Poppy de Souza (she/they) is an interdisciplinary researcher with a diverse portfolio career that leans across cultural, creative and critical research and practice. She is currently Bridging Hope Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC) at UNSW Sydney and is an adjunct member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University, Brisbane. Previously, Poppy was a Research Fellow/Research Associate with the School of Arts and Media UNSW, where she collaborated with A/Prof. Tanja Dreher on two Australian Research Council-funded projects: Listening In: improving recognition of community media to support democratic participation and wellbeing (FT140100515) and Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission (DP190101282).
Poppy’s scholarship is concerned with the politics of voice and listening—broadly defined—in conditions of inequality and injustice across a range of contexts with a focus on sites and practices of struggle, resistance, resilience, and transformation. Her work is informed by critical theory and cultural studies, critical media studies, and by feminist and intersectional approaches, and but is firmly interdisciplinary. More recently, Poppy’s focus has extended to an interest in exploring sonic, sensory, and embodied politics of listening and attunement; the relationship between sound, race, and (in)justice; and political listening (Bickford, 1996) in response to mediated accounts of state-sanctioned violence, settler-colonial harm, and the slow violence of offshore detention. They have developed concepts and practices of slow listening, sonic intimacy, and dwelling in discomfort as part of this and is finding ways to think and live with/in them.
Poppy completed her doctoral degree through the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne—at the time, a centre at the leading edge of community-engaged and social justice oriented critical praxis. Her doctoral thesis Beyond Voice Poverty: New economies of voice and the frontiers of speech, listening and recognition developed new theoretical approaches and critical frames to account for the shifting structures of power that condition any claim to ‘speak up’ or ‘be heard’ or ‘give account’ and has oriented the direction and focus of all her subsequent work, including a critical interest in borderscapes, boundaries, frontiers and thresholds.
Through her postdoctoral fellowship, Poppy will develop, co-design and test a suite of community-engaged listening interventions focused on themes of listening, breath and breathlessness in the wake of pandemic grief and chronic debilitation through the orienting concept of Holding Breath.
Poppy is also working on a co-authored book project, led by 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 borderscapes in the context of settler-colonial Australia.
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Poppy has used participatory video in community settings and collaborative video-based methodologies in research (Process Video with people living with chronic pain conditions); has conducted collections policy analysis and program evaluation; interviewed community stakeholders and project partners across the arts and cultural sector; and has teaching experience at postgraduate level. Their Masters thesis examined the role of arts-based and creative interventions in contributing to peace building, capacity building and resilience in post-conflict communities internationally.
Before embarking on her PhD, Poppy worked in Canberra with archival and cultural institutions as a collections-based curator, researcher and writer: first, as Archival Curator at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) on Australian Screen (ASO) – a curated digital resource for accessing Australia’s moving image heritage online; and subsequently as an Educational Writer with The Learning Federation (TLF), producing written content for the National Digital Learning Resources Network about photographic, printed and moving image materials selected from several national collections.
Poppy has also facilitated digital storytelling workshops in community-based arts settings on and off since 2008, collaborating with diverse communities (refugee youth, culturally diverse migrants, Koori young people, and people impacted by the justice and mental health ‘care’ system) to co-create multimedia stories about their histories, identities and cultures. This cultural work— with/in archives, and with/in communities—continues to inform and inspire her approach to collaboration, community engagement, and research; and underpins an ongoing interest in voices from the ‘margins’ and struggles to be heard.
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Poppy holds a BA (Fine Arts and English Literature), Sydney University; a Master of Arts and Cultural Management (Moving Image), Melbourne University; and an interdisciplinary PhD, Melbourne University.
Poppy is of Anglo and Eurasian (Serani) migrant-settler heritage, with maternal roots in maritime Southeast Asia and the the Straits of Malacca, and Penang, Malaysia, where her mother is from. Poppy was born on Yorta Yorta country (Shepparton), and lives and works on the lands of the Jagara/Yuggera people in Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia.