Convenors

• 2024

  

  Dr Amit Kumar

  Dr Amit Kumar is a passionate educator, researcher, and social entrepreneur. He completed his PhD in Engineering and Technology from Chitkara University, India, specializing in the use of Augmented Reality (AR) in Engineering Education. He has more than twelve years of teaching experience in tertiary education sector and has expertise in rapid prototyping, the Internet of Things (IoT), Embedded Systems, Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality, image processing, web development, machine learning, and robotics. Amit has published his research findings in more than twenty research papers in various international journals and conferences and has conducted more than twenty-five workshops and expert sessions on state-of-the-art tools and technologies. He is currently working on two research projects: a Web-AR system for teaching systems worth 5,000 AUD, funded by Deakin University Australia, and an AR-based system for STEM education worth 40,00,000 INR, funded by SERB-INAE, Government of India. Amit is also the co-founder of Techliasioning Services Pvt. Ltd., supported by the CM Startup Scheme of the Himachal Pradesh Government.

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• 2023

  

  Dr Anthony K J Smith

  Anthony K J Smith is a health sociologist and postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney. His thesis, ‘PrEP in Practice: a sociological study of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis prescribing’ was submitted August 2022 and has passed subject to minor corrections to his supervisors’ approval. Anthony’s research explores the social dynamics of healthcare, illness, pharmaceuticals, digital healthcare systems, and surveillance technologies, with a focus on HIV prevention and LGBTQ+ communities. He is currently leading competitively funded research on PrEP users’ pharmaceutical practices and adherence (project coordinator); HIV stigma in NSW (project coordinator); and the Australian response to monkeypox virus (principal investigator $75k UNSW Triple I Clinical Academic Group seed grant). Anthony has a strong ECR track record with 17 refereed journal articles (13 in Q1 journals, 7 as first author) and 3 research reports, and is an editorial Advisory Board member of Health Sociology Review.

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  Ausma Bernot

  Ausma Bernot is a PhD Candidate at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University. She has six years of work experience with forensic science and research organisations across the globe, in particular China, where she had the chance to gain insights on how technologies are governed at provincial and national levels. Being fluent in Mandarin and building on existing networks in China, she has excellent capabilities to access key information on both technology and governance in the country. Her current research focuses on the effects that the merging of infotech and biotech triggers in the fields of governance, surveillance, policing, and public safety. Her doctoral research explores the dynamic interaction between surveillance technologies and social context and questions around totalisation of surveillance in China.

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• 2022

  

  Dr Randi Irwin

  Randi Irwin is a Lecturer at the University of Newcastle. An anthropologist interested in energy, her research attends to the intersections of resource extraction, land rights, and sovereignty by exploring the ways in which colonial and settler state infrastructure is resisted and countered (Western Sahara) or reinforced and protected (Australia). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (US) and has been published in The London Review of International Law, The Journal of North African Studies, and Citizenship Studies.

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• 2018

  

  Karen Barad

  Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory.

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  Annika Capelán

  I have a background in physical theatre and photography, and long term research interest in the visual arts.  I took my PhD at Lund University, Sweden, in 2017 Fibre Formations – Wool as an Anthropological Site (find it here). My current study sets out to advance the understanding of emergent environmental and geopolitical situations as more-than-human and human-nonhuman relations through a focus on woollen fibre. By following up on observations from my thesis it aims to develop the notion of landscape-making to richly understand land-wool-human frictions. I analyse landscape-makings in relation to woolwork, with a comparative move between Patagonian and Australian grasslands. This comparative and ethnographic exploration of woolwork and landscape-making invites a multispecied approach on the Anthropocene.

  Additional interests and knowledge areas:

  • Indigenous knowledge makings
  • Medical anthropology
  • Ethnographic filmmaking

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  Arun Saldahna

  Arun Saldanha is Associate Professor of the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is a cultural and historical geographer working mainly on theorizing race and travel, having an undergraduate degree in Communication Studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and a PhD in Geography from The Open University, UK. Arun is author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), an ethnography of hippie/rave culture in India, and Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), an introduction to the geographical concepts of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Arun is co-editor with Hoon Song of Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013), with Rachel Slocum of Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets (Ashgate, 2013), and with Jason Michael Adams of Deleuze and Race (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). His historical work has been mainly on Dutch colonialism and the history of early-modern geography, culminating in an article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers on Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a sixteenth-century traveler to Goa. Arun is now working on a theoretical book blending geohumanities, Marxism, and evolutionary theory to rethink race as planetary process, tentatively titled Phenotypically: A Materialist Theory of Race. On a public-engagement front, while Arts, Design, and Humanities Chair of the Imagine Fund at Minnesota over 2016-18, Arun focused on organizing a large symposium on campus called “Prince from Minneapolis”, which inquired into how a black superstar could emerge from a relatively white city and state. He is also working on an edited collection based on this symposium.

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  Alex Zahara

  I’m a PhD Candidate and cross-disciplinary researcher in the Department of Geography at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. My work focuses on the ways in which government-mediated environmental management practices, particularly those associated with pollution and natural hazards, make possible particular understandings of, and relations to, land, nature, wellbeing and community. My dissertation project ‘Worlding Fire Management’ draws on Science and Technology Studies and Indigenous Studies research to examine wildfire management practices and controversies near my home community in Treaty 6 Territory in northern Canada. I’m interested in action-oriented, community-based research that examines how management practices might be done differently and towards Indigenous resurgence.

  I’m also a member of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist and anticolonial marine science lab based in Newfoundland that examines plastics in wild food. Here, I direct the Queer Science Reading Group and am working on methods to bring community consent and refusal into the natural sciences. I’m also Collaborating Editor and frequent contributor at Discard Studies blog, an online hub for social science and humanities research about waste and pollution issues. More information on my publications is available on my website.

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