Gender Relations Centre
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Gender Relations Centre
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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 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. 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’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. Thesis title: 'My Blood, Sweat and Tears': Female Sex Workers in Cambodia - Victims, Vectors or Agents?
Frances' research interests centre on the maritime dimensions of colonialism in the Pacific, with a particular focus on New Zealand's regional seaborne influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her PhD thesis, ‘Oceania under Steam: Maritime cultures, Colonial histories, 1870s-1910s' was a cultural history of steamship operations in the western Pacific, drawing on the archives of the largest shipping company in the southern hemisphere, the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand. Her current research explores the colonial origins of cruise ship tourism in the Pacific, bringing together the operations of British, Australian, New Zealand and American shipping companies between the 1880s and 1950s. The colonial history of the now-derelict Grand Pacific Hotel on Suva's harbour front, built by the Union Company, forms a central part of this research. Frances also has research interests in food history, particularly the cultural history of butter in New Zealand and Australia. She is a lecturer in the School of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong where she teaches Pacific History and Australian Studies. Thesis title: Oceania Under Steam: Maritime Cultures, Colonial Histories, 1870s-1910s |
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Page last updated:
September 02 2009 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