Wild Policy

Tess Lea is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia (2008) and Darwin (2014).

Interlude I 1. Can there be good policy? Interlude II 2. Policy Specters Interlude III 3. Moorings, mining, and minutes Interlude IV 4. Almost a miracle Interlude V 5. Militarized social policy Interlude VI 6. Wild Policy Manifesto

"By naming the arbitrary, anarchic nature of policy, Tess Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head. The sheer effectiveness of the writing speaks to her ethnographic skill in delineating bureaucratic purpose: the result is a stunning re-visioning whose implications will reach far beyond what stimulated it."-Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge "Wild Policy offers an extraordinary contribution to the anthropology of policy, settler colonialism, and infrastructural inequality. Tess Lea's profound accomplishment rests on her sharp, ethnographically innovative account of policy as a milieu, its attention to the uneven ground of policy's materiality, and its appreciation for the work involved in wresting some good from policy's consequential detritus."-Daniel Fisher, University of California, Berkeley "Lea is an acute observer of the everyday practices that characterise the wild, disorderly, and strange cultural world of the interventionist settler-colonial state....this is courageous scholarship. Wild Policy's blast of originality compelled me."-Eve Vincent, Sydney Review of Books "[There] is a poetics in Lea's anthologising of policies, one that is profoundly moored in land and relations. The efficacy and power of Lea's work, be [it] destabilising or advocating, lies in their specific and relational mode of engagement with human and more-than-human worlds."-Jamie Wang, Sydney Environment Institute "Wild Policy provides a nuanced take on how policy is formulated and implemented in ways that exclude Indigenous experience, and seeks to rectify this through the interludes that present Indigenous knowledge apart from scholarly theorization."-Claire Ross and Alexander Howes, Political and Legal Anthropology Review