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AAS Executive Committee 2021


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President
President

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.


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President Emeritus/a
President Emeritus/a

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.


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President Elect
President Elect
A/Prof Suzi Hutchings
Email: suzi.hutchings@rmit.edu.au

Suzi Hutchings is a Social Anthropologist and member of the Central Arrernte Nation. She holds an Associate Professor position in Criminology and Justice Studies in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. She teaches Indigenous Studies, Indigenous policy and policy design. 

Suzi’s career is dedicated to working with First Nations peoples and communities throughout Australia.  Since 1983, as a social anthropologist and Indigenous scholar of native title and family jurisprudence, Suzi has been consulting on the impacts of criminal justice and welfare intervention on Aboriginal youth and families. Her most recent engagement in this capacity was with the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (SA) providing expert cultural evidence in a child protection matter for a Pitjantjatjara family living in South Australia and the Northern Territory. 

Suzi has also worked extensively as a senior anthropologist on native title claims across Australia, including in Queensland, Western Australia and the ACT. She was the senior anthropologist on the successful Esperance Nyungar native title claim. Suzi also collaborates with First Nations young people exploring innovative ways to maintain and express Indigenous identities, resilience, resistance, sovereignty and indigeneity through music and performance. This has included a highly successful 2019 co-production on Indigenous Hip-Hop with Melbourne based Indigenous musicians and Boonwurrung Elders, and the Australian Music Vault, Arts Centre Victoria. 

From 2009 to 2016, Suzi wrote, produced and presented the music show Crossing Tracks for Radio Adelaide, and she currently produces music content for Community Radio station PBS in Melbourne. 

Suzi is co-editor with R. Aída Hernández Castillo and Brian Noble, of the 2019 publication: Transcontinental Dialogues: Activist Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of Canada, Mexico, and Australia, University of Arizona Press.

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Secretary
Secretary
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.

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Treasurer
Treasurer
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. 

 

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Ordinary Director
Ordinary Director
Dr Adele Millard
Email: Adele.Millard@clc.org.au

Adele Millard is the Senior Anthropologist coordinating native title research at the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, and an Honorary Research Fellow of The University of Western Australia. She has worked in applied and academic anthropology since receiving a BA(Hons) from UWA in 1998, with a thesis entitle Us and Them: Racism and Identity Construction in a Western Australian Farming Community – which studied farmers’ responses to the then-new Native Title Act 1993. She completed an MBA externally through Deakin University in 2008; and she undertook her business anthropology PhD thesis on The Narrative Economy of Western Australian Truffle Markets part-time while running her anthropological consultancy and juggling many and varied sessional and part-time academic research and teaching positions at UWA and the University of Hong Kong SPACE. Areas of applied and academic research include: native title, Indigenous heritage, customary marine tenure, environmental anthropology, regional development, business anthropology, ageing and new media, intergenerational care and equity, and cross-cultural dementia care. Teaching experience includes tutoring and lecturing in anthropological research methods and ethics, and course coordinating, lecturing and tutoring in media and communications. Adele was a print and broadcast journalist in Australia, New Zealand and the UK for 10 years before returning to university to study anthropology.

 

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Ordinary Director
Ordinary Director
Dr Ute Eickelkamp
Email: ute.eickelkamp@icloud.com

I am an anthropologist and independent scholar interested in Indigenous Australian lives, urban nature and design anthropology. My ethnographic research has been with Anangu families in Central Australia, first in 1995 as a PhD student at Heidelberg University after I had completed undergraduate studies in Berlin (around the rather exciting time of the fall of the wall). Art, children’s imagination, ogres and the nexus of personhood, culture and ontology have been the various foci of my ethnographic analyses. In short, I am interested in the symbolic articulations of a transforming Indigenous cultural imaginary. Drawing on German humanities traditions, philosophy and psychoanalysis, I seek to understand how the Anangu I have come to know accommodate or not the existential pressures they chronically live with. Most recently, as an ARC Future Fellow, I have explored how Anangu thinkers, including vernacular Christians, speak about nature, history and being. We explored these themes during a journey to the Holy Land and in a collaborative workshop, Placing Spirit, Minding the World: Towards an Intercultural Ethic of Care, that brought together Anangu artists and educators, and non-Indigenous philosophers, poets and anthropologists. Presently, I am orienting towards interdisciplinary action research on rapidly changing ecologies beyond Australia – the post-coal world of Germany’s Ruhr Valley where I grew up. Publications include Don’t Ask for Stories: The Women of Ernabella and Their Art (1999); the co-edited Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention (2008); and Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence (2011).

Other Office Bearers

 

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Public Officer
Public Officer
Dr Grant McCall
Email: g.mccall@nissology.net

Grant McCall is a social anthropologist working in Eastern Polynesia on the topics of memory, land, and labour. He has taught at universities in Australia and overseas and done extensive archive as well as field research. Occasionally, he likes to dress up like an anthropologist, as shown in the attached photograph, taken at the Royal Anthropological Institute conference in 2012. Presently, he is very pleased to be part of the Department of Anthropology, The University of Sydney, whose regular seminars he has attended for years. Books, articles, and other activities can be found on his departmental webpage.

 

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Editor, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA)
Editor, The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA)
Professor Andrew McWilliam
Email: A.McWilliam@westernsydney.edu.au

Andrew McWilliam is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Science and Psychology at Western Sydney University. He is a specialist in the anthropology of Southeast Asia with ethnographic interests in Eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste as well as Northern Australia.  He was Associate Editor of The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (TAPJA 2013-2018).  Current research interests include post-conflict processes of social and economic recovery in Timor-Leste and a collaborative ARC project on household vulnerability and the politics of social protection in Indonesia. He has also worked extensively in applied anthropology and international development, including long and short term advisory work on technical assistance and resource governance projects in Indonesia, as well as Aboriginal land claims and native title research in Northern Australia.  Recent publications include co-edited volumes; The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Timor-Leste (Routledge 2019), A New Era? Timor-Leste after the UN (ANU Press 2015) and Land and Life in Timor Leste: Ethnographic essays (ANU Press 2011); as well as a co-authored monograph, Property and Social Resilience in Times of Conflict: Land, Custom and Law in East Timor (Ashgate Press 2012). 

 

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Chairperson, Australian Network of Student Anthropologists (ANSA)
Chairperson, Australian Network of Student Anthropologists (ANSA)
Tyler Riordan
Email: ansa.exec@gmail.com

Tyler Riordan is a PhD candidate in Anthropology and Hospitality at the University of Queensland (UQ). Tyler has facilitated UQ’s Anthropology Working Paper series since 2019, and he also works as a Research Assistant and Facilitator. Tyler’s PhD project investigates experiences of migrants who work in platform-based food-delivery. Through his ethnography on migrant labour in the ‘gig’ economy, Tyler hopes to further understand the concepts of social hospitality, virtual hospitality, and hospitableness. Tyler’s broader research interests include the ways in which disadvantaged communities use agency to navigate training and employment programs in hospitality. Tyler holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours Class I (Anthropology), and a Diploma in Languages (Spanish). His Honours research investigated the ways refugee youth developed strategies to take ownership of their settlement journeys to improve individual and peer wellbeing. Tyler has eight years’ experience in the hospitality industry and a professional background working on education and community development programs with vulnerable communities in Australia and Latin America.