarchic qualities onto Indigenous Australians. Launching from the Northern Territory Emergency Response of June 2007, in which the Australian government assumed direct control of 73 Aboriginal communities in the north of Australia, it asks why bureaucracy is considered the antonym of anarchy and not its synonym…
What has water got to do with it? Indigenous public housing and Australian settler-colonial relations
Recent scholarly efforts to recognize water rights and water fights have been driven into being through various territorial disputes. In such work, water is usefully treated as a form of imagined soil that can be mapped, as a liquid habitat with nutrients to haul or as a mining site with resources to be extracted. This paper instead draws from the physics of water to reconceptualize policy's corrosions in everyday worlds, as an intervention into …
Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also site…
Beyond the north–south cultural wars: Reconciling Australia's recent past with its future
Beyond the north–south cultural wars: reconciling Australia's recent past with its future." Australian Geographer, 47(1), pp. 123–124
Senses, ethnography and spatial politics: Storying Darwin
Notes1 Phillip Larkin, ‘Talking in Bed’ in Archie Burnett (ed), The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, London: Faber and Faber, 2012.2 Paul Carter, ‘Lines’, Postcolonial Studies 19(1), pp 94–96.3 Lynette Russell, ‘Darwin, a city on the edge’, Postcolonial Studies 19(1), pp 97–99.4 Russell, ‘Darwin’, pp 97–99.5 Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint : The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham and London: Duke University Pre…
Sharing the Wealth: By-roads and Hidden Treasures
A review of Paul Ashton, Chris Gibson and Ross Gibson (eds), By-Roads and Hidden Treasures: Mapping Cultural Assets in Regional Australia (UWA Publishing, 2015
Can Indigenous Land and Knowledge Solve the Twin Curse of Racism and Environmental Exploitation
Waging Paperfare: Subverting the Damage of Extractive Capitalism in Kakadu
Drawing on campaigns waged and administrative burdens managed by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation (GAC) in Kakadu National Park to manage the effects of existing uranium mining and further proposed mining, this article draws attention to some of the techniques and coalitions that GAC has created to manage its would‐be managers. It uses the case of monitoring the operations and particularly the rehabilitation of the Ranger Uranium mine and of…
Rabies response, One Health and more-than-human considerations in Indigenous communities in northern Australia
Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth
This essay introduces Visual Anthropology Review’s Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth,’ a special collection of essays on new media art, ceremony, animation, sensory immersion, and other hyperreal interventions by Aboriginal and First Nations artists, curators, and academics. This essay introduces the contributing Indigenous and non‐Indigenous authors who are working across this emergent field of cultural product…
Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords
Using forms of “improvisational realism,” the north Australian‐based Karrrabing Indigenous Film Collective mimics and plays with strategies of fabulation and faux realism to provoke audiences into new ways of understanding the multileveled worlds Indigenous families inhabit and think about. Successful as their filmography has been, Karrabing works nonetheless enter a culturally saturated visual contract that threatens to tip their productions bac…
Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention
Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly 'wild people' of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores naturalized policy: policy unplugged, gone live, ramifying in everyday life, to show that it is policies that are wild, not the people being targeted. Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head to reveal a policy-driven world dominated by short term political in…
Policy success for whom? A framework for analysis
Sociology (30 works) · Political science (24 works) · Indigenous (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · History (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works)