Postill

Short biographical note

John Postill (PhD Anthropology, UCL) is a Senior Lecturer in Communication at RMIT University, in Melbourne. Formerly he was a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT and a Digital Anthropology Fellow at University College London (UCL). His publications include Localizing the Internet (2011), Media and Nation Building (2006) and the co-edited volume Theorising Media and Practice (2010, with Birgit Bräuchler). Currently he is writing a book titled The Rise of Nerd Politics (London: Pluto), and the co-edited volume Theorising Media and Conflict (with Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler). From 2018 he will be working on an anthropological history of modern media and communication provisionally titled The Cultural Effects of Media [Last updated 22 July 2017].

Long biographical note

I am an anthropologist (PhD, UCL) specialising in the study of media. I live in Melbourne (Australia) where I am a Senior Lecturer in Communication at RMIT University. Prior to this I was a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow (2013-2016) at RMIT. I am also a Fellow of the Digital Anthropology Programme at University College London (UCL).

Over the years I have worked in various fields (including academia, journalism, teaching and translating) and lived in Spain, Britain, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Malaysia, Romania, and now Australia. Previously I held research fellowships at Cambridge University, Bremen University and the Academy of Art and Design in Karlsruhe and taught at Sheffield Hallam University, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Staffordshire University and the National School of Political Science and Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest.

In 2010-2011 I spent a year as a Senior Fellow at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona where I investigated the uses of social media for activism and protest with Sarah Pink, especially in connection with the indignados (#15M) and Occupy movements.

My first book, Media and Nation Building, was published by Berghahn in 2006. This study explains how the Iban, an indigenous people of Borneo, have been an integral part of Malaysia’s nation-building project since independence in 1963. My second book, Localizing the Internet, based on fieldwork among Internet activists in Peninsular Malaysia, was published in 2011 (see review). I have also edited a volume with Birgit Bräuchler entitled Theorising Media and Practice (2010) and am currently writing a book titled The Rise of Nerd Politics (London: Pluto), and the co-edited volume Theorising Media and Conflict (with Philipp Budka and Birgit Bräuchler). From 2018 I will start working on an anthropological history of modern media and communication provisionally titled The Cultural Effects of Media.

Running through these different research projects is a keen interest in how we may explain the relationship between media and sociocultural change from both ethnographic and historical perspectives. Throughout my career I have studied media not in isolation, but as complex and shifting configurations of people, technologies, practices and actions that can only be understood in their specific historical, geographical and cultural contexts. I am sceptical, therefore, of accounts written in the present continuous where things are perpetually chang-ing but never actually change.

I am the editor, with Mark A. Peterson, of  Berghahn’s Anthropology of Media Series, the convenor of the EASA Media Anthropology Network and a member of the editorial board of Anthropology Today.

The aim of this blog is to put out in the public domain materials that I am already working with as part of my research activity under the broad theme of media anthropology. The idea is to keep colleagues, students and others informed of my work as well as to keep an online notebook for my own personal use, e.g. as an easy way of tracking down materials that may otherwise have remained hidden in my personal records.

I can be reached at jrpostill [atr] gmail [dort] com.

John Postill
Jakarta, 6 May 2015
Melbourne, 22 July 2017

(Header illustration: Público.es)

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