Chair – Heather Fraser
Heather Fraser is an Associate Professor in Social Work at Queensland University, where she coordinates the Master of Social Work Program. She started her career in the 1980s as a second wave feminist mostly working with people left homeless through family and domestic violence. Today Heather identifies as a scholar-activist and a critical social worker who, in the last decade, has become involved in critical animal studies and been learning to paint animals. With Nik Taylor, Heather recently wrote Companion animals and domestic violence: Rescuing me, rescuing you (2019), London: Palgrave. And with Damien Riggs, Shoshana Rosenberg and Nik Taylor, she wrote Queer Entanglements. Intersections of Gender, Sexuality & Animal Companionship (2021), Cambridge University Press.

Heather is also a member of the Communications sub-committee.

Vice Chair – Zoei Sutton
Zoei Sutton (she/her) is a lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University, Australia. She co-founded the International Association of Vegan Sociologists in 2020 and The Australian Sociological Association’s Sociology & Animals thematic group in 2017, and specialises in multispecies sociology and qualitative research. She pursues critical, nonhuman animal-centric scholarship that meaningfully considers the experiences of other animals and their entanglements with humans in our shared social world. Find out more about her work here.

Zoei is also a member of the Activity Fund sub-committee.

Treasurer – Lisa Powell

Powell is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Accounting at Monash University. Lisa is an interdisciplinary educator and researcher bridging accounting, psychology, and education. Her research incorporates posthumanist, ecofeminist, and queer theory perspectives to explore the role of accounting and accountability in social and environmental challenges. Lisa has a particular interest in more-than-human flourishing where her research explores how sanctuaries and rescue organisations account for the flourishing of animals in their care. In her education work, Lisa embeds interdisciplinary approaches to create space for ecological emotions and provide accounting and business students with opportunities to cultivate compassion and connectedness with the more-than-human world.

Secretary – Chantelle Bayes

Chantelle Bayes is a writer, researcher and academic with a background in the environmental humanities. Her book Reimagining Urban nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities was published in 2023 with Liverpool University press. Her research interests include urban nature, posthumanism, critical animal studies, creative writing practices and contemporary literature – in the animal studies space she is particularly interested in how we write and read fiction for multispecies communities. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Southern Cross University doing arts-based and youth-led research for climate change education. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chantelle-bayes-b39a0050/

Chantelle is also a member of the Indigenous Engagement sub committee and the Activity Fund sub-committee.

Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (Scribe 2020) – winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel 2021. Laura is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc., 2013) and an Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University. Her latest collection is Gunflower (Scribe 2023). www.laurajeanmckay.com.au

Laura is the co-leader of the Communications sub-committee and a member of the Indigenous Engagement sub-committee and the Activity Fund sub-committee.

Alexandra McEwan

Alexandra is an interdisciplinary scholar and Lecturer in Law at the College of Law, Criminology, and Justice at CQUniversity (CQU). Alexandra’s research agenda focuses on animals, the law, and ethics, and her thinking is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory. In 2021, she introduced Animal Law into CQU’s undergraduate law program and in December 2022, led an international study tour focusing on wildlife law and protection in Vietnam.

Alexandra’s recent research and publications have focused on wildlife trafficking in Vietnam, and on Ag-gag laws. She also has an interest in the role of transformation learning principles in growing lawyers for nature.

Summary: animal protection law, wildlife law and protection, transformation learning, Bourdieu

My staff profile: https://staff-profiles.cqu.edu.au/home/view/22680

Josephine Browne

Josephine Browne is a multidisciplinary researcher and sessional academic at Southern Cross University. She has an earlier career as a Narrative Therapist specialising in disenfranchised grief and domestic violence. At Monash University in the 1990s, her initial research led to the establishment of Australia’s first pet bereavement service, Agape. Her current research is focused on human-animal relations and masculinities in sociology and literature. She publishes fiction, non-fiction, reviews and academic work. Her forthcoming chapter on utopian and dystopian sociology, examining ‘The Animals In That Country’ (McKay 2020), will be published by Routledge in a collection co-edited with Zoei Sutton in 2023. She is also writing a collection of narratives with Chantelle Bayes on more-than-human subjectivities. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Feminisms, Gender & Advocacy (formerly Outskirts).

Josephine is also a member of the Indigenous Engagement sub-committee.

Lynley Tulloch
Lynley Tulloch is a lecturer in early childhood education (ECE) at
Wintec/Te Pūkenga in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has a PhD in the field of sustainability education and ideologies of nature.

Lynley is a vegan animal rights activist with research interests in critical animal studies. She has published in this field including an autoethnography of vegan praxis and encounters with the meat-eating cyborg (in Review of Contemporary Philosophy, 2016); and an autoethnography of anti-dairy vegan activism in New Zealand (Animal Studies Journal, 2018).

Lynley has also published an article on video activism, the dairy industry and the politics of sight (with Paul Judge in Video
Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 2018). An advocate of grounded scholarship, Lynley founded Starfish Bobby Calf Project in 2015 and is involved in the rescue of animals from the dairy industry, particularly bobby calves. Starfish Bobby Calf Project focuses on educating the public to think more deeply and critically about human-animal relations and the depravations of dairy farming. Her work has been showcased in a series of photos by Jinki Cambronero. She is currently working with Paul Judge and Bridget Sutherland on a documentary film chronicling the activities of Starfish Bobby Calf Project and the wider animal save movement.
—photo by Jinki Cambronero.

Rebecca Scollen

Rebecca Scollen is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is Program Director of the Bachelor of Creative Arts and Community Wellbeing.  Rebecca’s research interests come together at the intersection of creative arts and animal studies.  In particular, how the creative arts can raise awareness and increase engagement in animal welfare and environmental protection issues AND how animals are represented in creative arts (whether live, deceased or fictional) and the implications of this involvement from an ethical point of view and from a meaning-generation perspective. Along with AASA, Rebecca is also a member of Wildlife Tourism Australia and Arts Health Network Queensland.

Rebecca was the 2025 Conference organiser and is a member of the Conference Art sub-committee.

Fernando do Campo
Dr Fernando do Campo (b. Mar del Plata, Argentina 1987) is an artist based in Sydney where he is Art Domain Coordinator and Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design. Since 2015 he also produces work as the HSSH (House Sparrow Society for Humans). Fernando’s practice engages the histories of non-human animals via anthropomorphism, speculative fiction and archival research. The global south and the legacies of colonialism and modernism that hold these animal narratives are a focus for both his research and the material studio explorations. Recent projects have focused on the possibility of painting as a diaristic archival process and listening as a performative gesture through which to complicate the anthropocentric gaze of both the maker and viewer of artworks. Fernando has presented solo exhibitions in Australia and the USA, and group exhibitions internationally. He is a Sir General John Monash Foundation Scholar, the first artist to ever receive this prestigious award for emerging Australian leaders to study abroad. Fernando is currently working on an ongoing research project with the Green-Wood Cemetery and the Brooklyn Museum, New York and an iterative solo exhibition being co-presented by Contemporary Art Tasmania, UNSW Galleries and PICA across 2021-22 and touring nationally in 2023. He is Artist-in-Residence at the State Library of NSW 2021-22 and represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.

Fernando is a member of the Conference Art sub-committee and the Activity Fund sub-committee.

Emily Major

Emily Major is an early career researcher who uses Critical Animal Studies, ecofeminist ethics of care, and intersectional approaches with advocacy to promote empathy, compassion, and kindness to nonhuman animals. While she advocates for all species of animals, her current research interests are focused on species of animals that are ostracised in society, such as ‘pest’ or ‘invasive’ species. Emily recently graduated with her PhD in Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her doctoral research critiqued the mainstream possums as ‘pests’ discourse and considered how principles from compassionate conservation could assist in alleviating the socially sanctioned violence and cruelty that is currently targeted towards the maligned marsupials. She has experience in qualitative thematic analysis, reflexive analysis, feminist interviewing, and observational fieldwork. Emily is also a Board Member of NZAVS (New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society), a Research Fellow at the ethics think tank, PAN Works, and mum of four rats, Eri, Trea, Tanza, and Nia.

Emily is the co-leader of the Communications sub-committee.

Philip McKibbin

Philip (Piripi) McKibbin is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, of Pākehā (NZ European) and Māori (Kāi Tahu) descent. He is currently pursuing his PhD on the Politics of Love and Multispecies Justice at the University of Sydney, and he holds degrees in English and Philosophy from the University of Auckland, as well as diplomas in te reo Māori (the Māori language) from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa.

Philip is a member of the Indigenous Engagement sub-committee.

Dinesh Wadiwel

Dinesh is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a background in social and political theory. Dinesh is an active critical animal studies scholar, and also has extensive research experience in disability rights. He is author of The War against Animals (Leiden / Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2015). His second monograph, Animals and Capital, will be released by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

Dinesh is the previous Chair and a member of the Indigenous Engagement sub-committee and the Activity Fund sub-committee.

Nik Taylor

Nik Taylor is a critical and public sociologist whose research focusses on mechanisms of power and marginalisation expressed in/through human relations with other species and is informed by critical/ intersectional feminism. Nik is currently the co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where she also teaches topics in the Human Services program that focus on human-animal violence links; scholar-advocacy; social change, and crime and deviance, particularly domestic violence and animal abuse. Nik’s latest books include Queer Entanglements (Cambridge University Press, with Damien Riggs, Heather Fraser and Shoshana Rosenberg) and Rescuing Me, Rescuing You: Companion Animals and Domestic Violence (Palgrave, 2019, with Heather Fraser).