The Ethnography Studio: A Book Talk with Timothy Neale

The Ethnography Studio invites you to a book talk with Timothy Neale (Deakin University) on Monday October 12th from 12-1:30pm at USC in Michelson Hall, Room 102. Neale will be presenting his new book “How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent” (Duke University Press, 2026). USC Professor of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis, Santina Contreras, will serve as a discussant. To join us, please RSVP using this Google Form by October 1st (lunch will be served). In preparation for our conversation, participants will read a section of Neale’s book in advance. We will send reading materials a week prior to the event. 

 

How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent

This past summer, wildfires again washed across southeast Australian landscapes, affecting over 500,000 hectares. Many of the forests that have carried these combustive tides are regrowth of native forests industrially cleared for mining and then recleared for timber. Many of the grasslands that were blackened with ash are littered with grasses and weedy grains intentionally refined and released by government agencies in the name of productivism. This is territory or "Country" that has been comprehensively reshaped by projects of resource control, reterritorialised by almost two centuries of settler colonial and postcolonial dispossession and resource extraction, nourished by a climate itself deranged by fossil capital endeavours of resource capture and exploitation. In these conditions, even La Niña patterns historically associated with quiet summers can underpin a landmark bushfire season. Meanwhile, another system of control now intervenes in these increasingly flammable terrains, telling us on emergency broadcasts that the fires are “out of control.” We are all told to watch and act. “The incident is escalating. Take action immediately to protect your life.” Between the warnings and health advisory messages about smoke pollution, media commentators suggest that we might be safer if only our multibillion-dollar technoscientific systems of control were better equipped. In this presentation, I will think with Landecker’s (2025) prompt to attend to modernity’s “aftermath,” considering how the impossible dreams of control persist both within and without the institutions of Australian fire management.

 

About the author

Timothy Neale is a pakeha (non-indigenous) anthropologist and STS scholar, originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, whose work addresses environmental hazards and disasters through the social life of their technical infrastructures. Timothy lives and works on the lands of Wurundjeri peoples in Naarm Melbourne, where he is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Deakin University, co-convenor of Deakin's Cultures of Technoscience (CoT) network, and Editor of the STS journal Science, Technology, & Human Values. He is the author of two monographs, Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017) and How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent (Duke University Press, 2026), and the editor (with Courtney Addison and Thao Phan) of An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

 

For any questions, please contact the Ethnography Studio at ethnographystudio@gmail.com