Dr Daniel May

Completed associate student
About
Dr Daniel May

Dr Daniel May’s project investigated the political and cultural influence of the understanding of Indigenous fire in settler societies, with a particular focus on 20th and 21st century Australia and the United States. Daniel investigated how non-Indigenous understandings of Indigenous fire have not been confined to the academy as anthropological curiosities, but have historically been political incendiaries that competing interest groups have attempted to draw upon, appropriate or deny.

In 2018, Daniel was awarded the Endeavour Research Fellowship through the Australian National University and visited the United States to work alongside leading geographer and expert on Native American and Aboriginal Australian fire management practices, Professor Don Hankins at California State University. As part of the trip, Daniel took part in prescribed burns, researched historical fire management, and gathering information on how the cultural burning movement in the US compares to Australia.

"I think there's similarities in how non-Indigenous people in both countries have come to understand Indigenous burning,” Daniel says. “General community awareness in some populated states is growing massively in Australia.”

Daniel has authored the chapter ‘Shallow fire literacy hinders robust fire policy: Black Saturday and prescribed burning debates’ in the book Disasters in Australia and New Zealand: Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). The chapter draws on his PhD research and discusses the relationship between policy, writing and prescribed burning. Daniel has also written a feature article for Inside Story and Fire Australia.

Daniel is currently employed as a research associate at the Parliamentary Library in the Science, Technology, Environment and Resources section.

Student project

This project is investigating the political and cultural influence of the understanding of Indigenous fire in settler societies, with a particular focus on 20th and 21st century Australia and the United States. It argues that non-Indigenous understandings of Indigenous fire have not been confined to the academy as anthropological curiosities, but have historically been political incendiaries that competing interest groups have attempted to draw upon, appropriate or deny.
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