Chair – 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.

Outputs

Monograph: The War Against Animals. Boston: Brill, 2015. http://www.brill.com/products/book/war-against-animals

Website/blog
Staff Profile

Deputy 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

Secretary – Peter Chen

Dr Peter J. Chen is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, where he teaches Australian and regional politics, media politics, and public policy. He is the author of Animal welfare in Australia: politics and policy (2016) and Australian politics in a digital age (2013), as well as the co-editor of Double disillusion: the 2016 Australian federal election (2018) and Australian Politics and Public Policy (2019).

Sue Pike
Sue teaches indigenous studies and creative writing at the University of Melbourne. She also researches global animal welfare policy with the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Animal Visions (2019 ) and has published a range of chapters and articles relating to non-human animals, most recently with a focus on the snakes of the Eastern Maar Nation. Sue gets her hands dirty most days working on co-creating safe habitat for those snakes and all the other critters who, like her, love living in the Stony Rises. More details on Sue’s publications can be found at http://suehallpyke.com. She also Instagrams @suzimez and twitters @suehallpyke

Clare Archer-lean
Discipline Leader, English Literature, University of the Sunshine Coast, Clare’s research focuses on the ways in which literary and cultural representations of animals inform human perceptions of their own identities and their place in the natural environment.

She has chapter, monograph and literary articles on animals in literature particularly in Indigenous story telling. She is also experienced in trans-disciplinary approaches and is lead investigator on a $25 000 competitive state funded (DSITIA, Qld) project on communication, values and dingoes on Fraser Island, 2015

Laura Jean McKay

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (2020), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. She is an adjunct lecturer in creative writing at Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa. She was awarded an NZSA Waitangi Day Literary Honour in 2022. She is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia (2013) and her next book is a collection of short fiction, Gunflower (2023).

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).

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

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.

Emily Major
Emily Major is a PhD candidate at the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her research uses an antispeciesist Critical Animal Studies lens to consider the ethics of government-sanctioned pest control methods towards the ‘invasive’ brushtail possum in Aotearoa New Zealand, questioning whether positive empathy and/or compassionate conservation could potentially alleviate the mass suffering and unwarranted slaughter of these introduced ‘pest’ animals. Emily’s volunteer work includes academic activism with SAFE (Save Animals From Exploitation) in New Zealand and she is the Canterbury region’s Roots & Shoots coordinator for the Jane Goodall Institute of New Zealand. Most currently, she has become a committee member for the AASA (Australasian Animal Studies Association), hoping to combine her academic and volunteer aspirations towards the protection of animals whom need compassion the most.