Rita Armstrong is an anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, based on two year's fieldwork in a longhouse community in Central Borneo. With an undergraduate major in History, she combines historical research with anthropological methodologies and interests to analyze a variety of issues: Indigenous perceptions of social change, political economy of the interaction between shifting cultivators and the state, subjective understanding of development and how all these influence and shape local identity. She has worked with Caroline Baillie, an engineer and social activist, for a number of years in developing interdisciplinary teaching material for first-year engineers at the University of Western Australia, and, most recently, on research projects funded by the International Mining for Development Centre. She continues to teach in Anthropology and Engineering and this experience has underlined the importance of developing collaborative research projects across these disciplines to better understand how we can resolve the increasing inequity in peoples' capacity to deal with issues such as climate change, resource extraction, and diminishing water supply.
