Mariko Smith

I undertake an interdisciplinary practice in academic research and the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector, specialising in visual sociology, contemporary art, museology, epistemology, and public history. I am currently the First Nations Assistant Curator at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Australia and an Honorary Associate in the School of Literature, Art & Media of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney; having previously been a Wingara Mura Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the University’s Sydney College of the Arts.

I completed my PhD at the University of Sydney’s Department of Sociology and Social Policy on the topic of the socio-cultural phenomenon of Aboriginal tied-bark canoe making for south-eastern Australian Aboriginal communities. My thesis involved visual-based methods, namely documentary photography and photo elicitation studies. I demonstrated that visual sociology has the capacity to promote empowering, culturally-appropriate research methodologies and methods which reflect the sensory-based, collaborative engagements in Indigenous ways of knowing.

I won a 2019 Rieger Paper/Project Award for my PhD’s contribution to sustaining and documenting cultural practices of Aboriginal communities through visual story telling of place-based learning. I use the camera to produce photographs which communicate powerful visual statements about strong communities and cultural resilience. As a Koori woman of the Yuin Aboriginal Nation on the New South Wales South Coast, who also has Anglo-Australian and Japanese heritage, I am passionate about including First Nations perspectives, experiences, and insight in the fields of visual sociology and visual methods.