Sheffield Hallam University

Faculty Member, C3RI

About

I am an anthropologist specialising in the study of media. Currently I am Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University and a Fellow of the Digital Anthropology Programme, University College London (UCL). In May 2009 I taught media anthropology as a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. Previously I have held research fellowships at Bremen University, the Academy of Art and Design in Karlsruhe and Cambridge University, and taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Staffordshire University and the National School of Political Science and Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest. I have lived and worked in Spain (where I was raised), Britain, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Malaysia and Romania.

My working life started in Jakarta as a trainee journalist with the Indonesian weekly Majalah Tempo and stringer with the Spanish newsagency EFE. This early experience led to a lasting interest both in Southeast Asia and in media issues that crystallised in a PhD in anthropology with a Southeast Asian media focus (UCL, 2000), reworked and published in 2006 as Media and Nation Building. This study draws on historical and ethnographic research to explain how the Iban, an indigenous people of Borneo, have been an integral part of Malaysia’s nation-building project since independence in 1963 – an ongoing project that relies on a range of state and commercial media.

I have recently completed my second ethnography, Localizing the Internet, based on fieldwork among Internet activists in Peninsular Malaysia, and co-edited a volume with Birgit Bräuchler entitled Theorising Media and Practice (in press), both with Berghahn. I am currently developing two new research projects: a comparative ethnographic study of mobile media practices in poor countries and a historical anthropology of media (see Postill 2009). I am a co-founder and former coordinator of the EASA Media Anthropology Network and a member of the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

Sheffield, 3 October 2009

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Homepage: http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/