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Linda Connor - Research
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Since undertaking ethnographic research for her PhD in rural Bali, Indonesia, Linda has had a sustained interest in processes of sociocultural transformation from the “local” perspective, and in understanding how the meanings and practices of local groups at small-scale affect, and are affected by, larger-scale processes.
Linda has been a research
associate of the ARC Key Centre for Asian Pacific Social Transformation
Studies (CAPSTRANS), a research centre based jointly at the University of
Wollongong and the University of Newcastle, since 1999. Two recent books of relevance to
these research interests are Staying Local in the Global Village: Bali in
the Twentieth Century (edited with Raechelle Rubinstein, University of
Hawaii Press 1999) and Healing Powers and Modernity: Shamanism, Science
and Traditional Medicine in Asian Societies (edited with Geoffrey
Samuel, Bergin and Garvey 2001).
Linda is also an active researcher in the
application of ethnographic and qualitative approaches to the study of
health and healing, as well as social transformation in Australian
communities. The book Health Social Science: A Transdisciplinary and
Complexity Perspective (Oxford University Press 2001), with Nick Higginbotham and
Glenn Albrecht, outlines the transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches
to teaching and research that she has increasingly adopted in recent years.
Current Research Projects
-
Several interlinked projects or
proposed projects, in the area of health, ecosystems and social
transformation focuses on rural and regional communities’ engagement with
large-scale industrial development:
- A qualitative study of perception of environmental change and experiences of human distress in the Upper Hunter region of NSW
- Development of an Environmental Distress Scale
- Longitudinal research on globalisation, citizenship and “risk society” in contemporary Bali, Indonesia, from an anthropological perspective.
- Social and cultural analysis of postnatal depression, couples, parenting and community support.