Rebecca Strating
Rebecca Strating Director, La Trobe Asia, and Professor of International Relations, La Trobe University
Rubayat Chowdhury
Rubayat Chowdhury is a macroeconomist with experience working on monetary policy, growth, and economic development in emerging market economies. He is a Research Officer at the Development Policy Centre.
Anne Irwin
Anne Irwin is a volunteer Community Chaplain in Geelong in Victoria. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Dementia Care and a diploma of Chaplaincy. Her voluntary work brings her into contact with current and former prisoners and provides reliable anecdotal and experiential influences to recognise the need for change in our prisons.
Mohamad Dian Revindo
Mohamad Dian Revindo is the head of the Business Climate and Global Value Chain Research Group at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, (LPEM) in the Faculty of Economics and Business Universitas Indonesia.
Baogang He
Professor Baogang He is Deakin Distinguished Professor and Personal Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Professor He recently co-authored a new book on China’s growing influence titled China’s Galaxy Empire.
Alex Sen Gupta
Associate Professor Alex Sen Gupta is a research scientist and lecturer at the Climate Change Research Centre and the Centre For Marine Science and Innovation at UNSW. His work revolves around the role of the ocean in the climate system, how the ocean influences regional climate and what global climate models tell us about the future of the ocean, with a recent focus on marine heatwaves.
Associate Professor Sen Gupta’s research has been funded by the Australian Research Council.
Stephen Howes
Stephen Howes is Director of the Development Policy Centre and Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.
Mervin Goklas Hamonangan
Mervin Goklas Hamonangan is a Junior Research Associate at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, (LPEM) in the Faculty of Economics and Business Universitas Indonesia.
Jane O'Sullivan
Dr. Jane O’Sullivan is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, an Executive member of Sustainable Population Australia, and a co-convenor of The Overpopulation Project. She has published widely on population projections, the threats posed by population growth to food security, economic development and ecological sustainability, and the effectiveness of measures available to limit population growth.
Amir Tibon
Amir Tibon is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s paper of record, and the author of The Last Palestinian: the rise and reign of Mahmoud Abbas (co-authored with Grant Rumley), the first-ever biography of the leader of the Palestinian Authority.
Donald Rhodes
Donald Rhodes is an Australian lawyer and activist based in New York. He is General Counsel for a democracy-focused NGO. He was awarded a Columbia Law School Public Interest Fellowship in 2020. He has previously worked as a political staffer for Labor front-benchers Tanya Plibersek and Mark Butler.
Aisya Zaharin
Aisya A. Zaharin’s research encompasses a diverse range of fields, including political science, history, Middle East issues, decolonisation, and LGBTQI+ and Islam, with a particular emphasis on addressing social inequality and promoting cultural relativism. Her formative years were influenced by her historian mother’s bedtime storytelling, centring around Islamic civilisation and the impact of colonialism on the social-political dynamics of the Global South. Having grown up in a British post-colonised nation, she recognises the dehumanising terminology used to characterise resistance groups as savages and pengganas (terrorists) to maintain colonial authority. She shares Noam Chomsky’s view that intellectuals have a responsibility to expose government concealed motivations and analyse their underlying causes, action and intentions. She accepts that it is the duty of Academia to progress from critique to driving transformative change, harnessing their privileged position to amplify marginalised voices, confront oppressive systems, and advocate for social justice in all its forms.
Anthony Klan
Anthony Klan is a multi-award winning investigative journalist, Anthony is the founder and editor of investigative news outlet The Klaxon.
Ken Davis
Ken Davis became a gay liberation activist in 1973. In June 1978, he was one of the founders of Gay Solidarity Group and an organiser of the first Mardi Gras, viciously attacked by police, along with the following campaigns and the Mardi Gras parades in 1979 and 1980. He has been in almost all the Mardi Gras since 1978. He has worked since 1991 in international solidarity and development.
Pearls and Irritations guest Alan Kohler
Alan Kohler is a former editor of The Age and The Australian Financial Review, and has long been a familiar face on the ABC. Alan founded the Eureka Report and has written columns for The Australian, The AFR, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Pascal Lottaz
Dr. Pascal Lottaz is an Assistant Professor for Neutrality Studies at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, in Tokyo. He received his MA and PhD from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (Japan) and specializes on neutral actors in international relations, especially on neutrality during the two World Wars and during the Cold War. He recently published the books Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War (Routledge, 2022), Permanent Neutrality: A Model for Peace, Security, and Justice (Lexington Books, 2020), and Notions of Neutralities (Lexington Books, 2019). He leads the research network neutralitystudies.com.
Dennis Doyle
Dennis Doyle received his doctorate in religious studies from the Catholic University of America. He taught at the University of Dayton for over 30 years. He has also been a guest professor at the University of Augsburg and the University of Regensburg.
Roderic Lyne
Roderic Lyne spent half of a 34 year diplomatic career dealing with the USSR and Russia up to 2004, since when I have visited Russia around fifty times as a businessman, writer and lecturer.
Khalil Harb
Khalil Harb is a Beirut-based journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Lebanese daily Al-Safir. He has also worked for the Associated Press and the Lebanese An-Nahar newspaper. Khalil is a graduate of the American University in Cairo.
Xu Yawen
Xu Yawen is a reporter and international affairs commentator with CGTN Radio based in Beijing, covering Chinese foreign policy, technology, and the economy.
Richard Manderson
Richard Manderson has recently retired after a public service career of 23 years, largely in the Departments of Immigration and Home Affairs. His roles included Director of Multicultural Policy, Director of Strategic Research, and a Director of Strategic Policy. He lives in Canberra, although hopefully not in any ‘bubble’.
Jane Kenway
Professor Jane Kenway is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia, Emeritus Professor at Monash University and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise is in educational sociology.
Richard Denniss
Dr Richard Denniss is the Australia Institute’s chief economist. He is an economist with a particular interest in the role of regulation. Prior to taking up his current position he was an Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University where he continues to hold an adjunct appointment.
Tabitha Lean
Tabitha Lean is an activist, poet and storyteller. An abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex, she’s filled with rage, channelling every bit of that anger towards challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and three years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe.
Hussein Dia
Professor Hussein Dia FIEAust FASCE FITE is professor of future urban mobility at Swinburne University of Technology. His current work focuses on decarbonising urban transport and harnessing digital innovations to unlock opportunities for sustainable mobility futures.
Sue Turnbull
Sue Turnbull is an Honorary Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Wollongong. Her publications include Media Audiences (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), The TV Crime Drama (Edinburgh University Press 2014). Sue is a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council LInkage grant, Valuing Web Series and also on the sole Discovery project, Border Crossings: The Transnational Career of the TV Crime Drama (DP 160102510). She reviews crime fiction for the Fairfax press, is Chair of BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival and is a Life member of Sisters in Crime, Australia. Sue is also on the Board of Screen Illawarra with a mission to make the region a hub for international screen production.
Geoff Roberts
Geoffrey Roberts is a specialist in Soveiet and Russian foreign and military policy, Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at UCC and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His latest book is Stalin’s Library: a Dictator and His Books (Yale University Press 2022).