Associate Professor Tess Lea

Director, School for Social and Policy Research

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Detailed Biography

I was born and educated in Darwin. Following high school, I took six months hitchhiking through the back blocks of Canada and the US, taking in gun shows in Montana and the religious austerity of Salt Lake City in Utah. After I returned home, a mind numbing stint as a junior salaries clerk in Transport and Works punching holes and stamping forms convinced me to go to the Australian National University to earn a degree in Women’s Studies and Anthropology.

Pregnant with my first child, Daniel, during my honours year meant I needed a ‘real job’ as opposed to short-term research assistant positions on anthropological projects in outback NSW and odd jobs with advocacy organisations such as the Consumer’s Health Forum. So I sat exams and joined the federal public service, where I underwent a year’s training, learning how to be a professional bureaucrat and policy officer. After ten years of living in Canberra, I had my second child (the beautiful Elise) and worked as a senior member of the Tobacco and Cannabis policy section of the Drugs of Dependence Division in Commonwealth health. I not only learnt about the power of the tobacco industry, but also the normative power of much public health discourse.

Returning to Darwin in 1995, I again worked in health, briefly in Health Promotion as an evaluation and research coordinator and then as an executive officer to the CEO. One year into that, I embarked on a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, determined to understand what it was about health work in the Northern Territory that made it so heroic yet so orthodox and constricting. I spent two years shadowing public health and policy folk as a participant observer, an ethnography I interrupted in 1999, post fieldwork, to conduct a review of Indigenous education with the late Bob Collins. This review was an exhausting yet life changing experience, showing me that if things were bad in health, they were far worse in education (see Collins and Lea 1999).

Toward the end of my PhD, and in a somewhat nihilistic mood about the capacity of bureaucrats and government professionals to change anything given their voluntary and imposed forms of conceptual straight-jacketing (see Lea 2008b), I leapt at the chance of assisting the new Labor Government in the Northern Territory. Elected for its inaugural period in government, after nearly three decades of continuous conservative party rule, it seemed like an opportunity to influence things at the centre, rather than the periphery. As a Ministerial Advisor to the Minister for Health and Community Services, I returned to drugs (so to speak), helping to usher in the Northern Territory’s inaugural tobacco legislation in between breaks to complete and submit my PhD. Exactly one year later, in 2002, I was asked to assist Professor Ken McKinnon in his overhaul of the former Northern Territory University. This in turn led to a request to create scope for applied social research, realised in the form of the School for Social and Policy Research (SSPR), which I established in late 2003, as part of the new Institute of Advanced Studies at Charles Darwin University,

I believe it is important to bring theoretical insights to bear on our practical research agendas and have struggled to create a space where people can both think and do. When not upholding applied research projects, advocating for the School’s wider interests and writing funding submissions, I think and write about the anthropology of policy and development.

I am currently working on an ethnographic study of Indigenous housing. One day I would also like to write about all I have learnt about school-based education and the systems of institutional expectation that contribute to such endemic failure rates in our region, but I am leaving that for another time.

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Research Interests

Anthropology of audit and policy
Development theory and the will to improve
Australian society and culture
Institutional ethnography
The tactics of post-colonial power and settler liberal governance
The co-dependencies between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds