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Sally Butler is a Reader in Art History.

Sally Butler took up the position as lecturer in Art History at the University of Queensland in 2004 after a period as Art History lecturer at the Australian National Univeristy in Canberra. Visual arts industry experience includes working for the Queensland Art Gallery and a number of freelance curating projects, and several years as Associate Editor of Australian Art Collector magazine and one of the edtiors for the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art. Sally regularly writes for Australian visual arts magazines, maintaining a particular interest in contemporary Australian art, Australian indigenous art and new media art.

Research

Her research interests include cross-cultural critical theory, Australian Indigenous art, Australian contemporary art, photography and new media art. Current research includes: Indigenous art from Far North Queensland, Virtual Reality theory and photography, contemporary Queensland photography, and art and cultural tourism.

I'm a linguistic anthropologist who studies how communicative events in Indonesia figure in the building and maintenance of social relationships and common knowledge among Indonesians. During my PhD and post-PhD early years my research often involved long periods of fieldwork in Indonesia. As research funding and sabbatical have become scarce, I have increasingly turned to publically available data, such as Indonesian films, newspapers, social media and so on. I have published extensively on my research, including Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2015), Global Leadership Talk: Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2020); Reimagining Rapport (Oxford University Press, 2021); Rapport and the discursive co-construction of social relations in fieldwork settings (Mouton De Gruyter, 2019); and Contact Talk: The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries (with Deborah Cole and Howard Manns, Routledge, 2020).

I am a cultural anthropologist with expertise in gender, racism, medical anthropology, and critical global health. I have conducted extensive ethnographic research in Indonesia on health care, gendered violence, education, and racial stigma. The main focus of my research is Papua/West Papua, where my work has tried to document and understand evolving forms of racism and violence, including how people resist and create change. Over the past 15 years I have worked with local Papuan and international research teams on studies of violence, older women's life stories, HIV/AIDS, hospital birth, and health vulnerabilities. My research aims to develop knowledge of the nuances and complexities of conditions and experiences in West Papua, while also working with Papuan scholars and community members to address pressing health and social problems.

I recently completed a study with Els Tieneke Rieke Katmo and Meki Wetipo on how urban Papuans today understand and experience pregnancy and childbirth and how hospital childbirth may be creating more distrust in the health system rather than improving maternal health (2023, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology), published as part of a special issue on 'Reproducing Life in Conditions of Abandonment in Oceania', edited with Sandra Widmer. Another recent multi-sited study looks at vulnerabilities in Indonesia with Professor Lyn Parker (University of Western Australia) and others from the UK and Indonesia. The study used ethnography and surveys to develop a deeper, contextual understanding of who is vulnerable, how and why, and thus shed light on the concept of vulnerability and what it means. Forthcoming publications look at education in Indonesia's frontier economy, older women’s narratives of economic agency and survivance (co-authored with Yohana Baransano), and the challenges faced by newlyweds.

I am expanding my research with older Papuan women on their experiences of the late Dutch and early Indonesian era and their narratives of survivance to include Papuan women from different cultural backgrounds and urban/rural locations. Papuan women's stories and historical experiences are largely missing from public view but are needed to understand their important contributions to society and their roles in creating the future. I am also expanding my research on obstetrics and c-sections to understand the cultures of maternity care in Indonesia, both in terms of local cultural needs and preferences, and in relation to the cultures of medicine and obstetrics that exist in hospitals and birth centres. This will help us to understand how to create respectful maternity care in different cultural contexts, including in Australia. Related to this, I recently completed an action research project funded by the Australia Indonesia Institute (with Els Katmo) on co-designing cultural approaches to sexual and reproductive health, including HIV prevention, in West Papua.

Some recent publications that illustrate key themes of my research:

Jenny Munro, Els Tieneke Rieke Katmo & Meki Wetipo (2022) Hospital Births and Frontier Obstetrics in Urban West Papua, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 23:4-5, 388-406, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2022.211512

Jenny Munro & Yohana Baransano (2023), From saving to survivance: Rethinking Indigenous Papuan women's vulnerabilities in Jayapura, Indonesia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12367

Jenny Munro, Lyn Parker, and Yohana Baransano. "There's Money but No Work": Diploma Disruptions in Urban Papua. The Contemporary Pacific 33, no. 2 (2021): 364-384.

Jenny Munro (2020) Global HIV Interventions and Technocratic Racism in a West Papuan NGO, Medical Anthropology, 39:8, 704-719, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2020.1739036

Jenny Munro. (2020), ‘Saving our people’: health workers, medical citizenship, and vernacular sovereignties in West Papua. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26: 633-651. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13318

I am an experienced PhD supervisor in medical anthropology and gender studies. I am particularly interested in working with candidates who wish to study gender, health, or racism in (or in relation to) West Papua using anthropological, ethnographic and qualitative approaches. Research projects I have supervised include:

• Intersectionality in Australian domestic violence services
• Changing masculinities in Uzbekistan
• Gender and education in Enga province, Papua New Guinea
• Australian spiritual healing
• Household meat practices in Indonesia and Australia
• Women’s empowerment and energy in South Africa
• Health of Pacific seasonal workers in Queensland Australia
• Carers’ experiences with medicinal cannabis
• Apitherapy in Australia

I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses on medical anthropology (ANTH2250/7250) and Pacific anthropology (ANTH2020). I also supervise Honours students and co-coordinate HHSS6002 (Honours coursework).

Dr. Manu P. Sobti is a landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South with research specialisations in South Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Within the gamut of the Global, the Islamic, and the Non-Western, his continuing work examines borderland transgressions and their intertwinement with human mobilities, indigeneities, and the narratives of passage across these liminal sites. From his perspective, ‘land-centered’ and ‘deep’ place histories replete with human actors serve as critical and de-colonizing processes that negate the top-down master-narratives wherein borders and boundaries simplistically delineate nation states and their scalar range of internal geographies. He was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA (2006-16). He has a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT (Ahmedabad - INDIA), an SMarchS. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge - USA), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta - USA).

As a recognized scholar and innovative educator, Sobti served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15). This foreign study program worked intensively with local architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chandigarh, allowing students and faculty to interact actively, often within the gamut of the same project. He also set up a similar, research-focused program in Uzbekistan, engaging advanced undergraduate and graduate students to undertake field research at sites, archives and cultural landscapes. In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), creating opportunities for student research in diverse areas of architectural and urban history and in multiple global settings. He served as the Chair of SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies.

Sobti's research has been supported by multiple funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation of the Arts (USA), the Architectural Association (UK), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (USA), the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (UZBEKISTAN), the US Department of State Fulbright Foundation (USA), the Aga Khan Foundation (SWITZERLAND), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the Centre for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), the Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Stanford University (USA), in addition to city governments in New Delhi/Chandigarh/Ahmedabad (INDIA), Samarqand/Bukhara (UZBEKISTAN), Erzurum (TURKEY) and New Orleans (USA). He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar and received 7 Research Fellowships at important institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP (Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites) International Committee, responsible for debate and stewardship on contentious cultural heritage issues globally.