about the contributors
keynote speakers
Jakelyn Troy
Jakelyn Troy is Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research
Research Portfolio and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Her research interests are currently focused on documenting, describing and reviving Indigenous languages. Jakelyn has a new focus on the Indigenous languages of Pakistan, including Saraiki of the Punjab and Torwali of Swat. She is interested in the use of Indigenous research methodologies and community engaged research practises. Jakelyn is Aboriginal Australian and her community is Ngarigu of the Snowy Mountains in south eastern Australia. Jakelyn is author of The Sydney Language (Australian Dictionaries Project and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) and co-editor of Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History (University of Nebraska Press) and Music, Dance and the Archive (Sydney University Press.).
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Elizabeth Povinelli
Elizabeth Povinelli is a critical theorist and filmmaker. Her critical writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late settler liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. This potential theory has unfolded across eight books, numerous essays, and a thirty-five years of collaboration with her Indigenous colleagues in north Australia including eight films they have created as members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Elizabeth's book, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award and The Cunning of Recognition was a Art Forum Best Book of the Year. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, the Contour Biennale, and MoMA PS1.
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Gastón Gordillo
Gastón Gordillo is Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. His research interests include terrain, place, and territory; racialized geographies; violence; materiality; affect and the body; ruins and ruination. In his current ethnographic project, Gastón is analyzing how deforestation by agribusiness in the Gran Chaco region is racialized and made possible by the infrastructures of the soy supply chains and how this project is challenged by campesino and Indigenous social movements who are generating agro-ecological territories in the name of defending life and the commons. Gastón's most recent book is Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (2014, Duke University Press), which won Honorary Mention for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His book Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco (2004, Duke University Press) won the American Ethnological Society Sharon Stephens Book Prize.
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poets
Craig Santos Perez
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is a poet, scholar, editor, publisher, essayist, critic, book reviewer, artist, environmentalist, and political activist. Craig is Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, where he teaches creative writing, eco-poetry, and Pacific literature. He the author of two spoken word poetry albums, Undercurrent (2011) and Crosscurrent (2017), and five books of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008), from unincorporated territory [saina] (2010), from unincorporated territory [guma’] (2014), from unincorporated territory [lukao] (2017), and Habitat Threshold (2020). His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, and Spanish. Perez's monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization (2022) was published by the Critical Issues of Indigenous Studies series at the University of Arizona Press.
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Judith Nangala Crispin
Judith Nangala Crispin is a Canberra-based poet and visual artist, with a background in music. She has published a collection of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers (Puncher & Wattmann, 2015), and a book of images and poems made while living with the Warlpiri, The Lumen Seed (Daylight Books, 2017). Judith is a proud member of Oculi collective, one of the chapter leads of Women Photograph (Sydney), and the 2021 Artist in residence with Music Viva. Since 2011, Judith has spent part of each year living and working with tribal people in the Tanami desert. Her work includes themes of displacement and identity loss, a reflection on her own lost Aboriginal ancestry, but is primarily centred on the concept of connection with Country. Judith traces her ancestry to the Bpangerang people of North-Eastern Victoria and the NSW Riverina. She also traces ancestry to Ghana, Senegal, France, Ireland and Scotland, but foregrounds her Aboriginal ancestry.
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Eunice Andrada
Eunice Andrada is a Filipina poet, educator, and organizer. Her debut poetry collection Flood Damages (Giramondo Publishing, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Her second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo Publishing 2021) was described by celebrated poet Ellen van Neerven as ‘one of the most important poetry releases in years.’ It is a finalist for the Stella Prize, Kenneth Slessor Prize, and the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Award. Eunice has performed her poetry on international stages including the UN Climate Conference in Paris, Sydney Opera House, and the Parliament House of New South Wales. Her performances include events during the Richesse des Langues Festival (Montreal), Ubud International Writers and Readers Festival (Bali), and 100 Thousand Poets for Change (Quezon City). Beyond her love for poetry, Eunice has a deep passion for sleeping, diving, and cooking (and eating) Ilonggo food.
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Jamie Wang
Jamie Wang is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and poet. She is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. Jamie’s current research is at the intersections of environmental humanities, cultural and urban imaginaries, and multispecies studies in the context of climate change, sustainable technological solutions, and environmental justice. Her poems exploring more-than-human entanglements have been published in Otherwise, Voice and Verse Magazine and The Shadow Places Network among others. Across her research and creative works, she is interested in sustainable story-making towards the opening of other kinds of possible futures.
For more information, please visit jamiewang.org.
ecomaterialities
Blanche Verlie
Blanche Verlie is a multidisciplinary social scientist whose work focuses on climate change. Her research investigates how people understand, experience, and respond to climate change, and how we might do this differently and better. Blanche draws on feminist and multispecies philosophy to consider the complex, diverse and intimate ways that climate changes manifests in contemporary life, and how this analysis could inform more just and ecological modes of living in, with, and as the world. Her work focuses specifically on the ways climate change is felt, lived and imagined, and how affective injustice can inspire regenerative forms of climate action. This work spans the areas and disciplines of climate change education, communication and activism, as well as environmental politics, cultural geography, and environmental humanities. Blanche's book, Learning to live-with climate change: From anxiety to transformation, is available as a free e-book.
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Erin Fitz-Henry
Erin Fitz-Henry is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and the Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She joined the department in 2011 after receiving her PhD in Anthropology at Princeton University and her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. She works primarily on transnational social movements, with a particular interest in the global movement for the rights of nature in Ecuador, the United States, and Australia. Her ethnographic work has focused on the use of these rights in contexts of large-scale resource extraction. This work is interdisciplinary, drawing on contemporary legal studies, sociology, critical development studies, and political science. Other interests include environmental justice and just transitions, post-colonialism, and new materialism.
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Danielle Celermajer
Danielle Celermajer is a Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, and Deputy Director – Academic of the Sydney Environment Institute. Her professional life has been characterized by moving between organizations whose principal focus is human rights policy, advocacy and scholarship, and seeking a greater integration between these dimensions of human rights work. Dany's books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology (Cambridge University Press 2009), A Cultural Theory of Law in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Dany is Director of the Multispecies Justice Project and along with her multispecies community, she has recently lived through the New South Wakes fires, writing in the face of their experience of the “killing of everything”, which she calls “omnicide.” In her latest book, Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin Books, 2021), Dany asks us to look around – really look around – to become present to all beings who are living and dying through the loss of our shared home.
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Natasha Fijn
Natasha Fijn is an ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker based at the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. Her ongoing interest is in cross-cultural perceptions and attitudes towards other animals, as well as the use of the visual, particularly observational filmmaking, as an integral part of her research. Natasha's ethnographic fieldwork has been based in the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia and Arnhem Land in northern Australia, involving engagement with human-animal relations and concepts of domestication. Since 2016, her research focus has been on multispecies medicine in Mongolia. Natasha has made two films - 'Two Seasons: Multispecies Medicine in Mongolia' (2017) and 'Yolngu Homeland' (2015). Her first monograph, Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Natasha previously held fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Oslo and the ANU's College of the Arts and Social Sciences.
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Christine Winter
Christine Winter (Ngati Kahungunu ki Wairoa, Ngati Pakeha) is a Senior Lecturer at the Politics Programme at the University of Otago/Te Whare Wānanga o te Ōtākou in Aotearoa New Zealand and a Research Associate at the Sydney Environment Institute. Her research focuses on the ways in which academic political theory, and particularly theories of justice, continue to perpetuate injustice for some people (and more specifically for Māori) and the environment. Her most recent research centres on ensuring the emerging field of a political theory of multispecies justice has decolonial (and anticolonial) foundations.
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Astrida Neimanis
Astrida Neimanis writes about water, bodies, and weather from intersectional feminist perspectives. Their most recent book is Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Often in collaboration with artists, scientists, and communities, their work uses interdisciplinary and practice-based methods to experiment in different ways of knowing and being. Astrida is a white settler from the Baltic Sea region who grew up mostly on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee lands in Southern Ontario. They are currently Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities and UBC Okanagan, where they are also Director of The FEELed Lab.
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Susan Reid
Susan is a trans-disciplinary, creative practitioner who imagines with, and engages approaches to, multibeing justice and relationality. Susan is an artist, writer, lawyer, and cultural theorist, and currently a Research Affiliate with the University of Sydney. A settler of mixed Celtic/European heritage, Susan works and lives nomadically on unceded Gadigal and Yugambeh lands.
technomaterialities
Donna Houston
Donna Houston is Associate Professor in the Discipline of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University, Australia. Donna is a cultural and urban geographer whose research focuses on environmental justice in the Anthropocene; geographies of extinction, and urban planning in more-than-human cities. She is particularly interested in how cultural methodologies such as storytelling, visual methods and cultural memory can be used to address current social and environmental challenges. Donna’s recent projects include an Australian Research Council Linkage Project “The Power of Public Spaces to Connect Communities and Places” and an ARC Discovery Project ‘Enabling Social Innovation for Local Climate Adaptability’. With A/Prof Andrew McGregor, she has formed a Multispecies Geographies research group that explores just climate transitions in urban and rural food systems and the development of critical frameworks for multispecies justice.
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Miyarrka Media
Miyarrka Media are an intergenerational and intercultural arts collective working on Yolŋu lands in northern Australia. Under the leadership of Paul Gurrumuruwuy Wunuŋmurra they use digital media to explore issues of shared concern. Their recent book Phone & Spear: a Yuta Anthropology won the Gregory Bateson award. The team for this project includes Wunuŋmurra’s daughters Enid Guruŋulmiwuy, and Meredith Balanydjarrk, his son-in-law Warren Balpatji, long-time collaborator Jennifer Deger and visual anthropologist Victoria Coffey. Wunuŋmurra and Deger co-direct the Centre for Creative Futures at Charles Darwin University.
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Zsuzsanna Ihar
Zsuzsanna Ihar is a PhD candidate and Gates scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD project, titled Armed and Arable: The Greening of a Cold-War Archipelago (1942-2022), explores the ongoing militarisation of Scotland's West Highlands and Hebridean archipelago, with specific interest in local knowledge-making practices and the mobilisation of scientific expertise to justify particular strategies of land management and use. She works across garrison towns, disused army bases, reclaimed conservation areas, as well as former military trial sites. Zsuzsanna's broader research interests include institutional activism, the agricultural history of empire, and lay (community) science initiatives. She previously studied at the University of Sydney, completing a combined bachelor's degree (in science and arts), as well as a Master of Research (MRes). Her most recent work can be found in the 2022 Duke University Press publication, The Promise of Multispecies Justice.
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Giulia Lepori
Giulia Lepori is a research-creator and ethnographer based in Meanjin (Brisbane), cofounder of tarra tarra, an archive of environmental humanist works. For a decade, she has been researching, communicating, and practicing narratives that cultivate forms of socioecological sustainability and challenge anthropocentrism. In November 2022 she won the Award of Excellence in a Research Thesis, from the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, for her interdisciplinary project with an Italian permacultural site. Currently working as a sessional academic, she is a community-minded volunteer, a horticulturist, and poetical activist.
César Enrique Giraldo Herrera
César Enrique Giraldo Herrera is a biologist and an anthropologist from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Aberdeen for the dissertation Sweet Dreams Rocking Viking Boats, Biocultural Animic Perspectivism through Nordic Seamanship, developed under the supervision of Tim Ingold. After that César worked as postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iceland in the project Biosocial Relations and Hierarchies, directed by Gisli Palsson. Currently, he is a Victoria Maltby Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College affiliated to the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, under the tutorship of Javier Lezaun. César is the author of Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), a book that brings together microbiology and Amerindian shamanic practice, with a view to interrogating both as equals.
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Elizabeth Duncan
Elizabeth Duncan is a PhD candidate in the School of Geosciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. Her PhD thesis looks at the cumulative impacts of waste, its movement through and beyond Sydney and how waste is embodied and entangled within the city as a system. By focusing on the materiality of waste and on how waste matters and persists even once it has been ‘fixed’ through technocratic intervention, Elizabeth troubles the ways in which matter (re)turns. From the perspective of city scaled urban cleansing, her research asks: what does it mean to respond to and be response-able for materials? Elizabeth has a Bachelor in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, and a Master of Sustainability from the University of Sydney.
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cosmomaterialities
Yasmine Musharbash
Yasmine Musharbash is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her ethnographic fieldwork is located in central Australia and mostly centred on Yuendumu, an Aboriginal community about three hours northwest of Alice Springs. Social relations, sociality, and notions of the person, and of self and other are themes Yasmine examines from various directions, including the ways in which Warlpiri people relate to others: to non-Indigenous people, to strangers, to enemies, but also to animals, plants, the weather, smoke, the underground, and to monsters. Yasmine's research on monsters has blossomed into an on-going inter-disciplinary and comparative project that brings together anthropology and monster studies. Her collaborative has gathered ethnographic analyses from all over the world, that look at human/other-than-human engagements from a variety of angles (in instances of social change and transformation, for example, or as explorations of the different ways in which people ‘live with’ the monsters that haunt them.)
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Makere Stewart-Harawira
Makere Stewart-Harawira is Professor in Indigenous, Environmental, and Global Studies in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Canada. An Indigenous (Maori) scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand, Makere is a member of the Waitaha ki Waipounamu iwi and has been living and working on Treaty Six lands in Alberta, Canada since 2004. Her work focuses on Indigenous knowledge systems, ethics and values in relation to integrative approaches to ecosystem and human-more-than-human wellbeing, multi species justice; planetary stewardship, and freshwater governance. Makere is the Program Lead for the I-STEAM Pathways Indigenous Youth Environmental Education Program. She previously led "Intersections of Sustainability" Network, funded by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.
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Jelle Wouters
Jelle Wouters is a social anthropologist in the Department of Social Sciences at Royal Thimphu College, Bhutan. He has conducted long-term ethnographic and historical research among the upland and tribal Naga in India's generally lesser known Northeastern region, writing about colonial ethnography, hill-valley dynamics, politics of identity, and social history. Jelle's current research focus is on Naga political lifeworlds, vernacular democracy, the development state, and the environmental humanities in the Himalayas and beyond. In 2021, Jelle co-organized the conference "Storying Climes of the Himalaya, Andes, and Arctic: Anthropogenic water bodies, multispecies vulnerability, and sustainable living. " Jelle is author of In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor with Michael T. Heneise of The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia (Routledge, 2022), and co-author with Milinda Banerjee of Subaltern Studies 2.0: Being against the Capitalocene (Chicago University Press, 2022).
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Jenny García Ruales
Jenny García Ruales is an Ecuadorian doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the Philipps University of Marburg, an associate researcher at the Max Planck Fellow Group “Environmental Rights in a Cultural Context” at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), and a doctoral fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Her doctoral topic is situated in the fields of Environmental Anthropology, Anthropology of Nature, and Legal Anthropology. Jenny's research aims to contribute to the processes of pursuing an ecocentric legal system in the (Ecuadorian) Amazon and of recognizing the rights of natural entities. To this end, Jenny supports with her quehacer antropológico (anthropological doing) the legal proposal of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
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material afterlives
Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart)
Karin Bolender, PhD (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher and founder of an experimental ecological art platform called the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), based in Philomath, Oregon since 2013. R.A.W. projects seek to co-compose “untold” stories with/in shadowy meshes of mammals, plants, microbes, and others, through time-based performance, writing, new media, and experimental book arts. In 2020 3Ecologies/punctum books published The Unnaming of Aliass. Bolender is also a co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke, 2022). Engaging methods across contemporary art, geopoetics, and environmental humanities, Bolender invites reckonings within rural/urban frictions and complicities in the Pacific Northwest, alongside anticolonial energies and propositions from interwoven academic, artistic, activist, and other fields of inquiry. Bolender is a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Environmental Futures. Find out more.
Malini Sur
Malini Sur is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Sydney University with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia. 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. Her writings center around mobility – of people, goods, territory, and transport – driven by history, militarization, globalization, and environmental change. She critically interrogates the history and socio-politics of borders, infrastructures, transnational flows, and identities. 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.
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Ute Eickelkamp
Ute Eickelkamp is a social anthropologist and Sandplay therapist whose work explores how symbolic orders and emotional attachment mediate self-world relationships. Over the last decade, her research has focussed on emergent images of nature in the face of climate change and ontological duress: with Anangu thinkers in central Australia, and, most recently, with former industrial workers and precariously employed workers in Germany’s deindustrialising Ruhr region where she grew up. Her scholarly interest in juxtaposing Indigenous survivance under settler colonialism and proletarian identities in postindustrial settings reflects life: Ute began ethnographic research with First Nations Anangu families in 1995, held positions as an ARC DECRA and as an ARC Future Fellow at Australian universities, while observing the eventful transformation of her childhood world of smokestacks and open sewers into a green Metropolis. Currently a Senior Research Fellow funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Ute is tracking the deindustrialisation of mindscapes in the Ruhr, collaborating with historian Stefan Berger and art activists Reiner Kaufmann und Cordula Grüner.
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Faizah Binte Zakaria
Faizah Binte Zakaria is Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Her scholarship centers on religion and ecology in maritime Southeast Asia, including conversions, sacred landscapes, Indigenous forest communities, and more-than-human relationships. Faizah has also published on mass violence in the twentieth century and Indigenous constructions of health. She is interested in exploring interdisciplinary approaches to historical research and incorporating non-conventional archives such as visual and scientific proxy records as well as digital tools. Faizah's first book, titled The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia, is forthcoming in January 2023 with Washington University Press. In this project, Faizah uses the North Sumatran highlands as a lens to examine how mass religious conversions from animism to monotheism were catalyzed by environmental transformations.
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David Schlosberg
David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations, Payne-Scott Professor, and Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. His research centers on environmental politics, environmental movements, and political theory. His other theoretical interests are in climate justice, food justice and multispecies justice, climate adaptation and resilience, and environmental movements and the practices of everyday life - what he terms sustainable materialism. David is author or co-author of numerous books, including Defining Environmental Justice (Oxford, 2007) and Sustainable Materialism: Environmental Movements and the Politics of Everyday Life (Oxford 2019); he is co-editor of both The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford 2011), and The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory (Oxford 2016). Find out more.
Sophie Chao
Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) with Karin Bolender and Eben Kirksey. Her DECRA project examines the conflicting perceptions, knowledges, and practices surrounding kangaroo-human relations in contemporary Australia. Sophie previously worked for the international not-for-profit organization Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia and the UK.
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