Linda Connor (anthropologist)

Connor graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours in Anthropology) in 1974 and a PhD in Anthropology in 1982. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.[1] From 2009-2018 she was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.[2] She served two years as President of the Australian Anthropological Society from 2009–2010 and Vice President of the National Tertiary Education Union Sydney University Branch[3] from 2018-21. She has held positions at the University of Newcastle, the Australian Research Council, University of California, and East-West Center, Hawai’i.

Connor has researched and published on religion and ritual,[4] medical anthropology,[5] development,[6] visual anthropology,[7] shamanism and healing,[8] and rural environmental change,[9] predominantly in Indonesia, India and Australia. Funding sources include the Australian Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Ford Foundation. In Indonesia, she studied transformations of development, economy and social life in Bali,[10] as well as processes of citizenship and decentralization in rural communities.[11] From 1978 to 1990 she collaborated with ethnographic filmmakers Patsy and Timothy Asch to produce a series of films and a film monograph based on the life and work of a Balinese healer, Jero Tapakan, and her village.[12][13][14][15] In North India in the mid-1990s, she investigated questions of displacement, identity, and cultural innovation, as part of a team studying healing in diasporic Tibetan communities.[16] Since 2002 she has worked on interdisciplinary projects focused on coal-affected localities, climate change and energy transitions in the Hunter Valley and North West New South Wales Australia.[17][18] She is currently undertaking ethnographic research on social legitimacy of renewable energy development in Upper Spencer Gulf, South Australia as part of an ARC funded cross-national team.[19]

Goodman, J., Connor, L., Ghosh, D., Morton, T. S., Marshall, J., Mueller, K., Menon, M., Kholi, K., Pearse, R. and Rosewarne, S. 2020. The End of the Coal Rush: A Turning Point for Global Energy and Climate Policy? Cambridge University Press.

Connor, L. 2016. Climate Change and Anthropos: Planet, People and Places. London: Routledge/Earthscan.

Marshall, J. and Connor, L. (eds.) 2016. Environmental Change and the World’s Futures: Ecologies, Ontologies and Mythologies. London: Routledge/Earthscan.

Connor, L. 2010. “Anthropogenic Climate Change and Cultural Crisis: An Anthropological Perspective.” Australian Journal of Political Economy 66:247-267.

Higginbotham, N., Albrecht, G. and Connor, L. 2001. Health Social Science: A Transdisciplinary and Complexity Perspective. Melbourne, Oxford University Press. 382pp.