Siobhan scholarly interests include: Indigenous people and land; Property rights issues; Social justice issues for Indigenous people; Gender and natural resource management; Legal Anthropology; Customary law and legal pluralism; Pacific studies; Indigenous History; Urbanisation; Cultural Economics; Cultural heritage management; Disaster recovery and climate change.

Dr. Siobhan McDonnell is an impact academic who produces reserach work that informs public policy outcomes. Dr McDonnell is a lawyer, economist with a doctorate in Legal Anthropology. She is currently employed as a Research Fellow at the National Centre of Indigenous Studies and at the College of Asia and the Pacific.

Dr McDonnell has over twenty years experience working in Indigenous Australia and in the Oceania. She previously worked as a legal and policy advisor at the Central Land Council and at Reconciliation Australia. She began her research career at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. She has served three terms as the Legal Advisor to Vanuatu’s Minister for Lands, Ralph Regenvanu.

In 2014 Dr McDonnell was the principal drafter of a new set of land laws in Vanuatu, as well as amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Vanuatu. In 2015 she worked with the Solomon Islands Government to develop a pathway for land reform discussions.

Dr McDonnell specialised in issues related to natural resource management and gender. In 2017 she was awarded the Gender Institute prize for the PhD dissertation that most contributed to the advancement of gender studies. Siobhan was also awarded the 2017 Australian Anthropology Society national prize for the best thesis in Anthropology.

In 2018 Dr McDonnell became the Chief Investigator on a project for the Australian Government Attorney General's Department on improving the delivery of Family Dispute Resolution services to Indigenous and refugee families. She is also involved in a 3 year ARC Discovery Project on gender and climate change in the Pacific.

Dr McDonnell currently convenes and lectures in a number of courses at the Australian National University and she is regularly engaged as a consultant by both government agencies and non-government organisations.

Dr Siobhan Mcdonnell is a Legal Anthropologist with twenty years experience working on legal and policy issues with Indigenous people in Australia and Melanesia.

She completed her PhD in Legal Anthropology on Indigenous land rights titled: ‘My Land My Life: Property, Power and Identity in Land Transformations in Vanuatu’. 

Siobhan is currently working on projects in Indigenous Australia and the Pacific including: 

- an evaluation of family dispute resolution processes amongst Indigenous and English as a second language (CALD) communities across Australia;

- constitutional law and rights for Indigenous Australians;

- the history of discrimination faced by Indigenous Australians under various Protection Acts;

- how 'deficit discourse' frames engagement with Indigenous Australians;

- climate change and gender in the Pacific;

- land reform and indigneous land rights in the Pacific;

- disaster managment in the Pacific; and,

- how concepts of 'paradise' frame foreign engagement in the Pacific.

• Maeve Powell. Indigenous Wellbeing in Urban Spaces: expressing voice through walking and photography in Canberra (PhD Thesis).
• Meabh Cryan. Concepts of Land and Life: Contested Land Access in Timor-Leste (PhD Thesis).
• Ed Wensing. Decolonising Property: How Indigenous and Settler systems of land ownerhsip, use and tenure can coexist in parity (PhD Thesis).
• Athena Rogers. The challenges and opportunities of regulating traditional justice practices in Timor-Leste (Masters Thesis).
• Evie Rose (Honours Thesis, topic TBC).