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.

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 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 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 Grant McCall

The AAS are saddened by the recent death of Grant McCall, long-time public officer of the AAS and a stalwart of Australian anthropology. A full tribute to Grant’s life and work will be included in the September/October AAS eBulletin. 

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).

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.