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Andrea is a Post Doctoral Fellow in Digital Cultures and Societies at the University of Queensland . She got her PhD at USC Annenberg, and is originally from Colombia. Broadly, her research interests lie at the intersection of media and Science and Technology Studies.She studies mobilities; cultures of transnational, remote work; on-demand workers and freelancers; feminized maintenance of workspaces; media tales of tech; civic social media in Latin America.

Her research can be found in New Media and Society, the International Journal of Communication, Mass Communication & Society, and in the edited volume Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: A Casebook. She has also conducted research with the IDRC and USAID in projects about the "future of work" in the "Global South".

Dr Patricia Alves is a digital media educator and researcher, whose work bridges critical theory with contemporary practice. With expertise across social media studies, philosophy of technology, and democratic engagement, she brings both scholarly rigor and industry insight to her teaching and research.

Her doctoral research at the University of Technology Sydney applied postphenomenological frameworks to understand how social media platforms shape young Brazilians' political participation, work that speaks directly to global concerns about digital citizenship and democratic futures. Her academic work is enriched by over a decade of experience as a broadcast journalist in Brazil.

Patricia's pedagogical approach draws from extensive international experience across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Latin America, including collaborative projects with NGOs in Malaysia and Vietnam. She is committed to inclusive teaching practices that recognises the diverse backgrounds and learning needs of contemporary university students, creating learning environments where all students can thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Dr Reza Arab is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages and Cultures. His expertise lies in pragmatics, cultural linguistics, and intercultural communication, with a focus on how humour, metaphor, and language practices shape belonging, identity, and interaction across cultural and institutional contexts.

His research spans historical pragmatics, contrastive semantics, and discourse analysis, particularly in national and Indigenous settings. He has led and contributed to projects on humour in prison discourse, media representations, and political communication. Dr Arab is also the major convenor for English as an International Language (EIL) at UQ.

Dr. Ki Young Choi has been a researcher and educator in the field of Korean language, conducting research and teaching at universities in Korea, Thailand, and Australia since 2010. His key research interests include the critical analysis of Korean textbooks. Dr. Choi employs methods such as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Visual Image Analysis (VIA) to examine how ideologies, norms, and cultural values are represented in educational materials. His work significantly contributes to understanding and improving the quality of Korean language education internationally, aligning with broader efforts to promote Korean language and culture globally.

Dr Emma Crawford is an occupational therapist and researcher whose work centres on promoting wellbeing for infants, children, families and communities. Emma's primary focus is on cross-cultural projects that link with community organisations to create social change and reduce the impacts of disadvantage by supporting health enhancing environments and activities in early life. At the centre of Emma's work is the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 - ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing across all ages. Currently, Emma is leading several projects:

1) The BABI Project (research): refugee and asylum seeker families' expereinces during the perinatal period (systematic review, qualitative focus group and interview research)

2) The Uni-Friends program (student delivered service and student placement) - a social-emotional helth promotion program that draws on cultural responsiveness (The Making Connecitons Framework) and community development principles in an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Controlled School

3) LUCIE-NDC (research) - mothers' experiences of accessing Neuroprotective-Developmental Care in the first 12 months of their infants' lives

Emma has a strong interest in understanding human experiences, community-driven initiatives, and strengths-based, innovative, evidence based, complex approaches to wellbeing that consider individuals and systems She also carries out research regarding allied health student placements in culturally diverse settings including low-middle income countries and Indigenous contexts. She works as a Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia after having worked in a range of occupational therapy roles including with children with autism, with asylum seekers, with Indigenous Australians with chronic disease, and completing her PhD in Political Science and International Studies in 2015.

Maureen Engel is a Lecturer in Digital Culture in the School of Communication and Arts. She was formerly Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada. At Alberta, she served as Director of Digital Humanities (2011-13; 2015-2019), and Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts (2011-2019). Formally trained as a textual scholar, her background is in cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. She brings these methods/orientations to her research on digital culture, with a particular interest in locative media, XR, and gaming. She is the author of the game Go Queer, a ludic locative media experience of queer history.

Bonnie Evans is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research has addressed the intersections between feminist politics and screen media, particularly film and television, and she has published on true crime documentary. Her most recent journal article examines rape-revenge film in the context of the Me Too movement, specifically Corale Fargeat's 2017 film Revenge, and her forthcoming monograph The New Feminist Horror will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. Her book will explore aesthetic and thematic links between contemporary feminisms, including the Me Too Movement and recent horror cinema, and the PhD thesis that forms the basis of the book received a UQ Dean's Award for Oustanding HDR Theses in 2022. Bonnie teaches across film and television studies, media studies and digital media and in 2025, she won the HASS Early Career Teaching Excellence Award for her innovations in teaching.

She is interested in supervising HDR research on the following broad topics:

• Gender in film, television and media studies
• Feminist media studies
• Genre film, television and media, particularly horror
• Embodied approaches to media studies (phenomenology, affect, feeling and emotion)
• Documentary studies, true crime and reality television
• Gender and sexual violence in film and television
• Feminist movements in media (#MeToo, the fourth wave, second wave etc).

Victor is a Postdoctoral researcher at The University of Queensland, with a clinical and academic background in rehabilitation medicine, public health, and digital health equity. His research focuses on enhancing healthcare access for culturally and linguistically diverse communities, particularly through the development of telehealth innovations and inclusive service design. He has experience teaching public health and epidemiology to medical students and mentoring postgraduate researchers. Victor has co-authored peer-reviewed publications, contributed to national surveys, and helped develop validated tools, including the Digital Health Acceptability Questionnaire.

He completed his Medical Doctor degree in Peru, followed by a specialisation in Rehabilitation Medicine, and later earned a Master of Public Health and a PhD from UQ. His doctoral research explored equity in telehealth access and was supported by multiple competitive scholarships and grants. Victor has also held leadership roles in Peru’s national health system and sports medicine programs, including the PanAmerican Games Lima 2019. His work has been recognised through awards for research excellence, equity, and inclusion.

Dr Kayoko Hashimoto is Senior Lecturer at School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland, Australia. Her main research area is language policy with particular interest in construction of national and individual identities in fluid multicultural and multilingual contexts. She has been actively involved in national and international research and teaching collaborations in Australia, Japan, Vietnam, UK and Poland – a visiting fellow at Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo, Japan in 2024-2025 and an Erasmus+ mobility program scholar at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland in 2025. She is an editor/author of five books, including Rethinking the Asian Language Learning Paradigm in Australia (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), Japanese Language and Soft Power in Asia (2018, Palgrave Macmillan), and Beyond Native-Speakerism (2018, Routledge, with S. A. Houghton & D. J. Rivers).

Amy is a specialist in Francophone autobiographies of exile and trauma. She is author of Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War (U of Nebraska P, 2020), Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile (U of Nebraska P, 2015), and A la recherche d'un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context (Hackett, 2017). She has co-edited several volumes including Places of Traumatic Memory - a Global Context (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art (2013), and Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (U of Nebraska P, 2011). She is currently working on her new project, Terrorism Testimony: French Narratives of Survival.

Shuang is an internationally recognised intercultural communication expert, specialising in the areas of ageing and immigration, acculturation, identity negotiation, and intercultural relations. Her research examines how older people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds build a sense of home as they live and age in a foreign land; how family and community care can be integrated to provide culturally appropriate, accessible and sustainale care for older people; how older people interact with their physical, social, cultural, and digital environments to develop attachment to place; and the consequences of these interactions for well-being. Shuang's work has been published in high-ranking international journals, and two sole authored books: Identity, hybirdity and cultural home (2015; Rowman & Littlefield) and Chinese migrants ageing in a foreign land (2019; Routledge). Her lead-authored textbook, Introducing intercultural communication: Global cultures and contexts, is in its 4th edition, and previous three editions have been adopted in 26 countries across 4 continents, with holdings in libraries of prestigeous institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, University of Oxford, University of Cape Town, and University of Zurich. Shuang is a fellow of the International Academy of Intercultural Research.

Shuang welcomes inquires from prospective Higher Degreee by Research students who are interested in working with her on their theses in any of the related research areas.

Renuka is an applied economist and Asia-Pacific expert who specialises in a broad range of topics from trade wars (specifically the US-China trade war) to the sharing economy (AirBnb, Uber DiDi etc). Her areas of interest and expertise also extend to empirical and policy analysis in development and agricultural economics, tourism economics, international trade, and productivity growth analysis, using econometrics and macroeconomic models

My academic training is in language teaching and linguistics. I hold a BA/MA equivalent in Teaching Foreign Languages from Ryazan State Pedagogical University, Russia, MA in English with concentration in Linguistics and TESOL from East Carolina University, USA, and PhD in Linguistics from University of South Carolina. Before coming to UQ, I taught at tertiary level for 13 in three universities in Russia and USA. I have supervised teaching practicums and research projects at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and have taught a range of Russian, English, Linguistics and Language Teaching courses.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Bilingualism, Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching. I am interested in cognitive, social and pedagogical implications of bilingualism in its broad sense and specifically in the similarities and differences between language development in foreign/second language learners and heritage speakers. I am interested in finding which linguistic phenomena are more difficult to acquire and why. I study factors that can potentially affect the success of bilingual language acquisition. The broad goal of my research is to gain a better understanding of how language works in the case of bilingual acquisition and, as a result, to inform classroom language pedagogy and policy.

I am a cultural anthropologist with expertise in medical anthropology and critical global health. I have conducted extensive ethnographic research in Indonesia on health care, gendered violence, education, and racial stigma. My work in Papua/West Papua 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 maternity care and hospital experiences, older women's life stories, and HIV/AIDS. I recently completed a study with Els Tieneke Rieke and Meki Wetipo on how urban Papuans understand and experience hospital childbirth, as part of an effort to understand dire maternal health in this location (2023, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology), published in a special issue on 'Reproducing Life in Conditions of Abandonment in Oceania', edited with Alexandra Widmer (York University, Canada). Another recent study funded by the Australian Research Council looked 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. Recent publications look at education in gender inequality 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.My article in Asian Studies Review, "West Papuan ‘Housewives’ with HIV: Gender, Marriage, and Inequality in Indonesia," was awarded the 2025 Wang Gungwu Prize by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

Funded by the Australian Research Council, I am currently expanding my research on obstetrics and c-sections to understand the cultures and inequalities 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 project is conducted with Dr Els Rieke (Universitas Papua), Associate Professor Najmah (Universitas Sriwijaya), and Dr Elan Lazuardi (Universitas Gadjah Mada). I also maintain ongoing collaborations with researchers at the National University of Singapore and Fiji National University, focused on maternity care. In 2026 I will begin ethnographic research on maternity care in the Fiji Islands, supported by an ARC Future Fellowship.

I am an experienced PhD supervisor in medical anthropology. I am interested in working with research students who wish to conduct anthropological research in Indonesia or the Pacific Islands. I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses in medical anthropology (ANTH2250/7250), Pacific anthropology (ANTH2020) and gender (SOCY2050).

Maggie Nolan is an Associate Professor in Digital Cultural Heritage in the School of Communication and Arts and the recently appointed Director of AustLit. AustLit is a comprehensive information resource and research environment for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture and it supports and promotes research into Australian story-telling.

Maggie values interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to humanities research.

Maggie's research is in the broad field of Australian Literary Cultures. Her most recent project, "Close Relations: Irishness in Australian Literature", with Professor Ronan McDonald (UoM) and Professor Kath Bode (ANU) was awarded an ARC Discovery Grant in 2022.

Her research interests include:

• Contemporary Indigenous Literatures
• Hoaxes, Imposture and Mistaken Identity in Australian Literary Culture
• Reading, reception and the civic role of book clubs
• Digital literary studies
• Value in literary studies and the impact of ranking systems on the discipline.

Maggie is an experienced postgraduate supervisor and is available to supervise topics on Australian literary cultures. She also welcomes students and researcher who would like to work on projects linked to AustLit.

Melanie Saward is a proud Bigambul and Wakka Wakka woman. She is a lecturer of Australian Studies in the School of Communication and Arts and has recently (July 2024) been appointed as the coordinator of BlackWords. Her research looks at Indigeneity in romantic comedy fiction with a focus on diversity, intersectionality, and the Australian publishing industry.

Melanie is a writer and editor. Her debut fiction book, Burn, was published in 2023 with Affirm press and her first romantic comedy novel, Love Unleashed, was published in August 2024.

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.

Dr. Manu P. Sobti is a landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South with research specialisations in South Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Within the gamut of the Global, the Islamic, and the Non-Western, his continuing work examines borderland transgressions and their intertwinement with human mobilities, indigeneities, and the narratives of passage across these liminal sites. From his perspective, ‘land-centered’ and ‘deep’ place histories replete with human actors serve as critical and de-colonizing processes that negate the top-down master-narratives wherein borders and boundaries simplistically delineate nation states and their scalar range of internal geographies. He was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA (2006-16). He has a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT (Ahmedabad - INDIA), an SMarchS. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge - USA), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta - USA).

As a recognized scholar and innovative educator, Sobti served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15). This foreign study program worked intensively with local architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chandigarh, allowing students and faculty to interact actively, often within the gamut of the same project. He also set up a similar, research-focused program in Uzbekistan, engaging advanced undergraduate and graduate students to undertake field research at sites, archives and cultural landscapes. In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), creating opportunities for student research in diverse areas of architectural and urban history and in multiple global settings. He served as the Chair of SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies.

Sobti's research has been supported by multiple funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation of the Arts (USA), the Architectural Association (UK), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (USA), the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (UZBEKISTAN), the US Department of State Fulbright Foundation (USA), the Aga Khan Foundation (SWITZERLAND), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the Centre for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), the Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Stanford University (USA), in addition to city governments in New Delhi/Chandigarh/Ahmedabad (INDIA), Samarqand/Bukhara (UZBEKISTAN), Erzurum (TURKEY) and New Orleans (USA). He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar and received 7 Research Fellowships at important institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP (Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites) International Committee, responsible for debate and stewardship on contentious cultural heritage issues globally.

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.