Sarah Holcombe

Dr Sarah Holcombe "is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Indigenous Studies.

"As a social anthropologist she has almost twenty years research experience in remote and very remote areas of the Northern Territory, Western Australia and western Queensland. This research has been a balance of applied and academic anthropology with eight of these years spent working as a regional anthropologist for, respectively, the Central and Northern Land Councils. Sarah’s PhD research in anthropology was undertaken in the Central Australian Luritja community of Mt Liebig (Amunturrngu), on the processes by which this settlement evolved into an Aboriginal community.

"Before joining the NCIS, Sarah was a Research Fellow at the ANU Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research where she spent five and a half years. Over this period she worked on three major projects, two of which were ARC linkage projects. The first was a linkage between CAEPR and Rio Tinto (Indigenous community Organisations and mining: Partnering Sustainable Regional Development); the second was with CAEPR and Reconciliation Australia (Indigenous Community Governance: Understanding, building and sustaining effective governance in rural, urban and remote Indigenous communities). The latter project is ongoing with support from the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre's Sustainable Desert Settlements research program. The final project Sarah was engaged in at CAEPR was as Social Science Coordinator for the DKCRC.

"Research interests include the engagement of Aboriginal organisations, such as native title representative bodies and small corporations, with development issues such as mining; Aboriginal Governance, such as those issues surrounding regionalisation and local autonomy; Land tenure systems and decision making processes; Succession processes and re-territorialisation; The anthropology of the State; The dynamics of the "inter-cultural" and social change; collaborative research methodologies and the management of Indigenous knowledge and intellectual property in research."