Margaret Somerville is a professor of Education at Western Sydney University where she was director of the Centre for Educational Research from 2012-2016. She has led a rich and varied life as a mother of four children, including periods of time on remote Aboriginal communities, in rural Australia as a self sufficient farmer, and as a professor in three universities. She is interested in alternative and creative approaches to research and writing, and has led a large number of externally funded research projects with a focus on our relationship to the landscape.
Her work has been carried out in collaboration with Aboriginal knowledge holders and communities, schools and school children, and her doctoral students in the Space Place and Body cohort. Her most recent research in an international ARC funded study involves collaboration with very young children and their extraordinary capacities in world naming. She has published nine books, two in collaboration with Aboriginal co-authors and has curated a number of art exhibitions in the long term project which culminated in Water in a Dry Land: Place learning through art and story, published in Routledge’s Innovative Ethnography Series.
Her forthcoming book, Riverlands: waterplace learning for the Anthropocene will be published by Routledge in 2018. In this book she explores how we can learn new ways of being human for the time of human entanglement in the fate of the planet.