Dr Debbi Long

Email: debbi.long08@gmail.com


A pioneer of hospital ethnography in Australia and internationally, Debbi has worked in rural communities in Turkey and Eswatini, as well as extensively in the public hospital system in Australia. With more than twenty years experience as a health systems analyst, Debbi’s research has included clinical governance and health management, development health and the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), behaviour change, culture change, workers compensation, industrial relations, patient safety, infection control, family violence, multidisciplinary clinical team communication, video ethnography, hospital ethnography and maternity systems. She has taught in a number of universities in anthropology, medical, nursing, Indigenous Studies and Development Studies departments/centres. Her current life/research interests incorporate health in areas such as permaculture and food security, sustainable housing techniques, i/Indigenous knowledges, with an overarching focus on resource equity and decolonisation.

Dr Malini Sur

Email: m.sur@westernsydney.edu.au

 

Malini Sur is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh, and Australia. She is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Western Sydney University. Her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was awarded the President's Book Prize from the South Asian Studies Association of Australia, Bernard S. Cohen Prize (honourable mention) and Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2022). Her writings feature in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History and Modern Asian Studies. Her research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Dutch Research Council (NWO), Ministry of Education Singapore and awards from the Tata Trusts. She was a Chevening scholar and a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University in 2022.

A/Prof Sur has taught and held fellowships at the University of Amsterdam, University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore and worked for Social Science Research Council (New York). She is an Associate Editor of South Asia – Journal of South Asian Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Commoning Ethnography and Humanities Research. In 2021, she was elected to Ordinary Director of the Australian Anthropological Society and assumed the role of President of the Australian Anthropological Society in August 2023. 

DrTim Pilbrow

Email: tim.pilbrow@socialcontext.com.au

I trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist (PhD, MPhil, MA, New York University) focusing on the ethnography of collective identities and the socially integrative dimensions of conflict and dispute and the social and cultural embeddedness of language and communicative practices. My doctoral work focused on the transformation of collective identity narratives, grounded in field work in Bulgaria in the mid-1990s, during a period of rapid social change following the fall of state socialism. As an undergraduate I studied linguistics and anthropology at Monash University, where I received first class honours in Slavic linguistics, following a period of study and fieldwork in (then) Yugoslavia. I have been a Member of the American Anthropological Association since 1993 and a fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society since 2006.  

After a brief academic teaching career in the USA, I returned to Australia, and developed a career in research for native title and Traditional Owner settlements in Victoria as Senior Anthropologist and Research Manager at First Nations Legal & Research Services, and since 2019 as an independent consultant. I have more recently begun shifting my focus to the challenges of organisational culture, aspiring to help organizations uncover and utilize the tacit knowledge embedded in their processes and relationships.  

I have always been deeply curious about people and communities, and the way language and culture are constantly being shaped through social interactions. Along the way I realized that I am a design-oriented systems thinker, and my real passion is helping organizations create better alignments between systems and the people that use them. This led me seek further training in communication and collaboration skills, including transformative mediation, Deep Democracy facilitation, user experience design, and Strategic Doing. I am developing an integrated practice weaving together ethnography, co-design and collaborative engagement practices.  

Dr Gretchen Stolte

Email: gretchen.stolte@uwa.edu.au

Dr Stolte is a Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce) Native American and has degrees in art history and anthropology focusing on the material culture of First Nations peoples both on Turtle Island (North America) and so-called Australia. Dr Stolte’s research areas focus on the relationship between cultural objects and identity and has published extensively about practice-based research, cultural protocols and the responsibility of western institutions in Indigenous cultural spaces. Dr Stolte is currently the anthropology discipline lead and lecturer at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. She is also a practicing bead artist, weaver and ribbon-skirt maker. 

Dr Richard Martin

Email: r.martin3@uq.edu.au

 

Richard Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Queensland, and the author of The Gulf Country: The story of people and place in outback Queensland (Allen & Unwin, 2019). He is currently working on the ARC funded projects The Queensland Atlas of Religion and Testing the Dark Emu Hypothesis. In addition to his academic research and teaching, Martin has authored anthropological reports about Australian native title claims and given expert evidence in the Federal Court. 

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 Kari Dahlgren

Email: kari.dahlgren@monash.edu

Dr. Kari Dahlgren is an early career academic and Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University. Kari is a social anthropologist who studies the social and ethical aspects of energy production and consumption in Australia. Her work is situated at the intersection of economic and environmental anthropology, with a particular interest in the anthropology of energy, climate change, and transition. She also works on several applied research projects and advocates for an anthropology which engages in and contributes to addressing contemporary socio-political and environmental challenges. She is concerned with the increasing precarity of Australian anthropology, and in particular, the challenges faced by early career researchers. She believes the AAS should work to expand the possibilities for the field as both critical and engaged, and that this is a key starting point for advocating for the membership’s diverse but mutual interests.  

Kari holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics, an MSc from Oxford University, and BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Dr Jaap Timmer

  

Jaap Timmer is an associate professor in the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. His research focuses on historicity, religion, and sovereignty in Solomon Islands and Indonesian Papua.   

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).

Jerrold Cuperus

Email: ansa.exec@gmail.com

 
 

Jerrold Cuperus is a PhD candidate in the Queensland Atlas of Religion project at the University of Queensland. In his research project, Jerrold investigates the use of multimedia and digital technologies (like audio-visual technologies and lighting) in Pentecostal (mega)churches in and around Brisbane. Jerrold is broadly interested in the nexus of technology, affect, and material religion in contemporary Christianities. He has previously completed MAs in Religious Studies and HASS in Secondary Education at Utrecht University where he conducted research in economies of Roman-Catholic religious heritage in the Netherlands.