Dr Darlene McNaughton
Associate Professor/Senior Research Fellow - Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Email: dmcnaug3@une.edu.au
Biography
Dr Darlene McNaughton is a social anthropologist whose career has focused on identifying and critically examining forms of hegemony (the dominance of a shared system of ideas, values, and ethics) both in discourse and practice. Most notably, her work has focused on the histories and life experiences of subaltern groups and their interactions with State actors. Dr McNaughton’s discipline-specific research methodology (ethnography) involves spending extended periods of time (often years) living and working with research collaborators. She has undertaken a number of collaborative, community driven research programs in India (1999-2001), North Queensland (2007-2010) Vietnam (2009-2010) and Cape York Peninsula (QLD) (2002-present).
In her work as an anthropologist of public health and medicine, her research takes a critical lens to the often taken for granted, hegemonic assumptions that underwrite contemporary health policy and practice, both past and present. Dr McNaughton is known nationally and internationally for her work in three key arenas: 1) critical, anthropological analyses of various ‘urgent' public health and biomedical issues (obesity, type two diabetes, Indigenous foodways, dengue fever) and the unintended consequences of prevailing assumptions and approaches; 2) the links between concepts of Country, cultural heritage, health, and wellbeing; and 3) her framework for designing ethical community engagement and developments in qualitative research methods. She has published extensively on these topics (h-index 19), in international peer reviewed journals as well as several edited volumes with major publishing houses, including Bell, McNaughton and Salmon (2011) Alcohol, Tobacco and Obesity: Morality, Mortality and the New Public Health. London: Routledge.
Dr McNaughton currently holds a research position at UNE, focusing on Indigenous history, gender and foodways in Cape York Peninsula (QLD) as part of the Indigenous Foodways in Colonial Cape York Peninsula project, funded by the Australian Research Council (LP170100050), the Western Cape Communities Trust), the Queensland Museums Network (Brisbane), the Chuulangun Aboriginal Corporation, and the Napranum Aboriginal Shire Council (NASC).
