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Dr Laura Simpson Reeves is a Research Fellow in the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Social Work at The University of Queensland. She is a highly experienced qualitative social researcher with a strong background across the social sciences and humanities. Her program of research explores how structural and cultural forces shape experiences of inequality and disadvantage, working at the intersection of culture, community, and care. It is grounded in a deep commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion, with a strong interdisciplinary focus that spans sociology, community development, communications, and social work. Her work is characterised by applied, impact-driven practice and methodological rigor, especially in qualitative and visual methods, with a sustained focus on vulnerable and marginalised populations. She is passionate about translating research into practice and amplifying voices of those with lived/living experience.

In addition to her research focus, Laura demonstrates a passion for creating safe and inclusive spaces in which research and teaching can be grounded and learning shared. She has a strong history of service and mentoring with students and early career academics, especially those returning to study or coming from non-traditional or marginalised backgrounds.

Kiah Smith is a Sociologist with expertise in environment, sustainable development and food justice. With a strong record of international publications on food justice, food security, climate resilience, financialisation, ethical trade, green economy, sustainable livelihoods, gender empowerment and food system governance, Kiah’s work contributes new understandings of the social dimensions of food system transformation at the intersection of multiple crises. Using mostly qualitative, participatory methodologies (such as action research and future scenario planning), her research emphasises the role that civil society plays in transformative policy making that is systems-focused and inclusive of social-ecological perspectives. For example, her ARC DECRA study - Fair Food, Civil Society and the Sustainable Development Goals - examined how civic stakeholders are able to resist, reshape or redefine what a just and sustainable food system might look like, based on co-design and collaboration with civil society, local government, advocacy groups and grassroots food actors (food hubs, community gardens, and food charities) in Australia. This interdisciplinary research agenda can best be summarised as one where ‘food futures’ are closely connected with ‘deep’ sustainability, rights, justice and empowerment, within the growing field of ‘sustainability transitions’.

Other past and present studies include: Multifunctional horticulture - land, labour and environments; Ethical consumption and COVID; Responsible innovation in digital agriculture; Employment policy and indigenous food sovereignty in remote Australia; Financialisation of food and farmland in Australia; Resilience and governance of Australian food systems during crisis; and Mapping civil society, human rights and the SDGs. Kiah has conducted research in Australia and internationally, she has worked with local NGOs (in Africa and Australia), with the United Nations Research Institute in Geneva, and in multidisciplinary research teams spanning the social and natural sciences both here and abroad. Kiah is also a Future Earth Fellow, treasurer of the Australasian Agrifood Research Network, and executive member of the RC40 on Food and Agriculture in the International Sociological Association. Her work at the nexus of academia and policy/advocacy contributes to the growing movement for the right to food in Australia and globally.

Dr Leigh Sperka is a Lecturer in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. She graduated with First Class Honours from the Bachelor of Health, Sport and Physical Education in 2013 and completed her Doctor of Philosophy in 2018.

Her research focuses on the outsourcing of education. This includes investigating decision-making around the practice, how outsourcing impacts curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, and student perspectives of outsourced lessons.

In her teaching, she emphasises the importance of creating an inclusive environment in Health and Physical Education that allows all students to participate and experience success. Students are at the centre of her teaching. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has been awarded:

• U21 Health Sciences Teaching Excellence Award (2021)
• UQ Commendation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (2020)
• Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences Awards for Teaching Excellence (2020)

Associate Professor Stahl's research interests focus on the relationship between education and society, socio-cultural studies of education, student identities, equity/inequality, and social change. Currently, his research projects and publications encompass theoretical and empirical studies of youth, sociology of schooling in a neoliberal age, gendered subjectivities, equity and difference as well as educational reform.

To date his scholarship has focused upon:

· Social and educational inequalities

· Learner Identities

· Student mobilities

· Masculinities

· Widening participation

He holds a PhD in Education (University of Cambridge), a Masters degree in International Education (New York University) and a Bachelors Degree in Secondary Education and English (Indiana University). He is a member and former SIG Convener for the Australian Association of Researchers in Education (AARE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Associate Professor Stahl was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council (2017-2019) where he researched the relationship between extreme disadvantage, masculinities and widening participation (DE170100510). In 2019, he was ranked by The Australian newspaper as one of the top 40 researchers in Australia who were less than 10 years into their career. Dr. Stahl is particularly interested in qualitative research methods, visual research methods and ethnography. At the University of Queensland, Dr. Stahl's teaches at the Undergraduate, Masters and PhD levels.

Recently, he was awarded two ARC Discovery projects: Including the voice of boys and young men in their health and well-being education (DP250102623) and Investigating how boys and young men experience their digital lives (DP250104014).

His research has been published in a range of international journals, including the Pedagogy, Culture and Society, the Journal of Educational Policy and Gender and Education. His books include Identity, neoliberalism and aspiration: educating white working-class boys (2015, Routledge), Ethnography of a neoliberal school: building cultures of success (2018, Routledge), Working-class masculinities in Australian higher education: policies, pathways and progress (2021, Routledge) and Gendering the First-in-Family Experience: Transitions, Liminality, Performativity (2022, Routledge) co-authored with Sarah McDonald.

He has held leadership positions in the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE).

Prior to working as a researcher, Stahl taught in secondary schools in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ken Tann is an in-house linguist at the UQ Business School. He specializes in applying linguistic and semiotic techniques to interdisciplinary research, and helps industry professionals add value to their professions through effective communication. His analytical framework has been applied across media, forensic, education and workplace contexts. He is currently supervising PhD research in marketing, finance and aged care.

Professor Wojtek Tomaszewski is Deputy Director (Research) and a Research Group Leader at the Institute for Social Science Research, and is also Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre). He holds a BSc and MSc in Mathematics, as well as an MA in Sociology from the University of Warsaw, Poland and a PhD in Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Wojtek joined UQ from the National Centre for Social Research in London and has specialist expertise in quantitative research methods and advanced statistical analysis.

Wojtek has a strong research interest in the impact of disadvantage on educational and labour market outcomes in young people. He has undertaken a number of research projects for the State and Commonwealth Governments in Australia, and previously for the British Government. He has published in high-profile international academic journals across the fields of social sciences, education, and beyond.

Mair Underwood is an anthropologist in the School of Social Science who specialises in bodies. In particular she explores how body modifications (such as tattoo or bodybuilding) are used to create, reflect and disrupt social boundaries such as those of gender and class. She is especially interested in the social lives of image and performance enhancing drugs: how they acquire meaning through social interactions and how they alter social interactions.

She also has an interest in assessment practice and has conducted research into assessment techniques that promote student engagement and academic integrity and compiled them into a searchable database called the UQ Assessment Ideas Factory

Mair is passionate about community engagement and engages with the community through her YouTube profile and podcasts such as this one with VPA Australia https://www.vpa.com.au/podcast

Mair Underwood coordinates two courses:

SOSC2190 Human Bodies, Culture and Society

SOCY1060 Gender, Sexuality and Society: An Introduction

Bio: Dr. Severine van Bommel is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland's School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability. With a keen interest in rural development and agricultural extension, her research focuses on understanding the role of experts and expertise in orchestrating effective governance performances for systemic transformation of natural resource dilemmas and competing claims. Through an interpretive lens, her research aims to support experts in communicating and collaborating with farmers and communities in situations of social learning, multi-stakeholder partnerships, farmer field schools, community-based NRM or co-inquiry and co-design.

Research Interests:

• Rural development
• Agricultural extension
• Sustainable development
• Indigenous engagement
• Environmental credentials verification

Current Projects:

- the co-design of a virtual platform for verifying environmental credentials for Australian beef producers - developing indigenous engagement methods (storian) for Australian researchers working with Ni-Vanuatu livestock farmers - making visible and challenging gender norms in transdisciplinary research and development practice - facilitating more-than-human participatory research and practice

Publications: Dr. van Bommel has contributed to significant works in her field, including:

• "Rural Development for Sustainable Social-Ecological Systems: Putting Communities First" (Palgrave)
• "Forest and Nature Governance: A Practice-Based Approach" (Springer)
• "Forest-People Interfaces" (Wageningen Academic Publishers)

Her research contributions have been published in prestigious journals and presented at international conferences such as IPA, MOPAN, IFSA, and APEN.

Teaching: In addition to her research, Dr. van Bommel teaches courses on:

• Leadership in rural industries (MSc)
• Effective stakeholder engagement (MSc)
• Human-wildlife interactions (MSc and BSc)

Mentorship and Community Engagement: Dr. van Bommel is dedicated to mentoring early career researchers interested in interpretive methods within the APSA mentoring program. She also runs an International Virtual Community of Practice for Interpretive Practitioners, fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange in the field.

Associate Professor Elske van de Fliert is the Director of the Centre for Communication and Social Change. She also convenes the Communication for Social Change plan of the Master of Communication program. She obtained a PhD in Communication & Innovation in 1993 from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. She joined the UQ School of Journalism and Communication (now School of Communication and Arts) in July 2006. Prior to this, Elske worked for two decades in research, development and teaching positions in Indonesia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka, with work also across China, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines and Kyrgyzstan.

Elske’s research interests include participatory development communication, facilitation of transdisciplinary research for sustainable development, and impact assessment of social change processes. Over the years at UQ, she has been conducting research projects in Indonesia, Timor Leste, Philippines and Mongolia. She has published widely on a range of topics related to participatory research and communication in sustainable rural development.

I am an urban sociologist and an expert in urban community in all its forms. My research encompasses the outer suburbs in Australia, the gentrifying inner city and informal communities in cities in the Global South. My work focuses on how different urban places and spatial logic in the city impact our opportunities to form attachments to neighbourhoods and each other.

Internationally, I have written extensively on urban poverty in Bangladesh, India and Indonesia and I am currently involved in work on climate change and its effects on the urban poor in collaboration with colleagues in Indonesia, Brazil and Solomon Islands. My latest research concerns the impact of climate change and natural disasters on the urban poor. More than 1 billion people live in informal urban settlements or slums. These people are among the most vulnerable to the impact of climate change. However, adaptation and mitigation policies are being formulated at multiple scales, often without considering the voices of the poor.

I am the Bachelor of Arts Sociology program convenor and an award-winning teacher. I teach courses at all levels in our undergraduate sociology program, including Introduction to Sociology (SOCY1050), An Urban World (SOCY2340) and Advanced Studies in Social Thought: Getting the Big Picture (SOCY3345).

I am also an award-winning photographer (you can see some of my work on my Flickr page.

I am open to proposals from potential Honours and PhD students who share my passion for understanding the social life of cities. Whether you're from Australia, the Global South, or anywhere else in the world, I look forward to the possibility of working together.

Mark Western's various roles at The University of Queensland included Senior Lecturer to Professor in Sociology, co-Director of The University of Queensland Social Research Centre (2003-2008), Founding Director of the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR, 2009 - 2022), Research Director for The Queensland Commitment (2023 - 2025) and Director of HASS Research Infrastructure (2025). As Founding Director of ISSR, Mark led Australia's largest multidisciplinary social science research institute with a track record of advanced academic social science research and high impact research and policy engagement with government, industry and the not-for-profit sector. As Research Director for The Queensland Commitment, Mark contributed to the design and implementation of The Queensland Commitment at UQ, and its supporting research and evaluation program.

Mark has a personal research program that spans academic publishing across sociology and cognate social science disciplines. He has also led and contributed to major research and evaluation programs and projects for external government and non-government partners. He is a former Chief Investigator on the ARC Centre of Excellence for Policing and Security and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families Over the Life Course.

Mark is a current member of the National Research Infrastructure (NRI) Advisory Group, advising the Australian government on NRI policy and strategy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Chair of the Academy's Policy Committee, and a member of its Board of Directors. He is a former member of the ARC College of Experts, ERA Chair, and Engagement and Impact Deputy Chair.

He has edited and authored 7 books, and over 120 book chapters, journal articles and commissioned reports and held research grants and contracts worth approximately $120 million.

Emily is an experienced evaluator and policy analyst whose experience is designing, collecting and interpreting high quality evidence to improve outcomes for priority groups. She has deep, strategic knowledge of the Australian public sector, working alongside government agencies to design, implement and evaluate large, complex social policy initiatives.

Emily's motivated by helping her clients to use evaluation and research to understand the people they serve - conumers, service providers, Executive sponsors, advocacy groups - to deliver tailored programs and achieve better outcomes both for people and human service systems.

Her ability to build rapid rapport, synthesise complex information and balance perspectives means she is an in-demand strategic facilitator and trusted advisor to the executives of government agencies.

Her work creates impact because of her ability to connect information and people. She's great at taking complex information and making it simple and easy to action.

Charlotte Young is a research fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland. Charlotte is a qualitative researcher with interdisciplinary interests spanning sociology, public health, health promotion, and migration studies. Her research focuses on the systemic drivers of migrant health inequities and how they can be redressed. Charlotte is also interested in the ways migrants adapt and respond to systemic and structural drivers of inequity. Recently, she has been exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted migrant and refugee background tertiary students and how young culturally and linguistically diverse social media influencers have been promoting COVID-safe behaviours online. Charlotte also explores immigrant organisations as critical settings to influence health and wellbeing. She is passionate about producing impactful research to affect positive change and tackling migrant health problems in solidarity with the communities they affect. Charlotte also has experience conducting evaluation research for large-scale health interventions.

Tomasz Zając is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) at the University of Queensland (UQ) and the Deputy Lead of the Opportunities research program at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (the Life Course Centre). Tomasz holds an MA and PhD in Sociology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. Before joining ISSR, he was an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Warsaw and a Researcher at the National Processing Institute (OPI) in Warsaw, where he developed the Polish Graduate Tracking System (ELA) on behalf of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. He was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley and The Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), University of Bamberg, Germany.

Tomasz's research interests include social stratification and inequality, migration, gender, and life-course research, especially individual educational trajectories and their links with labour market outcomes. He specialises in quantitative methods, particularly in using population-wide linked administrative data.

Moreover, he has been involved in developing research infrastructure. He currently leads two activity streams with the Social Science Research Infrastructure Network supported by the Australian Research Data Commons.