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.

Dr Sophie Chao
Email: sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au

Dr Sophie Chao is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sydney’s School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and the Charles Perkins Centre, and an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow at Macquarie University. Her research explores the intersections of capitalism, ecology, health, and indigeneity in Indonesian West Papua. Sophie’s broader research interests include multispecies ethnography, phenomenology, the environmental humanities, Science and Technology Studies, food and diet, and the senses. Sophie holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) in Oriental Studies (Chinese and Tibetan) and a Master of Science in Social Anthropology from The University of Oxford. She completed a PhD in Anthropology at Macquarie University in 2019. Her thesis was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation and the AAS PhD Thesis prize in 2019. Prior to her doctoral research, Sophie worked for indigenous rights organization Forest Peoples Programme and has published extensively on human rights and the palm oil sector in Southeast Asia. She has also undertaken consultancies for United Nations human rights bodies including the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Working Group on Business and Human Rights. For more information about Sophie's research, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Dr Geir Henning Presterudstuen
Email: G.Presterudstuen@westernsydney.edu.au

Dr Geir Henning Presterudstuen is a socio-cultural anthropologist and has conducted long-term fieldwork in Fiji since 2009. His PhD thesis, awarded in 2012, was entitled 'Masculinity, manhood and tradition' and reflects his main research interests which include the intersections between social categories such as gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality in context of the modern market economy. Other research interests includes economic anthropology, anthropology of religion and the supernatural and social theory. His key publications include a recent monograph Performing Masculinity: Body, Self and Identity in Modern Fiji (2019 Bloomsbury), two edited volumes: Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond (2014 Palgrave Macmillan, with Yasmine Musharbash) and Anthropologies of Value: Cultures of accumulation across the Global North and South (2016 Pluto Press, with L.F. Angosto Ferrandez) as well as a number of articles in international journals.