TIME: Interdisciplinary Forum

Amaara Raheem’s practice of choreography and writing is deeply shaped by her history of migration. In her life and work Amaara practises multiple belongings and is fascinated by creative, cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations, to develop new tools for transformation. In 2021 Amaara completed a PhD by practice at the School of Architecture & Urban Design (RMIT University). Her work crosses many borders and occurs in multiple modes: performance, text, video, sound, documentation and design. In 2022 Amaara was selected for ABC Top 5 – a media residency with Radio National – to voice her ongoing research on artists in-residence programs, to wider audiences.

Gerald McMaster is a curator, artist, author, and professor emeritus OCAD University, Toronto. Dr McMaster has forty years of international work and expertise in contemporary art, critical theory, museology, and indigenous aesthetics. His international curatorial projects include the 1995 Venice Biennale, 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, and Artistic Director to the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. His most recent books are Iljuwas Bill Reid: Life & Work (2020); Post-commodity: Time Holds All.

Agathe Lisé-Pronovost-Pronovost is an expert in Earth’s magnetic field research working in the disciplines of Geochronology, Paleoclimate, and Archaeological Sciences. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the Science Committee for the Australia and New Zealand Consortium for International Ocean Discovery Program. Her research unlocks data from the past in materials such as lake and marine sediments, cave deposits, archaeological artifacts and lava flows to understand geomagnetic field changes and how it impacts society.

Yasmin Smith works with ceramics and glaze technologies, producing large-scale sculptural installations that investigate particular sites via extensive field research, community collaboration and studio development. Her practice brings scientific and artistic concerns together to allow ecological forms of intelligence to be expressed through aesthetic outcomes in ceramic glazes. Smith works with plants, ash, rock, coal, salt and wild clay in her expanded material investigations that involve an ongoing conceptual interrogation of labour, extraction, colonisation and political ecology. Her large-scale ceramic installations have been presented in prestigious national and international exhibitions and extensively acquired by major public institutions in Australia.

Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, their Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. Andrew’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country. His work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks, and soil to mine historical, cultural, and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture. 

Leah Ruppanner’s research investigates gender and its intersection to inequalities, technologies and policies. Professor Ruppanner is a leading expert on COVID-19 and its impact on gender inequality in US and Australia. Her book, Motherlands: How States Push Mothers out of Employment (2020) provides a typology of childcare and gender policies and their relationship to mothers’ employment varies across US states. This has led to a range of high impact publications showing women have divergent experiences based on their state of residence. Finally, she is leading a project on gender bias in hiring algorithms to understand how gender bias limits women’s access to employment. 

Professor Robert Hassan’s most recent book is Analog (2022) which considers the question: ‘are human’s analogue creatures in a digital world?’ His book Uncontained (2020), was an auto-ethnographic account of a four-week journey on a container ship from Melbourne to Singapore, with no access to digital media of any kind, so to discover the effects ‘digital detox’ on the subjective experience of time and memory. From 2012 until 2022 he was Editor of Time & Society

Dr Cullan Joyce is a passionate collaborator, activist, and meditation practitioner and is an Insight Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Contemplative Studies Centre. He has twenty years of living with, studying, and practising different Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions in Australia and overseas, particularly China and Vietnam. He has lived (now part-time) in a contemplative interfaith community outside Melbourne since 2018. He helped organise with Extinction Rebellion Regenerative Culture or Regen until 2021 by supporting the community’s well-being and providing care during dozens of disruptive actions. His research examines how the insights and practices of contemplative traditions can support communities during the Anthropocene.

Professor Yin Paradies is an animist anarchist activist Wakaya man who is committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies. He seeks mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being and doing. Yin is Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University where he conducts research on racism and anti-racism. He also teaches and undertakes research in Indigenous knowledges and decolonisation. Yin has authored 242 publications, been awarded grants worth $48 million, is an invited reviewer for 127 journals and 17,669 citations with a Google h index of 64.

Marie Keatley is a plant phenologist; she studies the timing of budding, flowering and fruiting of plants including what influences the timing and whether timing is shifting. This intersects with vegetation ecology, botany, climate change and citizen science. At the international level, she has contributed to studies on the impacts of climate on plant phenology, particularly of the southern hemisphere.  She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Society of Biometeorology. Marie was one of the founders of ClimateWatch, Australia’s citizen science phenological observation network.

 Dr Loren Bruns Jr is the eInfrastructure Team Manager at the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), overseeing a team of research infrastructure engineers building modern, cloud-first digital infrastructure for the urban research community. Prior to joining AURIN, Loren completed a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Reed College and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Melbourne. This was followed by a decade spent as a full-stack research software engineer, creating research platforms and co-authoring papers in the fields of Alzheimer’s disease, neuropsychology, addictive behaviours, and juvenile diabetes before pivoting to managing national digital research infrastructure.

Working in sculpture, video and installation, Lisa Sammut’s practice oscillates between notions of cosmic perspective, belonging, connection and time. Privileging the poetic, intuitive and experiential, her immersive installations use a wide range of media to alter perceptions and question human-centric thinking. Incorporating objects, light and moving image, Sammut draws on natural, cultural, and historical imagery, transforming familiar visual language in unexpected ways. Sammut holds a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours (2012) and Master of Fine Art by Research (2018), both from UNSW Art & Design. She currently lives and works in Kamberri/Canberra.