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.

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 Tanya King

Email: tanya.king@deakin.edu.au



Tanya King is interested in issues of natural resource management policy and implementation and how these impact on human and non-human worlds. She has worked extensively with the Australian commercial fishing industry, and is embedded in national and international networks of maritime social scientists. Her research interests also include gender, mental health, anthropological pedagogy, public policy and consultation, procedural justice, mythical sea creatures, and the cultural aspects of water management and infrastructure development. Her PhD considered the introduction of quotas to the Australian Bass Strait shark fishery. Tanya teaches in the anthropology program at Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. She is committed to fostering public-facing anthropology, interdisciplinarity, student experience, public thinking, and the lived experiences of stakeholder communities.

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 Benjamin Hegarty

Email: benjamin.hegarty@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Benjamin Hegarty is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and a visiting research fellow at the Center for HIV AIDS Research at Atma Jaya University in Indonesia. His teaching and research, which takes place theoretically in queer anthropology and geographically in Indonesia, is collaborative, ethnographically attentive and ethically engaged. His first book, 'The Made-Up State' (under contract, Cornell University Press), addresses transgender women's lives against shifting meanings of public life in the Indonesian city. His current project, a collaborative ethnography co-researched and written with Indonesian epidemiologists and community activists, addresses the social life of HIV data worlds. His research appears or is forthcoming in journals such as Medicine Anthropology Theory, the Journal of Asian Studies, Ethos, Global Public Health, Transgender Studies Quarterly and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. He holds a Master of Asian Studies from Monash University and PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University, which was awarded the 2018 AAS PhD Thesis Prize. In 2018-19 he was visiting assistant researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine and, in 2021, was awarded an Evans Fellowship at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. For more information about Benjamin's research, see https://benjaminhegarty.com/.

Dr Adele Millard

Email: Adele.Millard@clc.org.au

Adele Millard is the Manager, Country & Cultural Heritage at Robe River Kuruma Aboriginal Corporation in Karratha, 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.

Dr Malini Sur

Email: m.sur@westernsydney.edu.au

Dr Malini Sur is a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and more recently Australia. She studies agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. She is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University. Malini is the author of Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). She has also published on borderlands in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies. Her second project is concerned with the political terrains that degraded air generates in India. Drawing on insights from three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, she explores how daily-wage bicyclists and environmental activists in large postcolonial cities experience, navigate and mobilize air in everyday life and the economies, including repair economies that coalesce around urban cycling. She has co-edited two Special Issues in CITY and Economic and Political Weekly on urban anthropology.

Malini’s interests in the environment, and especially in climatic events, air pollution and dust, and urban mobility now includes new research on Australia. She has published collaborative research on construction sites, on ground-breaking and the redistribution of earth’s particles and on dust and bushfire haze. She has also written about slow cycling and urban mobility in Australia and commented widely in the media including the ABC on the global impacts of dust and pollution. Her first documentary film Life Cycle, about air pollution and urban cycling in India has been screened at Baltimore, Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Santiago, Singapore, Kolkata and New York. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and has held fellowships at the University of Toronto and National University of Singapore.

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.

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).

Ivan Levant

Email: ansa.exec@gmail.com

As an honour student, Ivan Levant is currently researching the confluence of poetry and anthropology at the University of Queensland, where he co-founded the Anthropology Society. Ivan is a surrealist artist who has performed at numerous festivals across Australia and currently works as Arts Worker at AccessArts. In 2019 Ivan has filmed and edited a short film ‘Equitable Human Assertion’ featuring the work of artiste-anthropologist Dr Gina Athena Ulysse. Ivan ran multiple theatre and poetry workshops, including a poetry lab at The Australian Anthropology Society’s 2021 conference. In 2022, Ivan’s essay won Revitalizing Graduate Student Challenge from the Centre of Public Anthropology exploring the concept of Artist-Scholar Mutual Mentorship Networks. Ivan relishes bringing together people, ideas and creativity, wishing to do so for ANSA.