Amber
Patterson-Ooi
I am a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include anthropological approaches to the built environment, landscape, material culture, and narrative.I hold a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology), a Master of Arts by Research (Anthropology), and a Postgraduate Diploma in Production (Cultural Event Management).I am currently a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Design and Society at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Current research
Water permeates human life worlds linguistically, bodily, ecologically, and politically. In doing so, water possesses a conceptual expansiveness that has generated substantial research across the natural sciences and the humanities. However, many frameworks remain oriented towards management, resilience, and governance – often framing communities as recipients of policy rather than active participants in processes and placemaking at watery sites.The cultural, symbolic, and affective dimensions of human-water relationships, particularly at the intimate scale of domestic architecture, remain critically underexplored. This research project applies anthropological thinking and methods to advance a transdisciplinary response to recent calls for culturally grounded approaches to hydro-sociality.Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork across Australian and international water-centric housing developments, the research will examine how domestic architectures mediate human-water relationships and how both individual and communal acts of placemaking at the confluence of land and water are produced, sustained, and narrativised. The research will contribute to interdisciplinary discourses on the built environment, housing, and human-environment relationships.
Works
Keynote Speaker:
Tbilisi Architecture Forum, September 2026.
Thinking With Water. *Conference Presentation:
Y-Conference, Yerevan, May 2026.
Inter-Surfacing. *Master's Thesis:
Love, Grief, and Materiality: Interior Narratives and the Making of Home in Singapore, Master of Arts by Research (Anthropology), La Trobe University 2026. *Journal Article:
Patterson-Ooi, A., & Araujo, N. (2022). Beyond Needle and Thread: Communicating and Contesting Identity in Haute Couture. M/C Journal, 25(4). Read here*Excerpts available upon request.