Associate Professor Holly High, ARC Future Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI), is a leading anthropologist whose work bridges ethnographic depth with global relevance. Her research offers a rare and intimate lens into the everyday lives of Lao communities, revealing how policy, ideology and cultural heritage intersect in powerful and often unexpected ways. 

For over two decades, Associate Professor Holly High has conducted fieldwork in rural and remote Laos. It was the experience of becoming a parent herself that sparked a new curiosity: how do people raise children in vastly different material, cultural and economic contexts? 

“Having my own children prompted me to look back on my prior twenty years researching rural and remote Laos with new curiosity. I wanted to know how people raise children in such very different circumstances.” 

This question became the foundation for her ARC Future Fellowship project, Cultural values, birth and parenting: Reproductive health and Lao socialism. At the heart of the research is the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH) program – an ambitious initiative aimed at reducing maternal mortality and childhood stunting in Laos, where approximately 70% of women give birth without biomedical care. 

Working closely with local research assistants, the University of Health Sciences in Vientiane, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Luang Prabang and PhD student Amelie Katczynski, Associate Professor High has built a collaborative and deeply embedded research model. Her work documents existing birth and parenting practices and explores how global health interventions interact with deeply rooted cultural and ideological frameworks. 

This project has also led her to challenge long-held assumptions in the anthropology of reproduction – many of which, she argues, are still shaped by Cold War ideologies. 

Her findings have sparked renewed engagement with socialist theorists and led to a widely acclaimed podcast episode for Actually Existing Socialism, now the platform’s most downloaded and recommended episode. She also shares her insights through a growing Substack newsletter, Revolutions in Reproduction, which frequently ranks among the fastest rising in the parenting category. 

An exhibition showcasing the project’s findings, which is bilingual and accessible online, is set to launch in November 2025, ensuring that even villagers in remote Laos who participated in the study can engage with and respond to the research. 

Ultimately, Associate Professor High’s work invites us to rethink what we take for granted about parenting, gender and care. By exploring the cultural diversity of reproduction, she expands our understanding of what is natural, what is ideological and what is possible.