Rate My Professor Max Harwood

Dr Max Harwood is a sessional lecturer, unit convenor, and adjunct fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at Macquarie University in September 2019, with the thesis 'Man Made: Masculinity & Military Service in Istanbul & Tel Aviv'. This work, supervised by Professor Christopher Houston, drew on honours and doctoral fieldwork conducted in Istanbul, Tel Aviv, and Ottawa between 2011 and 2019. Harwood's professional background includes roles as an applied visual anthropologist, remote community fieldworker, and ethnographic film consultant in Australian native title, and he has been a partnered consultant with the Indigenous Desert Alliance in Perth since 2018. Currently, he also serves as a Senior Associate in the NSW Premier's Department Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program since May 2021.

Harwood's research focuses on ethnographic filmmaking; Turkish and Israeli nationalism and militarism; conscription and state-crafted masculinity; Australian white nationalism and ideology; white nationalist phenomenology and digital subcultures; and the globalised phenomenon of Replacement Theory violent extremists. Key publications include the article 'Living death: imagined history and the Tarrant Manifesto' in Emotions: History, Culture, Society (2021), the chapter 'Transcendental terror: Zen self-transformation through white supremacist atrocity, from Nazi Germany to Utøya and Christchurch' in Self-alteration: How People Change Themselves across Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2023), and ethnographic films 'We Don't Stay in Camps' (2019, co-directed with Yahya Al-Abdullah) and 'Water' (2016). He is preparing 'Living Death: The phenomenology of Replacement Theory violent extremism' for 2025. Harwood founded and co-directs the Macquarie University International Ethnographic Film Festival (MUIEFF), has run annual two-week ethnographic filmmaking workshops for anthropology students since 2017, and supervises postgraduate research. He has delivered invited talks such as 'The Seduction of Extremes: field notes on Australian men and the appeal of white nationalism' (2023) and 'Decoding the Tarrant Manifesto' (2022), participated in panels on online violent extremism, and leads projects including 'From Reed to Ney: Documenting Musical Craftsmanship and Pedagogy in Turkey' (2024-2025). Appointed Honorary Adjunct Fellow in January 2021, Harwood contributes significantly to anthropological scholarship through visual ethnography and extremism studies.