Dr Debra McDougall
Email: debra.mcdougall@unimelb.edu.au

Debra McDougall is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Director of the Anthropology Major at the University of Melbourne. Debra studied History at Penn State University as an undergraduate and completed her MA and PhD at the University of Chicago. She is a scholar of Oceania with expertise in the anthropology of religion, language and culture, and gender relations; she has a growing interest in the anthropology of education and global socio-economic, political and epistemological inequality. Over two decades, her ethnographic and historical work has explored dynamics of community making in Australia’s near neighbour, Solomon Islands, with particular attention to how religious commitments shape ordinary people’s visions of what a polity should be. Debra is author of Engaging with Strangers: Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands (2016), a historical ethnography that explored how people of Ranongga Island have managed relationships with strangers over more than a century, from the long distance warfare at the turn of the twentieth century to the struggles over resources and civil war that marked a transition to the twenty-first century. She has published numerous book chapters and articles exploring the dynamics of Christian conversion in Solomon Islands. Her current work is a collaborative project undertaken in partnership with Dr Alpheaus Zobule, founder and director of the Kulu Language Institute of Ranongga. This remarkable grassroots initiative from classes in basic literacy into a thriving campus where thousands of students study the grammar of their own small languages. With support from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and the Endangered Languages Documentation Program at SOAS University in London, they are working to bring the lessons of this local movement to a broader public in Solomon Islands.

A/Prof Lisa L. Wynn
Email: lisa.wynn@mq.edu.au

Lisa L. Wynn is an associate professor at Macquarie University in Sydney.  She is a medical anthropologist who writes about reproductive health technologies, gender ideologies, affect, and sexuality.  She also writes about research ethics and served on the NHMRC Working Committee to revise the sections of the Australian National Statement that pertain to qualitative research.  She is the author of the book Pyramids and Nightclubs (University of Texas Press, 2007) and Love, Sex, and Desire in Modern Egypt: Navigating the Margins of Respectability (Texas, 2018) and co-editor of, most recently, Abortion Pills, Test Tube Babies, and Sex Toys: Exploring Reproductive and Sexual Technologies in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt University Press, 2017).  She serves on the editorial boards of the Maternal and Child Health Journal and Contraception: An international reproductive health journal.  Lisa received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Princeton University in 2003.  Subsequently she held postdoctoral research positions in Princeton's Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing.  In Australia, her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Australian Research Council and the Office of Learning and Teaching (National Teaching Fellowship), and her teaching has been recognised with a national Teaching Excellence Award from the Office of Learning and Teaching.