Professor Tim Soutphommasane
Professor Tim Soutphommasane is Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Oxford and Professor of Practice in Human Rights and Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He is also Professor of Practice (Sociology and Political Theory) at the University of Sydney. He was previously Director of Culture Strategy at the University of Sydney (2019−2022) and Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission (2013−2018). Professor Soutphommasane led the National Anti-Racism Strategy during his term at the Australian Human Rights Commission, which included the ‘Racism. It Stops with Me’ campaign that featured more than 360 organisational supporters. His research has focused on multiculturalism, citizenship, race, national identity, and patriotism, and he is the author of five books, including The Virtuous Citizen (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and the award-winning Don’t Go Back to Where You Came From (NewSouth Books, 2012).
Associate Professor David Smith
Associate Professor David Smith is a political scientist based at the University of Sydney, jointly appointed between the School of Social and Political Sciences and the United States Studies Centre. His research has focused on political relations between states and minorities in the United States and Australia. He is the author of Religious Persecution and Political Order in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In 2018 he was awarded a British Academy Fellowship, based at LSE, to initiate comparative research on Islamophobia in the UK, US, and Australia. He is recognised as one of the leading Australian scholars of American politics and foreign policy, with significant media impact through his commentary on the United States.
Dr Jane Park
Dr Jane Park is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. Her research explores the impact of popular culture on changing notions of race and gender, and critical race pedagogies in Australia and the United States. She led the creation of a minor in diversity studies within the Sydney undergraduate curriculum, providing students with an applied understanding of cultural diversity (including race). Dr Park is author of Yellow Future (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), which explored innovative connections between film studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies. She has extensive industry experience, having worked as a cultural consultant with a number of media organisations in and outside Australia, including Goalpost Pictures, CARAT, Space Doctors, and Asia Pacific Screen Forum.
Dr Gilbert Caluya
Dr Gilbert Caluya is a lecturer and cultural and gender studies scholar at Deakin University. He has over a decade of research experience focusing specifically on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality in everyday life. He was awarded a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council from 2013-2016 and the ResearchSA Fellowship by the University of South Australia from 2012-2015. He is currently on another ARC Discovery Project grant on digital citizenship as a named CI. His research, which has been published in leading cultural studies journals, has focused on the relations between race, intimacy and security, in different cultural sites: queer subcultures, everyday cultures of security, and cultural and digital citizenship. Dr Caluya also has considerable industry research experience, including with Commonwealth government departments and leading multicultural civil society organisations. He has over two decades of experience working with, and serving in, community and arts organisations focusing on multicultural and queer communities.
Dr Liyana Kayali
Dr Liyana Kayali is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her research encompasses gender, social movement activism, restorative justice, race, hate crime, and Middle Eastern studies. She is the author of Palestinian Women and Popular Resistance: Perceptions, Attitudes, and Strategies (Routledge, 2020). Dr Kayali was previously a lecturer at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University (2020-2021), and research fellow at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex (2018-2019). While at the University of Sussex, she was part of a project which examined the use of restorative justice approaches to respond to hate crime and hate incidents on university campuses.