Ute Eickelkamp

University of Technology Sydney

Ute Eickelkamp is a social anthropologist affiliated with the School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney.  She grew up in Germany former centre of heavy industries, the Ruhr, and has lived in Australia for thirty years, where she has conducted collaborative research projects with First Nations artists, educators, cultural philosophers and children. She held positions as Stipend Recipient at the German Mining Museum-Bochum, as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, and as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (University of Sydney)– while observing the eventful transformation of her childhood world of smokestacks and open sewers into a green Metropolis. Her ethnographic research focuses on emergent images of nature in the face of climate change and ontological duress, in contexts of Indigenous survivance and postindustrial precarity in Central Australia and Germany respectively. She writes about water, slag heaps, the underground, gardens, art, imagination, care and temporality.