Research Profile for Dr Graham St John
Graham is a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary research interest in contemporary youth, techno and dance cultures, the anthropology of ritual and performance, and the sociology of the newest social movements.
Past and ongoing projects include research on global electronic dance music cultures; a study of the role of ‘country’ and ‘reconciliation’ in the re-imagining of Australian identity; the cultural politics of ‘reclamation’ within alter-globalisation movements; and alternative religious movements and counterculture.
His current major research project continues an inquiry beginning in the mid 1990s on global psytrance culture, technology and religion supported by the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, and The School for Advanced Research in the Human Experience (SAR), Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was a 2006/07 Social Science Research Council/SAR Fellow at the SAR.
In 2006, he was a Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology at City University, London, conducting research for the ESRC funded project 'Anti-War Movements and the Information Age'.
Between 2003-2005 Graham was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He remains a Research Associate at the CCCS. See Projects.
Graham has published widely in the fields of anthropology, cultural, youth and religious studies. He recently edited Rave Culture and Religion (London: Routledge, 2004), and FreeNRG: notes from the edge of the dance floor (Altona: Common Ground, 2001), and has several forthcoming books including the collection Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn, 2008), and two monographs: Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Berghahn, 2008), and Global Trance Culture: Religion, Technology and Psytrance (Blackwell, forthcoming).
Between 2001-2005, he was an Associate Editor of the recent Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, as coordinator for Religions, Nature and Culture in Oceania.
From 1993-1999, Graham conducted doctoral research in Anthropology at Latrobe University, Melbourne. The project investigated Australia's alternative lifestyle festival, ConFest. His PhD thesis, 'Alternative Cultural Heterotopia: ConFest as
For a complete list of publications click here.