Gender Relations Centre
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
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Gender Relations Centre
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
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Past Students
Greg Dvorak commenced his study at the Gender Relations Centre in March of 2004, in dual affiliation with the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. Prior to completing a Master of Arts degree in Pacific Islands studies and a certificate in international cultural studies, at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Greg worked for four years as a consultant to the Japanese government and nearly two years with a Tokyo advertising firm. He also holds a BA with highest Honours in Asian studies from Rutgers University. Having spent his life mostly in triangulation between Oceania, the United States, and Japan, Greg is interested in articulations, synchronicities, migrations, and flows between the local and the global. His current research is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited exploration of the layers of colonial and indigenous meanings, identities, and nostalgias that intersect at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. His project also interrogates the gendered embodiment of these contradictory subjectivities by looking at masculinities in this postcolonial, militarised contact zone. Navigating trans-temporally between childhood memory, Deleuzian theory, Marshallese narratives, local and diasporic American/Japanese reflections on ‘home’, and discourse ranging from ballistic missile testing to contemporary tuna fishing missions, Greg’s research will culminate in a multi-media project that includes both written and film components. A personal journey that became a film about Kwajalein: Interview. In the Loop, ABC Radio Australia, Australian Broadcasting Commission, July 3, 2007, accessed online 09/0707 Thesis title: Seeds From Afar, Flowers from the Reef: Re-membering the Coral and Concrete of Kwajalein Atoll
Katherine Lepani commenced her study at the Gender Relations Centre in February 2002 and is a PhD candidate in Anthropology. 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/AIDS, women’s and children’s health, gender and development, and theatre arts. She was the coordinator for the development of the PNG National HIV/AIDS Medium Term Plan 1998-2002, the first national multi-sectoral strategy for responding to the epidemic. She has recently worked with the PNG Health Services Support Program as Gender and Development Adviser and Formative Research Adviser. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (1991) and a Master of Public Health (Tropical Health) from the University of Queensland (2001). Katherine’s PhD research aims to contribute to the understanding of the social and cultural complexities that influence and shape the escalating HIV/AIDS epidemic in Papua New Guinea. The project builds on the foundational research she undertook at the Masters level in response to the identified need for qualitative research to inform HIV/AIDS policy and program development. The ethnographic focus of her study is the matrilineal Trobriand Islands in the Massim region of Milne Bay Province. The research considers Trobriand people’s perceptions of HIV and AIDS in relation to cultural meanings and lived experiences of sexuality, reproduction, health and illness. The research explores how Trobriand people make sense of the messages that are reaching them—messages that derive primarily from biomedical knowledge and epidemiological models of sexual practices, risk, and behaviour change—and whether and how they use this information to evaluate their own practice. Thesis title: "In the process of knowing": Making Sense of HIV and AIDS in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea
Markus Pangerl commenced his study at the Gender Relations Centre in April 2001 and is a PhD candidate in anthropology. Markus received a Masters in Anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 2000. While studying as an undergraduate Markus also worked as a social worker with disadvantaged youth from a wide range of national backgrounds. Markus’ scholarly interest was informed by the Anthropology of South Asia, with a theoretical focus on questions of colonial and postcolonial intricacies in representing authority, processes of identification and experiences of diasporic communities. This theoretical focus is strongly reflected in his Masters thesis, which critically examined the dialectic between coercive constraint and individual/collective creativity among indentured migration of Indian labourers to the British colony of Fiji between 1879 and 1930. His current multi-sited research on the secondary international migration of Indo-Fijians to the Pacific Rim concerns features of self-consciousness and active and strategic participation of people who are affected by migratory movements. Through a stress on diversity and choice as expressed in everyday life as well as narratives this work confronts the popular and scholarly representation of ‘mass migration’, or ‘exodus’. The multiple migratory movements of Indo-Fijians and the articulation thereof echo the diversity of histories of deterritorialisation along with practices of translocal networks, and thereby interrogate the individual and more collective constraints that affect Indo-Fijian familiarity with moving lives. Thesis title: Moving Lives - Routes and Routines of Indo-Fijian Migration
Thesis title: Inventing the Buddha: The Glorification of Ascetic Masculinity in Taiwanese Buddhism
Larissa Sandy commenced her study at the Gender Relations Centre in March 2001. While completing her Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, Larissa participated in a student exchange program with Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where she studied Korean language, culture, philosophy and the situation of women in Korean society. Returning from her exchange program in Seoul, South Korea, in her third year of undergraduate study Larissa completed fieldwork in Northeast Thailand. Her short project focused on the gender division of labour among the Akha in Northeast Thailand, for which she was awarded a high distinction. After finishing her undergraduate studies, Larissa commenced her Honours study that examined the formation of public policy on the sex industry in Perth, Western Australia. She holds a BA in Social Sciences with First-class Honours from Curtin University of Technology. Having travelled extensively throughout Southeast and North Asia, Larissa’s life motivation is the fight for women’s rights and gender equality in Australia and East Asia. Her work focuses on groups of women that suffer from the most severe forms of oppression and she is interested in the relationship between discrimination against these groups and the production and implementation of social policies. Her current research is an anthropological study of sex work and sex workers in Sihanoukville, a port city located in Southwest Cambodia. Through the collection of individual life histories, her project aims to reach an understanding of Cambodia’s sex industry that is not grounded in theory or politics but in the everyday lives and realities of women who earn a living from sex in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Her project also interrogates dominant contemporary and historical meanings of monetised sexual exchanges and the role these discourses play in shaping the conditions and structure of the Cambodian sex industry. Thesis title: 'My Blood, Sweat and Tears': Female Sex Workers in Cambodia - Victims, Vectors or Agents?
Before commencing her PhD at ANU at the beginning of 2004, Frances completed her History Honours degree at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Her general research interests centre on colonial race and gender relations, and the construction of colonial space. While Frances is particularly interested in such dynamics as they play(ed) out in the New Zealand and broader Pacific contexts, these themes transcend national and regional boundaries. Frances' PhD investigates the impact of steamship networks in the Pacific over the decades 1870s-1910s through the operations of the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand. In treating the steamship as a metaphor for (re)connection, she examines New Zealand as a space in and of the Pacific, the political, economic and cultural connections between it and other Pacific Islands, and the ocean itself as a site of Pacific history. Thesis title: Oceania Under Steam: Maritime Cultures, Colonial Histories, 1870s-1910s |
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Page last updated:
August 27 2008 Please direct all enquiries to: GRC Administrator Page authorised by: Director, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies |
| The Australian National University — CRICOS Provider Number 00120C |
Greg DVORAK
Katherine LEPANI
Markus PANGERL
Ines RITTGASSER (Yeshe Choekyi Lhamo)
Larissa SANDY
Frances STEEL