You are invited to a conversation with Dr. Timothy Neale, author of How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent.
In this new book, Dr. Neale offers an ethnographic look at wildfire management in Australia, showing how institutional fire agencies increasingly rely on technical control and militarization as they respond to ever-larger fires. Drawing on conversations with fire professionals and Indigenous land stewards, he links today's fire crises to ongoing colonization and argues for moving beyond the logic of control toward learning to live with a flammable world.
The event is co-hosted by the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, the Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, and the Department of Anthropology
Event Details
Date: Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: LaKretz Garden Pavilion, Mildred Botanical Garden
About Dr. Neale
Dr. Neale is an anthropologist and STS scholar whose research addresses two overlapping fields of inquiry. The first focuses on the politics of settler and Indigenous relations to lands and waters, and the second examines natural hazards and disasters with a particular interest in the social and cultural life of their technical infrastructures.
Dr. Neale is currently an Editor of the journal Science, Technology & Human Values. He was a Global Editor (2019-2021) of the journal Postcolonial Studies, producer of the podcasts Conversations in Anthropology and Technoscience, and the Deputy Convener (2017-2020) and Convener (2020-2023) of the Deakin Science and Society Network, and a Member of the Australian Academy of Science's National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science (2022-2026).