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The Australian National University
Gender Relations Centre
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
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Academic and General Staff


Professor Margaret JOLLY BA Hons, PhD (Syd), FASSA
Professor / Head

Margaret Jolly is a historical anthropologist. She received her BA(Hons) and PhD from the University of Sydney, and taught for many years at Macquarie University in Sydney. She has published extensively on women in the Pacific and especially Vanuatu, on the Cook voyages, on gender in colonial history and on the politics of tradition.
Her major publications are Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (1994), Women's difference: sexuality and maternity in colonial and postcolonial discourses (ed) (1994), Family and gender in the Pacific: domestic contradictions and the colonial impact (1989) co-edited with Martha Macintyre, and Sites of desire, economies of pleasure: sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. (1997) co-edited with Lenore Manderson, Maternities and modernities: colonial and postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific. (1998) co-edited with Kalpana Ram, Borders of being: citizenship, fertility, and sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. (2001) co-edited with Kalpana Ram, Birthing in the Pacific: beyond tradition and modernity? (2002) and Engendering health in the Pacific: colonial and contemporary perspectives. (forthcoming), both co-edited with Vicki Lukere. Her latest book is An ocean of difference (forthcoming).

Complete publications list
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Carolyn Brewer BA (Canterbury), BA Hons first class (Murdoch), PhD (Murdoch).

Carolyn Brewer trained as a primary school teacher at Canterbury Teachers’ College in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She was posted to Ashburton, a small town in mid-Canterbury, where she eventually married, had two daughters and from where she escaped in 1989. As a mature-aged student she studied Feminist Studies and Religious Studies at Canterbury University, before going to Murdoch University in Perth to focus her honours year on the debates surrounding the ordination of women into the Anglican Church in Australia. She accepted a Murdoch doctoral scholarship to further explore the impact of Christianity on women’s lives – this time Catholicism in the Philippines.



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Greg Dvorak PhD (ANU)
Visiting Fellow

 

 

 



Dr Tamara JACKA BA Hons (ANU), PhD (Adelaide)
Senior Fellow

Tamara Jacka's research interests are in gender relations and social change in contemporary China, women in rural-urban migration, and the politics and epistemologies of cross-cultural research. Her major publications are Women's Work in Rural China. Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and On the move: women and rural-to-urban migration in contemporary China, co-edited with Arianne Gaetano (Columbia University Press, 2004). She has just completed an ethnography of women in rural-urban migration in China, to be published as Rural women in urban China: Gender, migration, and social change . (ME Sharpe, in press), and has begun new projects on the discourse on suzhi ('human quality') in contemporary China and changing approaches to gender and development in rural China.

Complete Publications List.
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Dr Elizabeth REID AO, FASSA
Visiting Fellow

Elizabeth Reid is a development practitioner and a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Relations Centre at The Australian National University.

As a development practitioner she has worked on a range of aspects of socio-economic development, including the developmental dimensions of the HIV epidemic, social and community development, including health and gender, agricultural production, transportation and marketing, including land usage and ownership and rural development.

Her work has included: policy, programme and project analysis, design, review and evaluation; the design and conduct of training, team building and capacity building courses for multi-lateral, national and local institutions; and the development of methodologies for community mobilisation, national consensus building, and capacity building approaches to development.

Her work has been consistently based on gender and equity principles and oriented towards the strengthening of social capital. She works in English and French and has published extensively.

Elizabeth has worked in Africa and Asia as well as in the Middle East, the Caribbean and Central America, and Eastern Europe and the CIS States.

Previous positions she has held include United Nations Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Papua New Guinea, Founding Director of the UNDP HIV and Development Programme, Founding Director of the Asia and Pacific Centre for Women and Development, and adviser to the Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon. E. G. Whitlam QC, on matters relating to the welfare of women and children.

Elizabeth was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001 for service to international relations, particularly through the United Nations Development Programme, to the welfare of women and to HIV/AIDS policy development, both in Australia and internationally. She is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Dr Larissa Sandy BA (Hons) (Curtin) PhD (ANU)

Larissa Sandy’s research explores women’s agency in sex work and the complexity of life choices available to women in developing countries. Her research interests include women’s agency; sex work; contract labour; HIV, gender and development; women’s labour migration; forced migration and trafficking; sexual violence and gender-based violence; working conditions in the sex industry; and regulations. Larissa has a BA in Asian Studies with Honours (IA) in Social Science from Curtin University. Her PhD, entitled, “My blood, sweat and tears: Female Sex Workers in Cambodia – Victims, Vectors or Agents?, was carried out at the ANU. As a part of her work at the GRC, Larissa is exploring women’s experiences of debt-bondage in the Cambodian sex industry.


 


Dr John P TAYLOR BA, MA (Auck.), PhD (ANU)
GRC Visiting Fellow

John Taylor's current research explores gender relations and male subjectivities in northern Vanuatu, particularly through the social, economic and symbolic context of kava bisnis. This represents the initial component of a more extensive project that aims to expand knowledge of island Melanesian communities, sexuality and gender through the study of masculinities. John holds a BA in English literature and anthropology and a MA in social anthropology from the University of Auckland. Research for the latter resulted in the monograph Consuming Identity: Modernity and Tourism in New Zealand (1998). His PhD was carried out at the Australian National University and the thesis "Ways of the place: History, cosmology and material culture in North Pentecost, Vanuatu" (2003) won the inaugural prize for a doctoral thesis awarded by the Australian Anthropological Society in 2004. He is currently revising it for publication as a book. Other research interests include the anthropology of Vanuatu and island Melanesia; cosmologies and colonialism in cross-cultural perspective; ethnohistory and historiography; kinship and gender; modernity, ethnicity and identity politics in the Pacific region.

Complete Publications List
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Dr John Ballard, BA Dartmouth, JD Harvard, PhD Tufts
Visiting Fellow

John Ballard's research interests are public policy, particularly on health issues including HIV and on gender and sexuality, in Australia, Papua New Guinea and the region.  
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Dr Michelle Antoinette, BA (Hons) Monash, PhD ANU
Research and Publications Administrator

Dr Michelle Antoinette is the Centre's Research and Publications Administrator. She is also an independent researcher of modern and contemporary Asian art. Prior to joining GRC, Michelle received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research through the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra, and her BA (Hons) in Visual Culture from Monash University, Melbourne. Her major research interests include modern and contemporary Asian visual cultures and histories of art; Southeast Asian and Asian studies; colonialism and postcolonialism; theories of race; hybrid and creole cultures; modernity and globalisation; migration, diaspora, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism; memory discourse and practice; theories of the body and embodiment; gender and sexuality; popular culture and cultural studies. Michelle's recent publications include "Intimate Pasts Resurrected and Released: Sex, death, and faith in the art of Josè Legaspi" for the journal Biography (Winter 2008), and her chapter "Deterritorializing Aesthetics: International art and its new cosmopolitanisms, from an Indonesian Perspective", in Jurriëns & de Kloet (eds), Cosmopatriots - On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters (Rodopi 2007). Forthcoming publications include "The Art of Race: Rethinking Malaysian Identity Through the Art of Wong Hoy Cheong", in Goh, Gabrielpillai, Holden & Khoo eds., Interrogating Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (Routledge, forthcoming 2008) and "Contending with Present Pasts: on developing Southeast Asian art histories", in Jaynie Anderson ed., Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence (Miegunyah Press, 2009).



Ms Janet Beard,
Centre Administrator

Janet is the part time Gender Relations Centre Administrator. She holds a BFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. She has previously worked as an administrator at The New School’s Writing Centre, as well as an English teacher and tutor. Her debut novel, Beneath the Pines, is to be published in the U.S. in September 2008, and she is currently at work on a second book.


 

 


Katherine Lepani, BA (University of Hawai‘i at Manoa), MPH (Queensland), PhD (ANU)
GRC Visiting Fellow, Gender Relations Centre

Katherine is a long-term resident of Papua New Guinea, where she has extensive community-based and public sector work experience in primary health care, HIV, gender and development, and theatre arts. She coordinated the development of PNG’s first national multi-sectoral strategy for responding to HIV and currently serves as an adviser for Sanap Wantaim, the AusAID-funded HIV and AIDS support program in Papua New Guinea. Katherine holds a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) degree awarded with Distinction from the University of Hawai‘i (1991), and a Master of Public Health (Tropical Health) degree from the University of Queensland (2001). She received the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine Medal in 2001 for her MPH thesis. A recent PhD student in the Gender Relations Centre, she was awarded her doctorate in February 2008. Her PhD thesis, “In the process of knowing”: Making Sense of HIV and AIDS in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, explores the interface between biomedical and cultural models of sexuality, risk, and disease and argues for the importance of community engagement in responding to the HIV epidemic. Her current research interest in HIV focuses on gender vulnerabilities, perceptions of risk, and the social context of voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) services in Papua New Guinea. She is a lecturer in Social Foundations of Medicine in the ANU College of Medicine and Health Sciences and teaches qualitative methods for health research in the Master of Culture, Health, and Medicine program.  

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Kasumi Nishigaya

Kasumi Nishigaya received a Ph.D in Epidemiology and Population Health from ANU (2006) with the thesis entitled Gender, Mobility and Premarital Sexuality: A Case Study of Women in the Garment Manufacturing Industry in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She is a social development specialist with over fifteen years of professional work experience in the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment mainly in Southeast Asia, but also in other continents. She has held positions in UNHCR as protection officer and program manager and in JICA as principal technical advisor on gender equality and women’s empowerment in large country programs and at its headquarters in Tokyo. Most recently, she has worked as the Acting Team Leader for the Asian Development Bank’s Project in Lao PDR. Her current research interests are gender-based violence in post-conflict societies, especially its prevalence and responses, gender mainstreaming in comparative perspectives, and feminist research methods. She is currently updating her thesis for publication as a book and journal articles.

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