Associate Professor Adam Fish
Scientia Fellow (Level D)
Arts, Design & Architecture (ADA)
School of the Arts and Media
Adam Fish is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts and the Media, at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. Dr. Fish employs ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods to examine the social, political, and ecological impacts of new technologies.
He has authored several books including: Oceaning: Governing Marine Life with Drones (Duke University Press 2024), about the consequences of sensing technologies becoming actors in ecosystems; Hacker States (MIT 2020, with Luca Follis, Sussex University, UK), about how state hacking impacts democracy; Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), an ethnography of the politics of internet and television convergence in Hollywood and Silicon Valley; and After the Internet (Polity 2017, with Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA), which reimagines the internet from the perspective of activists on the margins of political power. After the Internet was translated into Spanish in 2021. The book Remote Control: How Drones Remake the Planet, written with Michael Richardson (UNSW), is under peer-review.
His current project focuses on how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other First Nations communities are involved in renewable energy industries. Here is a short 2024 documentary from that work with Indigenous owners of renewable energy industry in Australia, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand featuring the Wujal Wujal community of North Queensland.
He has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012) and is from the Pacific Northwest of North America.
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Fish has been awarded several grants the most recent being:
Decolonising the Just Transition: Energy Epistemologies and Energy Justice in three Indigenous Communities, British Council, £296,856.65. 2025-2028. Co-Investigators: Benjamin Sovacool (Sussex), Andrew Curley (University of Arizona), Adam Fish (University of New South Wales), Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran (University of Melbourne), KF25\100545. This humanities and social science project aims to revolutionize Just Transitions practice and discourse by giving voice to those on the frontlines of the climate crisis, energy poverty, and renewable energy industrialization–Indigenous people. By examining “energy epistemologies” or how Indigenous people know and value energy and its relationships to justice, this project promotes a more inclusive and pluralist conception of Just Transition. Working with Indigenous communities, we will document energy epistemologies with the Diné, or the Navajo of the Southwest of Native North America, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji, in north Queensland, Australia, and the Mincéirs or Travellers of North Ireland. Collaborating with Indigenous scholars, communities, and renewable energy developers, this project will (1) link energy epistemologies to notions of energy justice, (2) influence policies by advancing Indigenous energy justice in policy debates, and in the process (3) contribute to the theory and practice of Indigenous energy justice and Just Transition.