School of Social and Political Sciences

Lisa Adkins is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney. Her home discipline is Sociology. She has previously held an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professorship (2015-19) and Chairs in Sociology at the University of Manchester and at Goldsmiths, University of London. She served as a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts (Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences Panel), 2011-13.

Lisa's interventions in the discipline of Sociology lie in the areas of economic sociology, social theory and feminist theory. Currently, she is working on questions of asset ownership and social inequality, with a particular focus on the restructuring of lifetimes in the asset economy. This team-based research is supported by the Australian Research Council and by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). Her most recent books are The Time of Money (2018, Stanford University Press) and The Asset Economy (2020, Polity Press) co-authored with Martijn Konings and Melinda Cooper. With Gareth Bryant and Martijn Konings, Lisa is currently directing a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Strategic Research Theme on Asset Ownership and the New Inequality, one of six Faculty Strategic Research Themes known as FutureFix. Lisa is also joint editor-in-chief of the journal Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor&Francis).

B.Med.Sc., M.B., B.S., M.D. (Melbourne), M.A., Ph.D. (Pennsylvania); FAHA, FASSA, FAHMS, FRSN

Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Health and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. From 2012-17 Warwick Anderson was ARC Laureate Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Additionally, he has an affiliation with History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. In 2018-19 he was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, based in the Department of the History of Science.

As an historian of science, medicine and public health, focusing on Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the United States, Professor Anderson is especially interested in ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also studied the history of immunology (particularly autoimmunity) and perceptions of 'waste'. Occasionally he writes programmatically on postcolonial science studies and, more generally, on science and globalisation. In recent years, his research has focussed on the conceptual development of disease ecology and planetary health, i.e., the population health impacts of climate change.

Before moving to Sydney in 2007, Prof. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Wisconsin he also served on the steering committee of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and was a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Previously Prof. Anderson taught at Harvard, Melbourne (where he founded the Centre for Health and Society, now the Centre for Health Equity), UCSF and Berkeley. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Australian Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (US), and the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations. He was the Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2005-6), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-8). He has held visiting professorships at Harvard, Manchester and McMaster universities. In 2013 he was John Hope Franklin Fellow at Duke University and the Whitney J. Oakes Fellow in the Humanities Center at Princeton University. His books have been awarded the W.K. Hancock Prize (AHA, 2004); the Philippines National Book Award for Social Science (2008); the NSW Premier's General History Prize (2009 and 2014); the William H. Welch Medal (AAHM, 2010); and the Ludwik Fleck Prize (4S, 2010).

Prof. Anderson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (FAHA), the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA), the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (FAHMS), and the Royal Society of NSW (FRSN). In 2023, he was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science for distinguished contributions to science and technology studies, the Society's lifetime achievement award. In 2025, he was awarded the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize for lifetime achievement in public health history by the American Public Health Association. The Australian's research review named him Australia's 'top historian' for 2026.

PhD Queen's University of Belfast, MPhil University College Cork, BA (Licenciatura) Universidad de Granada

Luis is a teacher and researcher in Anthropology and Spanish & Latin American Studies. He has extensive fieldwork experience in Latin America and Spain. In Venezuela he started conducting fieldwork in 2003 and has since spent over a decade living, working, and researching there. In addition to his scholarly work, he is a contributor to various public media outlets.

His first book, Venezuela Reframed (Zed, 2015), provided the first diachronic analysis of the formation of a social movement in Bolivarian Venezuela. With a focus on the indigenous movement, the book theorises the emergence of “state-supporting” social movements, showing the political synergies that unite some state actors and large sectors of the indigenous population in pursuit of socio-economic enfranchisement.

Luis’s new book project, entitled Property in Paradise, is a historical ethnography of the production of space, property relations and class formation in Southern Venezuela. In this work, he builds on the concepts “modern accumulation” and “defetishisation of environments” to shed light on the sociocultural dynamics and outcomes of a process of land enclosure that is transforming radically the lives of the inhabitants of that region.

In another ongoing project, Luis is studying the usage of national symbols in contemporary political scenarios. Grounding this study in anthropological theory on political communication and behaviour in periods of social instability, he contributes to debates about the distinctive foundations of democratic and authoritarian ideals and the social conditions that enable their realisation. As part of this project, he has coordinated the first comparative exploration of usages and functions of national flags in Spain and Latin America (with contributions published in AIBR, 2022).

In the early 2010s, Luis also co-coordinated pioneering comparative studies of race and ethnic categorisation in Latin American censuses. His co-edited volumes Everlasting Countdowns (2012) and The Politics of Identity in Latin American Censuses (2016, originally published as a special issue of JILAR [2014]) set theoretical foundations for scholars who have subsequently approached this area of research. Building on those projects, Luis recently completed a small project exploring understandings of race, mestizaje, and criollismo among blind people in Chile and Venezuela (published in LARR, 2025). This project demonstrates that visually perceived markers are not self-evidently constitutive of race as a social category and enables a reconsideration of how different notions of admixture continue to permeate ideals of personhood and social relations in Latin American countries.

Editorial work is an important part of Luis’s academic experience. This includes membership in the boards of Latin American Perspectives (Participating Editor) and two open-access anthropology journals that publish primarily in Spanish: AIBR and Antropologías del Sur.

Luis was born in Villarrobledo (Spain) and has personally experienced the positive results that solid state investment in public education and health systems can generate. His primary and secondary schooling took place in his local public institutions, and his BA degree was also obtained at a public University in Spain. When he needed to visit doctors, he was able to attend clinics and hospitals that did not make patients pay fees when leaving the premises. He is married and has two sons, and for their and other kids’ future he’d very much like to see strong public services supporting civic citizenship growth in our societies.

"Comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology; it is sociology itself."  - Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method

A/Prof Salvatore Babones is a quantitative comparative sociologist. He also engages in research on Australian social policy and the sociology of knowledge. He is currently researching books on:

• Australian Immigration Policy (2026 project)
• Authority in Science and Society (2027-2028 project)
• The Sociology of Sanatana Dharma (long-term project)

Salvatore's short book The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts was named "Best on Politics 2018" by the Wall Street Journal. His 2021 book Australia's Universities: Can They Reform? was covered in every major Australian newspaper. And his 2025 book,  Dharma Democracy: How India Built the Third World's First Democracy, showed how international rankings systematically underrate India's democratic success.

Dr Francesco Bailo is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney. He is interested in researching forms of political engagement and political talk on social media. He has researched the emergence and dynamics of online communities, the role between news organisations and social media, and the interdependence between social media activists and news organisations. He has engaged and applied quantitative research methods developing expertise in quantitative text analysis (NLP) and network analysis.

Susan Banki studies the political, institutional, and social contexts that explain the roots of and solutions to human rights violations and social justice abuses. In particular, she is interested in the ways that questions of sovereignty, transnationalism, and citizenship/membership have shaped our responses to conflict and injustice, particularly examining institutions such as the international refugee regime, diasporas, and the humanitarian system. Susan's focus is in the Asia-Pacific region, where she has conducted extensive field research in Thailand, Myanmar/Burma, Cambodia, Nepal, Bangladesh and Japan on refugee/migrant protection, statelessness and border control. Her current projects include: the work of diasporas in responding to acute crises at home; humanitarian responses to complex displacement contexts; and the role of creative arts in transnational activism.

Professor Barbara Barbosa Neves (PhD, FRSA, FHEA) is an award-winning sociologist of technology, ageing, and health based at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. She holds a prestigious Sydney Horizon Fellowship in AI social science and is an incoming ARC Future Fellow (2026-2030). Dr Neves is an internationally recognised expert on loneliness, social isolation, and digital inequalities in later life.

Barbara has secured more than $7 million dollars in competitive external funding from scientific and industry bodies in Australia, the European Union, and Canada. She currently holds an ARC Discovery Project on loneliness and technology and two MRFFs on dementia. Additionally, she is the Lead Chief Investigator of a national evaluation of the ACVVS for the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care. Her co-designed, mixed-methods research focuses on how technologies like AI, VR, and robotics can benefit rather than exclude older people (65+).

This research has received 28 esteemed awards in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia -- and it has been used to refine technology design and inform social policy and care practices (Canada, Australia, Europe). Dr Neves has a background in sociology and human-computer interaction. Prior to moving to Australia, she was an Associate Director at the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada.

Barbara has taught over 10 courses and 4,000 students throughout her academic career. She was named a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) in 2023. In 2022, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK) and named among the ABC Top 5 Humanities and Social Science Scholars in Australia in 2019. Barbara has held several visiting positions (University of Oxford, University of Oslo, University of Louvain, University of Toronto) and delivered over 50 invited keynotes and 70 talks across five continents.

Her research has been published in top-tier journals across social and computer sciences. Five of her articles have won scientific and industry awards in sociology, gerontology, and computer science. She serves in the editorial board of 'Sociology', the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association.

Barbara is passionate about public communication. She is a regular media commentator with over 200 media contributions. Her work has appeared in the ABC, CBC, SBS, The Guardian, among others. She has written several op-eds for the ABC and The Conversation and appeared in the SBS documentary "What does Australia really think about old people?"

Further information can be found on her website.

Dr. Beem’s interests include the intersection of international and domestic policy and politics in governing the environment. She examines the ways in which science or other forms of expert knowledge gain authority in political decision making, while also attending to agenda setting and institutional dynamics. The interaction of issue frames, decision venues, and advocacy groups that transcends national borders in environmental policymaking is of particular interest.

Dr. Beem’s research focuses on marine policy and protected areas and she has done extensive work on the roles of science and policy learning in the development of fisheries policies for the management of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. Her current research projects include evaluating the dynamics of change that led to the re-zoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park; examining implementation of the World Heritage Convention the United States, Canada, and Australia, and how policy instruments create new domestic political institutions that may provide opportunities or constraints to national and international advocacy groups; and a comparison of marine protection policies in the US and Australia.

Dr. Beem is also committed to career development and teaching. In 2006 she initiated and currently runs the Making Policy Work initiative (mpw), a program designed to educate students about policy relevant careers in the public, private, and non-profit sectors and to build connections between university students and practitioners. In addition to a weekly email list and webpage, she holds periodic workshops to enhance career skills and decision-making. Her student focused teaching philosophy and innovative teaching approaches that use “serious games” to enhance learning outcomes contributed to her being awarded the 2008 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching (Design and Practice) Award.

Michael’s research concentrates on the evolution of economic policy. He has written books on the history of macroeconomic policy in Australia and central banking in China. His interests include the history of monetary theory and policy, labour institutions and macroeconomic policy, and socialism and social democracy. He is currently working on a book for Verso on market socialism and workplace democracy.

Dr Juliet Bennett is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies (SCHS), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Charles Perkins Centre (CPC), at The University of Sydney. 

Juliet’s research draws connections across scales and subjects to activate co-creative and systemic interventions for personal and planetary wellbeing. She is currently working on SCHS and CPC’s joint research program on the social life of food and nourishment applying critical social theory to systems of food production and consumption.

Juliet’s book Reimagining Peace through Process Philosophy provides a new inroad to process thinking and a tool for to assist in its application for more peaceful, just and sustainable futures. 

Juliet has a PhD, MPhil and MA in peace and conflict studies, through which she explored structural violence with a focus on themes of narratives, religion and education. Juliet has taught undergraduate units in narratives and peace studies at Lenoir Rhyne University in North Carolina, and postgraduate units in peace and conflict studies at The University of Sydney.

Juliet has also worked at Sydney Policy Lab as Collaborative Research Manager, applying community-led research and policymaking methods for improved social outcomes, and spent five years as Executive Officer and Acting Director of Sydney Peace Foundation organising the annual Sydney Peace Prize. 

Juliet is committed to connecting traditional academic research with policy and practice, and communicating insights from research to diverse audiences.

Dr. Gwilym David Blunt is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sydney. Prior to his arrival in Sydney he held appointments at City, University of London and the University of Cambridge. He holds degrees from the University of Western Ontario, The University of Cambridge, and University College London. He is a Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for International Policy Studies, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy,and a Fellow of the Ethics Centre.

Dr. Blunt's first book Global Poverty, Injustice, and Resistance was published with Cambridge University Press in 2020; it examines the injustice of radical inequality and how those who experience this injustice can reassert their agency through resistance. He has also published with major academic journals such as International Affairs, International Theory, Human Rights Quarterly, and Raisons Politique.

He has also be awarded major research grants from Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, The Social Science and Research Council of Canada, and the Leverhulme Trust.

BA Hons 1 LLB Hons 1 Sydney PGCert MRes PhD London School of Economics

Associate Professor Anna Boucher is a global migration expert as it intersects with public policy, comparative politics and legal studies. Her research covers immigration, gender and racial diversity, inequality and labour market and regulatory change as well as the skill selection of migrants. She has written three books on migration that cover skilled immigration, gender diversity and workplace exploitation. The first, Gender, Migration and the Global Race for Talent (Manchester University Press) creates diversity indicators that have been used by international agencies. Her second book with Professor Justin Gest, Crossroads: Immigration Regimes in an Age of Demographic Change (Cambridge University Press, New York) compares immigration regimes across 30 countries and has won multiple awards and nomination for the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Politics, considered the second most prestigious prizes globally in political science. Her third book Patterns of Exploitation: Migrant Worker Rights in Advanced Democracies came out in 2023 with Oxford University Press (New York) and analyses labour market exploitation of migrants in four countries, building on a database of 1,912 migrants in 907 court cases that she constructed with a team of lawyers. It won awards in policy impact. Her new book “Out of the Depths: The First Collection of Holocaust Songs” (with Joseph Toltz) is out in April 2026 with Manchester University Press. Anna is a regular commentator in the media and consultant to domestic and global governments on migration issues. She holds qualifications in political science and law and is an admitted solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW, having completed a placement at Clayton Utz Law Firm (Sydney). In 2026, she is seconded from the University of Sydney at 70% to Fragomen Law Firm Global working on international projects and she is also a Research Fellow at the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). She sits on the Immigration Minister of Australia’s Advisory Council on Skilled Migration Expert Sub-Committee (MACSM). Prior to coming to Sydney University, she was an Australian Commonwealth Scholar and Bucerius Scholar in Migration Studies at the London School of Economics where she completed her masters, doctorate and teaching qualifications.

Alex Broom is Professor of Sociology, Founder and Co-Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, and Dean's Fellow - Research Collaboration and University Engagement, at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney. 

He is also Academic Director (SBE) at the Australian Research Council and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He is recognised as an international leader in sociology, with a specific interest in health, illness and care. His work takes a person-centred approach, qualitatively exploring the intersections of individual experience and social, political and economic context. His career has been dedicated to building inclusive, interdisciplinary research communities and translating scholarship into meaningful outcomes for policy, industry, and society. All of his work embodies the broad aim of generating insights and creative collaborations which foster health, wellbeing and care, across all forms of life on our planet. His latest books are A World of Resistance (Harvard University Press) and A Sociology of Care: Living Relationally in a Fractured World (Polity).

He has held a range of leadership roles across leading national and international institutions, with portfolio-level responsibility for research strategy, performance and capacity building. He is the Founding Director of the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies at the University of Sydney, now a Faculty Flagship Centre, which he established and scaled into a major social science-led, interdisciplinary research platform, delivering sustained growth in research income, outputs, cross-university and cross-sector collaboration. Under his leadership, SCHS has generated significant return on investment through the expansion of large-scale programs, external partnerships, and research capacity, alongside measurable uplift in early- and mid-career researcher development. He also co-developed and has co-led an Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Research Hub, working with extensive industry, government and community partners to deliver translational research outcomes at scale, and has led major initiatives spanning research strategy, industry engagement, and cross-sector collaboration.

He has spent much of the last 25 years researching areas of life steeped in taboo; those often receiving limited or fleeting attention, and are at times, sites of avoidance and neglect. This includes a focus on death, dying and bereavement, and people's 'everyday' experiences of loss, commemoration and grief, in collaboration with family, carers and professionals. Most recently this work has examined, via the lived experiences of people who are dying, how wealth (Sociology, 2026), time (Social Science & Medicine, 2025) and collective desires (Sociology of Health & Illness, 2025) mediate the end of life, and beyond. This work specifically aims to inform improved policy and practice for better care the dying and their loved ones.  

Over the course of his career, and working in partnership with community, government and industry, he has led or co-led over $30 million in social science research projects, including 16 Australian Research Council (ARC) projects and an ARC Future Fellowship. He has chaired and contributed to governance, promotions, and culture-change processes, across both research and broader institutional domains, including those relating to funding, transdisciplinarity, and organisational research and innovation strategy.  In 2026, he was appointed Academic Director (SBE) at the Australian Research Council, where he contributes to national research priorities, strengthens evaluation systems, and fosters a high-performing and globally engaged research ecosystem. His skill set includes bridging higher education, government, industry and civil society, in service of research excellence and societal impact.

His work rests upon the following pillars: First, the importance of a person-centred perspective, and deriving change from the lived experiences of individuals, communities and practitioners. Second, that social, cultural, economic and political dynamics are constitutive – rather than mere influencers – of illness and wellness experiences and central to improving health outcomes. Finally, that multi- and interdisciplinary partnerships are critical for enacting meaningful, sustainable change in healthcare. Working with patients/people, families, communities, clinicians, health services and industry, he has operationalised these values to develop the knowledge that can improve care for the dying (e.g. Broom, 2015), enhance opportunities for living well with cancer (e.g. Broom & Kenny, 2021), and contribute to the global response to antimicrobial resistance through innovative strategies for behavioural and social change (e.g. Doron & Broom, 2026). 

His research has been widely cited (15,000+ citations; H-index 68) and he has been ranked among the most cited researchers worldwide. He was previously an ARC Future Fellow and Head of Sociology at UQ, and a Scientia Professor and Co-Director of the Practical Justice Initiative at UNSW. He has held Honorary/Visiting positions at UC Berkeley, King's College London, The University of Vienna, The University of British Columbia and Paris Dauphine University. He was previously a Member of the ARC’s College of Experts (2021-25), and Chair/Co-Chair of the Health Research Council of New Zealand’s funding committee (2018-2024). He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA). 

He is a regular contributor to public conversations about key issues and invited speaker for industry and peak professional bodies. Examples of engagement include: 

The Conversation: We talked to dozens of people about their experiences of grief: Here's what we learnt (and why it is different from what you might think).

The Conversation: A ‘good death’ has a price – and a new study shows not everyone in palliative care can afford it. 

The Conversation: Parents find Health Star Ratings confusing and unhelpful. We need a better food labelling system.  

The Conversation: 'Paris in spring, Bali in winter: How bucket lists help cancer patients manage life and death'

The Conversation: How the food industry shapes your child's fussy eating

The Conversation: 'A cancer diagnosis can be devastating but for some it gives a license to live'.

The Conversation: 'Cancer is increasingly survivable, but it shouldn't depend on your capacity to 'wrangle' the health system'

The Conversation: 'What junior doctors' unpaid overtime tells us about the toxic side of medicine'.

The Conversation: 'Friendships between young men are more than just beers and banter'.

The Conversation: 'Olivia Newton-John gave a voice to those with cancer and shifted the focus to the life of survivors'.

The Conversation: 'You should care about your doctor's health, because it matters to yours'.

The Conversation:'It's your fault you got cancer: the blame game that doesn't help anyone.

The Conversation: 'Before you go ... are you in denial about death?'

The Conversation: 'Infection Control: Why doctors overprescribe antibiotics'

The Conversation: 'The Dirty Disease': both smokers and non-smokers get lung cancer. They face stigma on top of illness.

Craig Browne works in the area of critical social theory. He is currently finalising a book comparing influential contemporary social theories and extending his research into the relationship between recognition, symbolic power and social imaginaries. He has received funding for research comparing pragmatist notions of creative democracy with ideas of democratic creativity in contemporary French social and political thought. This research into creative democracy builds on his Ph.D. dissertation: Projects and Anticipations: a Comparative Analysis of Habermas’ and Giddens’ Conceptions of the Social.

Gareth Bryant is Chair of the Discpline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow and economist-in-residence with the Sydney Policy Lab.

Gareth is a political economist who researches how public policy and public finance can create more sustainable, equal and democratic economies. His research has focused on issues including climate finance, renewable energy, higher education, housing, labour and Indigenous justice.

Gareth is the author of Carbon Markets in a Climate-Changing Capitalism (Cambridge University Press 2019), Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures (Agenda Publishing 2024, with Sophie Webber) and Decarbonising Electricity: The Promise of Renewable Energy Regions (Cambridge University Press 2024, with James Goodman et al.).

Gareth has been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for 2021-24 for a project investigating new spaces of fiscal power in an asset-based economy. Previously he was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project on energy transitions and was awarded the Sydney Research Accelerator (SOAR) Prize for early career researchers at the University of Sydney. Gareth was also awarded the Global Network for Financial Geography (FINGEO) dissertation prize and the Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) journal article prize.

Gareth teaches across the pluralist, heterodox and radical Political Economy program at the University of Sydney. He has taught units of study on the political economy of the environment, the history of economic thought, and the dynamics of global capitalism, among others. Gareth is a recipient of a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Award.

Gareth co-edits the Progress in Political Economy (PPE) online blog and associated Manchester University Press book series. Gareth and Adam David Morton were jointly awarded the Special Achievement prize from the Online Media Caucus of the International Studies Association (ISA) for their work as co-editors of the blog.

Damien Cahill's research focuses primarily on the nature and dynamics of neoliberalism. He is particularly interested in the relationship between neoliberal theory and practice, reasons for the durability of neoliberalism, and the ways it is being re-shaped by crisis. More broadly his research focuses on the economy-society nexus and the theoretical tools scholars use to understand this relationship. Damien has worked as a shop assistant, labourer, student newspaper editor and political adviser, and spent several periods of time on the dole. He is a trade union activist and a keen runner.

Luciano Carment is a Lecturer and Horizon Educator in the discipline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. His research is in the field of critical macro finance with specific interests in inflation, monetary policy, financial aspects of economic development and East Asian economies. During his doctoral studies he was a guest scholar at Meiji University in Tokyo. He has a special interest in the theory and practice of tertiary education particularly the application of educational technologies, equity in education and the pedagogy of economics. He has taught broadly in political economy including in the areas of macroeconomic theory, money and finance, economic policy and post-graduate research skills.

Beatriz is senior lecturer in the Discipline of Sociology and Criminology. Her broad research interest is in social justice, social change and theories of transformation. She has pursued these themes through two research pathways. One, focuses on social exclusion/inclusion issues in contemporary urban China; the other focuses on transformative learning and methodologies.
Her work on China has looked at processes of social inclusion and exclusion of rural migrant workers entering small urban centres, as opposed to those who move to the large metropolises. Her book Small Town China: Rural Labour and Social Exclusion (Routledge 2011) develops that theme through the case study of a county in north China. She has also published work on the impact of social policy on welfare provision in China, including the rapid growth of the philanthropic sector.
Her work on transformative learning arises from her passion in teaching, and her commitment to develop students' pro-social behaviours. Her work in this area combines Theory U - an awareness-based method for changing systems - with transformative education theory, and seeks to identify methods and tools to foster greater self and eco-awareness, alongside the relational capacities needed to develop a transformative learning experience that can lead to positive social change.

I am a Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project. My research focus today is on Multispecies Justice, or how the concepts, practices and institutionalisation of justice need to be transformed to take into account ecological realities and the ethical standing of all Earth beings.

A longtime human rights activist, before joining the academy I was head of Indigenous policy at the Australian Human Rights Commission and worked in grass roots democratization and human rights movements in Central America. As a human right scholar, my books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology and The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach (both with Cambridge University Press 2008 and 2018), with Richard Sherwin, A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury 2019), with Alex Lefebvre, the Subject of Human Rights (Stanford University Press 2020), and with Moira Gatens and Millicent Churcher, Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Embodiment, and Affect (Routledge 2021).

In recent years, and very much in light of the ecological and animal crisis, I have turned my attention to injustices and violence against the more than human. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, I began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. My latest book, Summertime (Penguin Random House, 2021) was written in recognition of the critical urgency of conveying the complex conceptual recognition of the multispecies harms of the climate catastrophe in ways that can provoke affect and hence action. Summertime was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for non-fiction.

My most recent publication, written with other members of the Multispecies Justice Collective is Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2025). I have a forthcoming book with Professor Roseemary Lyster and A/Professor Phillipa McCormack entitles Multispecies Climate Justice, Disasters and Responsibility with Edward Elgar. 

I write in a range of genres, including research monographs and articles, long and short form opinion pieces, creative non-fiction and memoir.

M.A. (Oxon), M.Sc.(Oxon), Ph.D. (Macquarie), FHEA, MRSN

Dr. Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Chair of Discipline at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke, 2022), Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (Duke, 2025), and Plantations: Extraction, Extinction, Emergence (Cambridge, 2026), and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke, 2022) and Worlds Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (Duke, 2026). Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

Minglu Chen is the Associate Dean (Student Affairs) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She is an associate professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Director of the China Studies Centre’s Local China Project. Her research focuses on social and political change in China, especially the interaction between entrepreneurs and the state, local governance, and women’s political participation. Her work has been published in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of East Asian Studies, Australian Journal of Political Science, and The Pacific Review. 

Peter John Chen teaches media politics, public policy and Australian politics at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His research interests focus on the relationship between media and politics: with a special interest in new media's impacts on electoral politics, media regulation, social movements, and the politics of animal protection. His work includes an interest in the political content of film, the movement of political and policy ideas, and the role of networks in collective action. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics and the International Journal of Electronic Governance. Peter is currently working on a new book on the politics of animal welfare in Australia.

BComm (Melb), MPubPolicy (Syd), PhD (UNSW)

Lynne's research spans two fields: energy and heterodox (non-conventional) economics.

She is recognised as a leading Australian scholar of French Régulation theory, a heterodox school of economic thought inspired by Marxian and (Original) Institutional Economics, to advance understanding of contemporary 'energy and society' issues. Her research contributes to debates on electricity price formation, household energy (un)affordability, energy (in)justice, energy problematisation, energy security and crises, the economic-energy-environment relation, and the economic regulation of energy sectors.

Her heterodox economics research focuses on the conceptualisation of heterodoxy, the reasons why its various schools have been marginalised within the economics discipline, and the insights from different schools to understand and propose solutions to contemporary pressing problems like climate change, the energy crisis, and inequality.

The topic of her PhD was the restructuring of the Australian electricity sector.

Her submission on wholesale electricity prices to the 2023 ACTU's Inquiry into Price Gouging and Unfair Pricing Practices was cited in the final report by the Inquiry's Chair, Professor Allan Fels.

Lynne was an independent member of the Australian Federal Government's 2011-12 Energy White Paper Reference Group, a former Board member of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (2009-15) and the Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (2011-14), and former Chair of AGL's Customer Council (2012-15). In 2023, Lynne was the academic member of AusNet's 10-member Independent Stakeholder Reference Group to provide advice, from a customer and stakeholder perspective, on the company's 2026-31 expenditure, revenue, and pricing proposals to be approved by the Australian Energy Regulator.

Prior to academia, Lynne worked as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, as a senior executive with two of Australia's largest utilities (EnergyAustralia and Sydney Water), as Chief of Staff to two Federal Government Ministers, and Economic Adviser to the South Australian Premier.

David Clune was for many years the Manager of the NSW Parliament's Research Service and the Parliament's Historian. He is currently an Honorary Associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney and Consultant Historian to the NSW Legislative Council History Project. Dr Clune has written extensively about NSW politics and history. He is the editor (with Michael Hogan) of The People's Choice: electoral politics in twentieth century NSW, author (with Gareth Griffith) of Decision and Deliberation: the Parliament of NSW, 1856-2003, editor (with Ken Turner) of The Premiers of NSW, 1856-2005 and The Governors of NSW, 1788-2010, and author of Inside the Wran Era: the Ron Mulock Memoirs. Dr Clune was a member of the Sesquicentenary of Responsible Government in NSW Committee and the Governor Macquarie Bicentenary Committee. He was awarded the Centenary of Federation Medal in 2001 and the Order of Australia Medal in 2011.

Dr Anjalee Cohen is a senior lecturer in social and cultural anthropology. Prior to joining the discipline of anthropology at the University of Sydney, she was a researcher at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, and the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales. She specialises in medical anthropology and Northern Thailand. She has published on youth mental healthcare experiences in Australia, methamphetamine use among northern Thai youth, as well as northern Thai youth subcultures, including violent youth gangs. Her current research focuses on Thailand's village health volunteers and their role in managing a range of illnesses includng COVID-19.