Rate My Professor Monica Minnegal

Monica Minnegal is an Honorary Principal Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. Holding a PhD, she has been affiliated with the university since April 1997 and serves as Chair of Anthropology and Development Studies. Her research focuses on the articulation of social and ecological systems, particularly the processes that shape changes in how people perceive relationships with each other and the land. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Kubo, subsistence hunter-horticulturalists in the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea, exploring social change, agency, economic anthropology, reciprocity, and the effects of anticipating resource extraction projects like PNG LNG on local social and cultural ecologies. In recent years, her studies have also addressed professional fishing communities in Victoria, Australia, investigating risk, uncertainty, decision-making, sustainability, and community dynamics.

In long-term collaboration with Peter D. Dwyer, Monica Minnegal has authored key publications including the book Navigating the Future: An Ethnography of Change in Papua New Guinea (2017), which examines transformations among Kubo communities. Other significant works include Hunting in lowland, tropical rain forest: Towards a model of non-agricultural subsistence (1991), Deep identity, shallow time: sustaining a future in Victorian fishing communities (2003), Theorizing social change (2010), Managing risk, resisting management: Stability and diversity in a southern Australian fishing fleet (2008), The time is right: Waiting, reciprocity and sociality (2009), and more recent articles such as A Road, a Border, and Development in New Guinea (2023) and Imagining the city in remote Papua New Guinea (2024). Her research projects, including economic, political, and cultural brokers in remote Papua New Guinea, have advanced understanding in anthropology and socio-ecology. Minnegal has engaged broader audiences through contributions like the University of Melbourne podcast Seeing like an anthropologist.