In this profile we speak with Professor Tess Lea, who has recently joined Macquarie University as Dean of the School of Social Sciences, about her career activating and researching the limits and possibilities of social policy under continuing settler occupation in Australia.
- What is your background and what brought you to Macquarie?
- How did you originally become interested in your area of research, and what keeps you interested in it?
- Tell us a bit about your current research and what makes it so important?
- What is something you have recently accomplished?
- What do you need to do your best work?
- What is the most impressive/useful/advanced piece of equipment you use in your work?
- What do people always ask you when they find out what you do for a living?
- What is your definition of success?
- A personal quality you value in others?
- A moment you felt proud?
- What would people be surprised to know about you or your work?
- What is on your agenda for 2023?
I am a policy anthropologist who studies settler colonial administrative power and different infrastructures for living (housing, schooling, public health, creative industries, energy, logistics). I come to Macquarie University fresh from heading Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, following a decade at the University of Sydney. I have also been a research centre director, a division head in the Northern Territory Department of Education, Employment and Training, a Canberra-based policy officer, and a ministerial advisor in health and community services. While I loved my work at UBC, what Macquarie, and specifically, the School of Social Sciences, is setting out to achieve inspired a return across the Pacific. The configuration of Anthropology, Sociology, Geography and Planning, and Politics and International Relations make sense to me at a personal level – my work as an anthropologist probes the spatial, temporal, political, organisational, and global intersections of settler colonial social policy unfurlings. I am deeply attracted to working for institutions which are true to their stated mission and purpose. Macquarie seems the perfect blend of being agile, less moribund and tradition-bound, more questing and engaged, with teaching and connecting to communities at its core.
I began my career in the federal health bureaucracy in Canberra, working on tobacco and cannabis policy before returning to my birthplace, Darwin, to work in Territory Health Services. I was swept up by the institutional urgency to make a difference in Indigenous health, given stark disparities in illness and death rates. Intelligent, well-educated and earnest professionals worked long hours to ‘close the gap’. But the more I learned, the more I felt that bureaucratic capture of imaginable solutions constrained people, and that this constraint was not necessarily a top-down imposition but something people taught each other. It was, to decontextualise a term from Roland Barthes, a ‘spectacular alliance of so much nobility and so much futility’. Understanding how this alliance was institutionally and professionally reproduced became the subject of my PhD. I am still interested in thinking within and about paradoxical-seeming issues, and most pressingly now, how we as researchers, teachers, advocates and mentors, can assist the massive societal transitions needed to survive and thrive amid what the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres now calls the time of global boiling.
My most recent book, Wild Policy, asked some deceptively simple questions. Is it possible to have good social policy under continuing settler occupation? Why is it almost always the case that any benefits from social policy must be arm-wrestled into being? Why are achievements so difficult to sustain? The answers to these questions took years of inquiry and a book, the short version of which is “the system isn’t broke: it was built this way.” That is, any needs being met by diverse social policies and program efforts are to the periphery of, or the collateral side show of, a prior militarised extractivist techno-industrial complex (which our life worlds are annexed to). My next research agenda asks a related but different question. How can the inconvenience of non-fossil fuel dependent life worlds become something we truly desire?
While I was in Canada, my daughter-in-law sent me what looked like a shredded rag, together with two pieces of new fabric. She requested I use the torn model to recreate her favourite (worn out) shorts. Zips, velcro tabs, tags and ties were involved…so difficult. But with the help of an un-picker and some curly words, I posted back two new me-made pairs and triumphantly binned the original! Some other work can be seen here.
The stimulation and imperatives of collaborations across different cultures, dog walks, morning coffee, access to probing ideas and prior wisdom, water to drink and to swim in, serendipitous encounters with others doing exciting things, and a sense that the questions I am pursuing are not egotistical but even so, somehow stick to me. I also know from my different work experiences that I perform best when I admire what the organisation is doing. Being part of a younger, responsive, more engaged University, and joining a leadership team that is cohering around improving the University, who and what it stands for – I am keen for that.
My laptop, a camera device and probably the internet. Back in the olden days, when I was a student, we stood for hours with bags of coins to photocopy journal articles and book chapters, after searching the musty stacks to locate hopefully relevant material, using scissors and sticky tape as key editing tools for drafts before the final type-up! Of course, the new capacities of data interrogation and visualisation are immensely powerful too, but the big leap was putting the power of global searches into something we can carry in our hands, even though, when I am in the field, a notepad and retractor pencil are the most vital tech of all.
What do you teach? (If I say I am an academic). Or do you work with bones? (If I say I am an anthropologist).
It truly depends on the context. I am trying to make it so that I confront life’s obstacles and challenges with decency and open-heartedness, and to age well without preventable mobility impairment or cognition atrophy. Success might also be reckoned in terms of slaying Kafka-esque policy thickets to simply register my car. On an everyday level, for me it can mean turning up when I have said I will, being attentive, and bringing my best self to commitments and undertakings. So much of what should be counted as success is relational, collaborative and about the process rather than the pinnacle.
It is not singular but plural. I treasure people who are witty, thoughtful, unpretentious, open-hearted, observant, trustworthy and truthful.
I was proud to have been blanketed by the Syilx Okanagan in a healing ceremony in Canada, following some big life issues I had experienced. Pride is not quite the right word. I felt honoured, and tearful, as hurts pooled at my feet amid drumbeats, song chants and sage bush smoke. Without romanticising, it somehow made the challenge of walking my ethics more consistently and intentionally clearer as a lifepath.
I think people might be surprised to know that I like sewing and how seriously I take administration issues. I believe we are privileged to be academics, that we are custodians of public money and public trust. Students give us their ambitions and hopes to help guide and shape; people, other beings and places entrust us with research information; and we need to bring our best selves to these responsibilities. Bringing our best selves is also about finding ways to have joy and to see meaning in what we do. It is not so much about balancing work and life - passionate scholars may often find this is a nonsensical binary - but connecting with things that replenish the soul because they are true. Much of our work as university members connects with different aspects of massive global and local transitions and challenges, and demands something of us in response: analysis, compassion, solutions, tactics, resources, cynicism, hope, courage, critique, compromise and so forth. Replenishment can be very individual, but it can also be collegial. That is what I am interested in.
I would like to be in a situation where people are glad that I joined them, the School is humming with vibrancy, and retains its reputation as an area which enables individual and collective capacities to flourish. We have the opportunity to relaunch the Bachelor of Social Science so that it excites more students and elevates their confidence and skills for diverse futures, so helping with this relaunch is an immediate priority. More personally, I want to bring my stroke rate down for a given distance of open water swimming.