Dr Poppy de Souza

Dr Poppy de Souza (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher with a diverse portfolio career that leans across cultural, creative and critical research and practice. With a background in critical media and cultural studies, visual culture research and community arts & cultural development, both her practice and research explores the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of 'voice' and 'listening' in conditions of inequality and injustice with a focus on sites and practices of resistance and transformation.  More recently, she has examined the relationship between sound, listening and racial (in)justice; sonic and sensory methodologies; acoustic violence and the 'white ear'; the conditions of listening in settler colonial contexts; and community-led media practices.  

Poppy's current program of research is focused on a range of projects and collaborations on the politics of listening across thresholds of experience, often working from/with lived experience.  This includes: a co-creative project exploring creative possibilities for collective listening, witnessing, care and connection in the wake of pandemic grief (and beyond) framed around the orienting concept of Holding Breath; a book project with Dr. Emma Russell (La Trobe), provisionally titled Sensing the Carceral State, which builds on their joint work, including sensory approaches to analysing the violence of (and resistance to) prisons, policing, and borders in the context of settler-colonial Australia; a new art-research collaboration Mapping Migratory Meeals at the Ends of the World (MMMEOW!) which explores the relationships between transnational food cultures, migration and the politics of listening (with S Loo, UNSW, M Badham, RMIT, and S Suliman, Griffith).  Poppy is a co-Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project  Voice and Belonging: Pathways to inclusion for new migrant communities through media engagement (led by Griffith University, DP240103048) and currently Bridging Hope Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC).

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A significant gift from the Bridging Hope Charity Foundation (BHCF) has supported the first philanthropy funded Research Fellow position at the UNSW Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC). This position will play a pivotal role in developing innovative tools and programs to help support those dealing with mental health issues while broadening the Centre’s reach into diverse communities across Australia and internationally. BARC will join BHCF’s International Art Therapy Alliance, leveraging on their extensive networks with cultural organisations within China, such as The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Bridging Hope Charity Foundation is committed to connecting mental health with the arts to make a culturally vibrant and healthy society..