Aaron Burton

Dr Aaron Burton is a lecturer in Screen Media Production. Burton is a creative practice-based researcher with foundations in personal documentary filmmaking and photography. His practice traverses scholarly work in documentary film, art history, cultural studies, and ethnography. Notable non-traditional research outputs include, My Mother's Village (2014), a feature length documentary film that revisits a series of ethnographic films made in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s by Burton's parents. My Mother's Village (2014) is a revealing inter-generational study across three transformative decades from civil war to globalisation, and a reflexive meta-narrative on how the act of representation has similarly transformed. Burton's interest in experimental ethnography extends to a collaborative documentary film with professors Stephen Muecke and Michael Taussig titled Sunset Ethnography (2014), in which the filmmaking attempts to enact innovations in ethnographic fieldwork. Burton founded the Visualising Top End Research conference at Charles Darwin University in 2016. Burton's current research explores visual narratives of climate change and environmental crises. Burton has published research on the potential of unmanned imaging technologies to provide a non-anthropocentric and trans-disciplinary narrative to human relationships within the natural environment. Burton has wide-ranging industry experience from independent filmmaking to producing digital content for daily news to art installations and exhibitions. His creative media-arts practice includes numerous prizes for national and international exhibitions, such as; 2012 Colombo Art Biennale, Hatched 07 National Graduate Show (PICA), Brisbane Airport Fresh Cut 2009 (IMA), and the inaugural Jeremy Hynes Award 2009 (IMA). Burton currently sits on the Executive Board of the Australian Screen Production Education and Research Association (ASPERA). Screen and digital media, Cultural studies