Dr Timothy Heffernan

I am an anthropologist living and working on Gadigal Country. I work with communities in Australia and Europe affected by event-based hardship, such as environmental disasters and political and economic crises. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork, my research examines the connection between a community's experience of crisis or disaster and the ways people set about building recovery pathways, noting this is never straightforward.

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the UNSW School of Built Environment and a visiting researcher (2022-2024) at the ANU School of Psychology and Medicine. My research has been funded by the Australian and NSW Governments and UACES: University Association for Contemporary European Studies.

Understanding crisis experience:

My current book project, based on my Ph.D. research, is an ethnographic study of the lived experience of crisis and recovery in Iceland in the decade following the 2008 global financial crisis. With reference to contemporary kinship studies, affect studies and the anthropology of politics and social movements, the book examines Icelanders' efforts to recast community belonging after the government "failed" to avoid and adequately address economic crisis. The books looks to the importance of kinship bonds and affective resilience-building strategies after crisis as forms of bridging and bonding capital.

Interrogating Recovery and resilience:

My research also looks at the framing and utility of language as its relates to event-based hardship, particularly "crisis", "recovery" and "resilience". My research asks "How are these terms used", "How are they defined?" by elites and by communities themselves, and "What happens," socio-culturally, when a community labels themselves (or is labeled by others) as resilient?

My forthcoming co-edited volume is The anthropology of ambiguity: Theory, praxis and critique (Manchester UP)