Dr Akbar is a Pacific Fijian academic and researcher with extensive experience in community development research and teaching and has contributed to the Australian and International higher education sectors. Dr Akbar’s teaching and research are shaping how Indigenous knowledge is used to address the health inequities and social determinants of health of First Nations Peoples, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Māori & Pasifika (Pacific Islander) communities through co-designed solutions with the communities, and integrating community participatory action research and Indigenous perspectives and knowledge systems with social justice principles to promote equitable health and wellbeing. Heena's research addresses the social, cultural and economic burden of chronic conditions through a strength-based approach and impacts policy development that translates to better health outcomes for First Nations peoples, particularly Māori & Pasifika peoples in Australia and Internationally.
A/Prof Steve Bell is a senior social scientist at the Burnet Institute and has 22 years’ experience across South-East Asia (India, Nepal), Africa (Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe) and Western Pacific (Australia, Indonesia, PNG, Fiji) Regions. He works respectfully with not-for-profits, public institutions, businesses and community organisations, using innovative, inclusive, people-centred approaches to identify sustainable solutions to critical health challenges and accelerate health equity.
Steve’s work brings together lived experience, socio-ecological systems thinking and social theory to understand what works (or not) in global health and social development. He has researched and published widely on HIV, sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, neglected tropical diseases, TB and Indigenous health. He is particularly interested in understanding the socio-structural determinants of health and social inequities, and injustices associated with marginalisation due to gender, sexuality, age and geography. He has also published two books on interpretive and community-led approaches in research, design, monitoring and evaluation: ‘Peer research in health and social development: international perspectives on participatory research’ (2021), and ‘Monitoring and evaluation in health and social development: interpretive and ethnographic perspectives’ (2016). He is currently taking on new PhD students in these areas, so please do reach out to him at the Burnet Institute for a chat!
He holds associate professorial appointments at UNSW Sydney and The University of Queensland, is a Member of the International Editorial Board at Culture, Health & Sexuality, has been a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group, and has worked in research and consultancy roles with international governments, NGOs, UNAIDS, UNFPA and WHO.
Professor Emerita Jennifer Corrin researches on law reform and development in plural legal regimes and legal issues affecting small states. She is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow and in 2019 was a short-term Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. Professor Emerita Corrin has participated in a number of research grant projects including an ARC Discovery Grant, which investigated means of better managing the flow of public finances and people across Australia's international borders; and work on environmental issues in Solomon Islands, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Most recently she has been co-investigator in a project concerning inclusion of women’s voices in marine resource management in the Pacific, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Jennifer has been consulted as an expert in a number of legal cases.
Professor Emerita Jennifer Corrin has published in the areas of legal pluralism, comparative law, South Pacific law, customary law, human rights, court systems, evidence, civil procedure, family law, land law, constitutional law and contract. She is the author of Contract Law in the South Pacific and co-author of Introduction to South Pacific Law (heading for its 5th edition), Courts and Civil Procedure in the South Pacific and Proving Customary Law in the Common Law Courts of the South Pacific. In 2019, she co-edited and wrote several chapters in a book on adoption in plural legal regimes. Her latest publication is the co-edited book, Legal Systems of the Pacific: Introducing Sixteen Gems.
Before joining The University of Queensland, Professor Emerita Corrin spent six years at the University of the South Pacific, having joined the Faculty after nine years in her own legal firm in Solomon Islands. She retains strong links with the profession and is a life member of Solomon Islands Bar Association. Professor Emerita Corrin’s memberships include the Australian Academy of Law, the Board of the Commission on Legal Pluralism, the Executive Committee of the Australian Law Academics Association, and titular membership of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Legal Pluralism, a member of the International Editorial Board of the Journal of South Pacific Law, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Comparative Law Journal and of the Asia Pacific Journal of Environmental Law.
Karen is a Professor in Development Geography in the School of the Environment. She is ultimately interested in how people experience and can improve their capacities to respond to the triple crises of poverty, disaster risk, and climate change. Over the last 20 years, Karen has been undertaking applied research in resilient livelihoods, non-economic loss and damage, community-based adaptation, human mobility, and gender, in close partnership with governments and NGOs throughout the Asia-Pacific region. For example, Karen has worked with farmers in Aceh as they rebuilt their livelihoods following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with newly-settled migrants in Dhaka (Bangladesh) forced from their rural homelands due to flooding and erosion, with Elders in the Torres Strait recording their traditional environmental knowledge, and with several rural communities throughout the Pacific Islands region, documenting their everyday stories of climate impacts, adaptation, and loss and damage.
Karen has advised several governments and international organisations on adaptation, loss and damage, mobility, and gender. She is currently a member of the Expert Group on Non-Economic Losses for the Executive Committee of the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (United Nations Climate Change Secretariat). Karen's recent advances have included a world-first conceptualisation of loss and damage across the Pacific Islands (ARC Future Fellowship), an understanding of how climate change is violating people’s human rights (Vanuatu Government), the identification of optimisation points to improve adaptation outcomes (ARC Linkage), and strategies for supporting women in disaster recovery (UN Women).
Karen has managed 27 research and capacity building grants as lead or named CI worth >$6.4 million for the ARC, Australian Government, DFAT, National Geographic, OECD, Scope Global, UNDP, and others. She has published over 120 papers and book chapters, and over 80 reports, online commentaries, and policy briefs. Karen has supervised 14 PhD students to completion (9 as Principal) who have gone onto exciting roles in universities, government, the UN, and consultancy firms. She is currently supervising five PhD students, and teaches core courses into the environmental management and planning programs.
Karen proudly comes from the small town of Quirindi, which is Kamilaroi Country, on the Liverpool Plains in NSW. Growing up in a small, close-knit country town sparked Karen's interest in social, development, and environmental issues in rural communities.
I am a cultural anthropologist with expertise in gender, racism, medical anthropology, and critical global health. I have conducted extensive ethnographic research in Indonesia on health care, gendered violence, education, and racial stigma. The main focus of my research is Papua/West Papua, where my work has tried to document and understand evolving forms of racism and violence, including how people resist and create change. Over the past 15 years I have worked with local Papuan and international research teams on studies of violence, older women's life stories, HIV/AIDS, hospital birth, and health vulnerabilities. My research aims to develop knowledge of the nuances and complexities of conditions and experiences in West Papua, while also working with Papuan scholars and community members to address pressing health and social problems.
I recently completed a study with Els Tieneke Rieke Katmo and Meki Wetipo on how urban Papuans today understand and experience pregnancy and childbirth and how hospital childbirth may be creating more distrust in the health system rather than improving maternal health (2023, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology), published as part of a special issue on 'Reproducing Life in Conditions of Abandonment in Oceania', edited with Sandra Widmer. Another recent multi-sited study looks at vulnerabilities in Indonesia with Professor Lyn Parker (University of Western Australia) and others from the UK and Indonesia. The study used ethnography and surveys to develop a deeper, contextual understanding of who is vulnerable, how and why, and thus shed light on the concept of vulnerability and what it means. Forthcoming publications look at education in Indonesia's frontier economy, older women’s narratives of economic agency and survivance (co-authored with Yohana Baransano), and the challenges faced by newlyweds.
I am expanding my research with older Papuan women on their experiences of the late Dutch and early Indonesian era and their narratives of survivance to include Papuan women from different cultural backgrounds and urban/rural locations. Papuan women's stories and historical experiences are largely missing from public view but are needed to understand their important contributions to society and their roles in creating the future. I am also expanding my research on obstetrics and c-sections to understand the cultures of maternity care in Indonesia, both in terms of local cultural needs and preferences, and in relation to the cultures of medicine and obstetrics that exist in hospitals and birth centres. This will help us to understand how to create respectful maternity care in different cultural contexts, including in Australia. Related to this, I recently completed an action research project funded by the Australia Indonesia Institute (with Els Katmo) on co-designing cultural approaches to sexual and reproductive health, including HIV prevention, in West Papua.
Some recent publications that illustrate key themes of my research:
Jenny Munro, Els Tieneke Rieke Katmo & Meki Wetipo (2022) Hospital Births and Frontier Obstetrics in Urban West Papua, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 23:4-5, 388-406, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2022.211512
Jenny Munro & Yohana Baransano (2023), From saving to survivance: Rethinking Indigenous Papuan women's vulnerabilities in Jayapura, Indonesia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12367
Jenny Munro, Lyn Parker, and Yohana Baransano. "There's Money but No Work": Diploma Disruptions in Urban Papua. The Contemporary Pacific 33, no. 2 (2021): 364-384.
Jenny Munro (2020) Global HIV Interventions and Technocratic Racism in a West Papuan NGO, Medical Anthropology, 39:8, 704-719, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2020.1739036
Jenny Munro. (2020), ‘Saving our people’: health workers, medical citizenship, and vernacular sovereignties in West Papua. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26: 633-651. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13318
I am an experienced PhD supervisor in medical anthropology and gender studies. I am particularly interested in working with candidates who wish to study gender, health, or racism in (or in relation to) West Papua using anthropological, ethnographic and qualitative approaches. Research projects I have supervised include:
Intersectionality in Australian domestic violence services
Changing masculinities in Uzbekistan
Gender and education in Enga province, Papua New Guinea
Australian spiritual healing
Household meat practices in Indonesia and Australia
Women’s empowerment and energy in South Africa
Health of Pacific seasonal workers in Queensland Australia
Carers’ experiences with medicinal cannabis
Apitherapy in Australia
I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses on medical anthropology (ANTH2250/7250) and Pacific anthropology (ANTH2020). I also supervise Honours students and co-coordinate HHSS6002 (Honours coursework).
Dr Heather Stewart has been a journalist for 20 years, including almost a decade with the ABC in news and current affairs and covering content for ABC Radio National. She is a Walkley award winner and two times nominee and her work received a Gold and Bronze Medal in the New York Festival world's best radio documentary and for social equity coverage.
As a media, marketing and communication contractor and consultant in the mining, oil and gas, education, and the not for profile and public sectors in Queensland and Federal government departments she has honed her digital skills preparing integrated marketing communication plans and advertising campaigns and mentored executives in business digital transformation.
in 2016, she received a peer nomination for teaching innovation at TAFE Queensland where she ran two iterations of the Advanced Accelerated Diploma of Marketing positioning mature age student teams with small and medium businesses to create business plans and integrated marketing campaigns.
She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland in 2018 conducting a longitudinal study into the impact of technological change on ABC journalists and journalism while teaching students in media and communication at UQ and QUT.
Joining UQ as a teaching and learning academic in 2006, she has coordinated courses and received a UQ Teaching and Learning Excellence Award. She was the joint winner of the UQ Vice Chancellor's Award, a high commendation in the UQ Trailblazer award for her teaching model empowering students to tell First Nation stories in an informed way. She co-led the United Nations World Press Freedom Day Indigenous Voice Communication for Social Change Forum at UQ in 2010.
She currently is a Post Doc Researcher at The University of Queensland,with Associate Professor Sarah Jane Kelly and Associate Professor Remi Ayoko.
As Chief Investigator she is leading the Digital First Business Transformation Project and the Rapid Transition to Online Learning study with partners in eight regions. She is the leader of a team in a bilateral Australia Indonesia Centre SRR PAIR grant investigating the impact of COVID-19 on Indonesia's Small and Medium Enterprises.
Heather is a Visiting Professor at Universitas Indonesia.
Heather specialises in digital media, marketing and communication change management, journalism work practice research, digital transformation in the media, work-integrated learning, and change management, and best practice for coverage of mental health and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories.
In 2020, she supported the Service Learning Online Internship Program at Griffith University as a research assistant and cofacilitator with a focus on mental health and well-being, digital inclusivity, environmental sustainability, and all abilities inclusivity. The pilot project is the subject of a book chapter and series of research publications.
Dr Stewart is a UQ Mental Health Champion and First Responder supporting students and staff. If you are in need of support please email heather.stewart@uq.edu.au
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.
