Executive Committee

Meet the team

An Executive Committee of seven elected directors manages the affairs of the Society. The Executive Committee works closely with and supervises the functions performed by the (part-time) AAS Administrator. Other office bearers include the Public Officer, the Editor of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (TAJA), and the Chairperson of the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists (ANSA).

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 2026

  • Yasmine is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Archaeology & Anthropology at the Australian National University. She has been conducting participant observation-based research with Warlpiri people in central Australia since the mid-1990s. Yasmine’s work is focussed on the everyday and anything that entails, from sleeping arrangements, mortuary rituals, and fighting, via Warlpiri relationships with dogs, monsters, and fire, to Warlpiri ways of surviving in the settler colony. Yasmine is the author of Yuendumu Everyday (2009) and co-editor of a number of volumes including Monster Anthropology from Australasia and Beyond (2014), Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of transforming Social Worlds through Monsters (2020), and Living with Monsters (2023).

PRESIDENT

PRESIDENT ELECT

PRESIDENT EMERITUS

  • I trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist (PhD, MPhil, MA, New York University) focusing on the ethnography of collective identities, 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.

SECRETARY

  • Meherose Borthwick is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines craft, textile, and fashion supply chains in India, with a particular focus on kinship and gender. Her ethnographic approach combines participant observation, interviews, and visual methods of film and photography. She co-founded the Sydney South Asia Society, a network for HDR students and Early Career Researchers focusing on South Asia. In her role at UNSW, she is working across two projects: one investigating social aspects of homemade, amateur, and DIY creativity, and another exploring the role of public libraries in mediating digital inequality in Australia. 

TREASURER

ORDINARY DIRECTOR

ORDINARY DIRECTOR

  • 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.

OTHER OFFICE BEARERS

  • Dr Jaap Timmer

    Jaap Timmer is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Jaap's key interests include culture change, the experience of time, and political theology. His regional interest is in the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. Currently, Jaap focusses on historicity, Christianity, and lost tribes in Solomon Islands, and temporality, religion, and heritage among the Asmat in West Papua.

  • Dr Jaap Timmer

    Jaap Timmer is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Jaap's key interests include culture change, the experience of time, and political theology. His regional interest is in the Southwest Pacific and Southeast Asia. Currently, Jaap focusses on historicity, Christianity, and lost tribes in Solomon Islands, and temporality, religion, and heritage among the Asmat in West Papua.

    Dr Anna-Karina Hermkens

    Anna-Karina Hermkens is a senior lecturer and researcher at Macquarie University, Sydney. Since 2005, she has been doing research on the ideological underpinnings of violent conflicts in Solomon Islands, Bougainville, and North Moluccas (Indonesia) in terms of religion and gender. This has provided insight into the gendered nature of religious beliefs and symbols, the enigma of religious movements, and the interplay between religion, nationalism, violence, and gender. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogues and co-edited four volumes: “Moved by Mary. The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World” (Ashgate 2009); a special volume of the journal Oceania on “Gender and Personhood in Oceania” (2015); a volume on Value and Material Culture titled “Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women’s Wealth in the Pacific (ANU-Press 2017); and most recently a volume on the interplay between time and religion titled: "Christian Temporalities" (Palgrave-Springer 2024)

  • Cindy Stocken

PAST PRESIDENTS

2024, 2025 Tim Pilbrow

2024 Doctor Debbi Long

2023 Associate Professor Malini Sur

2023 Associate Professor Tanya King

2022 Associate Professor Suzi Hutchings

2021 Doctor Debra McDougall

2020 Associate Professor Lisa Wynn

2019 Associate Professor Jennifer Deger

2018 Doctor Richard Vokes

2017 Doctor Gregory Acciaioli

2016 Doctor Pamela McGrath

2015 Professor Chris Houston

2014 Professor Ghassan Hage

2013 Professor Helen Lee

2012 Professor Rosita Henry

2011 Professor Alan Rumsey

2010 Professor Linda Connor

2009 Professor Linda Connor

2008 Professor Gillian Cowlishaw

2007 Associate Professor Martha Macintyre

2006 Associate Professor Martha Macintyre

2005 Doctor Thomas Reuter