Suzan Wahhab
Suzan Wahhab was born in Jerusalem and grew up listening to Nakba stories in occupied Ramallah. She is the President of Palestinian Christians in Australia and is an accountant and financial strategist.
Christopher D. Cook
Christopher D. Cook is an author and award-winning journalist who has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other national publications. He is the author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis.
Michális S. Michael
Dr Michális S. Michael is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe University and was Director of the Centre for Dialogue– Global Reconciliation. He has taught, published and researched extensively on political science, international relations, conflict resolution, foreign policy, and the theory and practice of dialogue. His work involves the careful study of intergroup and international conflict and their transformations away from narrow notions of state-bound security. By using various case-studies he investigates the conditions and circumstances in which disputants can alter their goals and perceptions of each other by exploring alternative modes of engagement to entrenched situations. Effectively, Dr Michael’s work seeks to deepen our understanding of the increasingly complex and often volatile social, political and cultural environments which conflict inhibits, and the corresponding pressures it places on both governance and civil society. By probing the need for dialogue in the conflictual setting, his research gauges the extent to which dialogue offers an effective form of communication that goes beyond traditional approaches of mediation and negotiation, and provides both governmental and non-governmental agencies with new possibilities for defusing polarisation and maximising the prospects for constructive engagement.
Patrick Gourley
Paddy Gourley is a former Commonwealth public servant who has spent the last 20 years working in the private sector.
Ali Bakir
Ali Bakir is a research assistant professor at Ibn Khaldun Center for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is following geopolitical and security trends in the Middle East, great power politics, small states’ behaviour, emerging unconventional risks and threats, with a special focus on Turkey’s foreign and defence policies, Turkey-Arab and Turkey-Gulf relations. He tweets @AliBakeer
Jeremy Kenner
Jeremy Kenner is a public servant, employed by an Australian government agency. An American by birth and rearing and an educator and lawyer by training, his professional interests lie at the juncture of research, clinical care, public health, policy making and regulation of science and technology. He also draws on a reservoir of Jewish learning received earlier in life at the feet of his father and grandfather.
Zahra Al Hilaly
Zahra is a Palestinian and Iraqi woman, who is working to decolonise story-telling to flourish revolution. Zahra is an established writer and vocalist for change.
Alan Gamlen
Alan Gamlen is Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University, Canberra.
Pearls and Irritations guest Eva Bartlett
Eva Karene Bartlett is a Canadian-American journalist who has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). She was a recipient of the 2017 International Journalism Award for International Reporting, granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club (founded in 1951), and was the first recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism. See her extended bio on her blog In Gaza. She tweets from @EvaKBartlett and has the Telegram Channel, Reality Theories.
Arseniy Kotov
Arseniy Kotov born in Samara in 1988, Arseniy Kotov grew up in an urban landscape consisting of standardised Soviet-era housing blocks and industrial towers. He has been taking photographs of city landscapes since he was a teenager.
Paul A Komesaroff
Paul Komesaroff is Professor of Medicine at Monash University and Executive Director of the international NGO Global Reconciliation. His books include Experiments in L_ove and Death and Riding a Crocodile: A physician’s tale._
Benedict Rogers
Benedict Rogers, a human rights activist and writer, is the co-founder and chief executive of Hong Kong Watch, and Senior Analyst for East Asia at Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a rights organisation specializing in freedom of religion or belief. He is the author of seven books, and his faith journey is told in his book “From Burma to Rome: A Journey into the Catholic Church” (Gracewing, 2015). His new book, “The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny”, was published in 2022 by Optimum Publishing International.
Zouhir Gabsi
Zouhir Gabsi is a senior lecturer in Arabic and Islamic studies at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Zouhir was named Australia’s lead researcher in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies by The Australian Research Magazine for 2024. His recent publications on Islamophobia, including his 2024’s book Muslim Perspectives on Islamophobia: From Misconceptions to Reason, the Arab Spring and religious and political discourses, demonstrate the importance of language in sociological and political narratives. His contributions and broad interests push the boundaries of knowledge and fill a vacuum generally overlooked by researchers.
Joshua Black
Visitor, School of History, Australian National University
Dr Joshua Black is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Australia Institute, and a visitor with the School of History at the Australian National University, Canberra. His PhD thesis, entitled ‘Bleeding Off the Page: A Cultural History of the Political Memoir in Australia’, was completed in March 2023. Josh has also held a Palace Letters Fellowship with the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University.
Ray Champ
Ray Champ has worked in the Public Service for five years and is studying a bachelor of economics at Macquarie University.
David Lee
David Lee is Associate Professor in the University of New South Wales, Canberra, National Archives of Australia Cabinet Historian, author of The Second Rush: Mining and the Transformation of Australia and co-editor of a book of official documents on Australia and the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1972.
Roger Gurr
Roger Gurr Associate Professor Gurr, MB BS DPM MRC Psych, FRANZCP is the Clinical Director of headspace Early Psychosis in Western Sydney. He also holds a Conjoint Appointment in Psychiatry, Western Sydney University Faculty of Medicine and is the Board Chair for the NSW Service for the Treatment & Rehabilitation of Torture & Trauma Survivors (STARTTS). He was awarded the NSW Government Human Rights Medal in 2021. He is presenting at the NDIS and Mental Health Conference on Tuesday 21 January at the ICC in Sydney.
Guesr author Andrew Y Glikson
Andrew Y Glikson Earth and climate scientist. The University of New South Wales.
Craig Fowler
Dr Craig Fowler’s diverse experience in Public Administration and Higher Education in Executive roles makes him exceptionally well qualified to reflect on the topic of diversity in career experience and its potential benefits for senior executive service (SES) leadership in the public sector.
Frank Bongiorno
Frank Bongiorno AM (born Nhill, Victoria, 1969) is an Australian labour, political and cultural historian. Prior to joining the Australian National University, he held lecturing positions at King’s College London (2007-11), the University of New England (2000-07) and Griffith University (1996), and also taught previously at the ANU (1994). He has been an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the ANU (1997 and 1998-2000), and in 1997-8 was Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge and Mellon Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Wendy Hunt
Wendy Hunt is the Academic Chair of Food Science and Nutrition at Murdoch University. She has over 25 years of experience in the field of Food Science, having roles in management, research, teaching, and services to the food industry. Her research is in food and human health with particular interest in seafood, starch, grains, fibre and satiety.
Shuyang Yu
BA student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, major in English literature, intern at the Center for China and Globalisation.
Richard Wolff
Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.
Sue Wittenoom
Sue Wittenoom is a Perth born architect who lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney. She is the founder of The Soft Build.
Tegan Cohen
Tegan Cohen Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology
John Quelch
John Quelch, teacher, community development worker, secretary of IPAN Geelong, Victoria South West Group.
Ainsley Barton
Ainsley Barton is an alias, he is a former political adviser to the Liberal Party and mainstream media journalist, presently engaged in consulting work in Canberra.
Lisa Singh
Lisa Singh is the CEO of the Australia India Institute, and a Cricket Australia Multicultural Ambassador.
Jeremiah Kenner
Jeremy Kenner is a public servant, employed by an Australian government agency. An American by birth and rearing and an educator and lawyer by training, his professional interests lie at the juncture of research, clinical care, public health, policy making and regulation of science and technology. He also draws on a reservoir of Jewish learning received earlier in life at the feet of his father and grandfather.
Judah Tana
Judah Tana is the Australian founder-director of Global Advance Projects which has rescued hundreds of trafficking victims who arrived in Myanmar from more than 60 countries as far-flung as Uganda and Morocco.
John H Howard
John is a researcher, policy analyst, management adviser, and author with three decades of experience advising governments, universities, and industry on science, research, and innovation policy and strategy.
John Howard
John is a researcher, policy analyst, management adviser, and author with three decades of experience advising governments, universities, and industry on science, research, and innovation policy and strategy.
Graham Pickering
Graham Pickering is a long-term resident of Taiwan. He is an educator and author. He is fluent in Chinese and getting there in Taiwanese. His interests include Education, Taiwan, China and Cross-Strait Relations.
Keith Bryant
After working at the stock exchanges in London and Johannesburg in the 1980s, Keith was appointed a partner of Bain and Company in 1989, and subsequently a Director at Deutsche Bank Australia for a decade. Keith previously held leadership positions at Wentworth Community Housing, the Constellation Project, and the Benevolent Society. He is Chair of the Board for the Foyer Foundation, and CEO of the Open Dialogue Centre.