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Daniel Tranter-Santoso is an anthropologist and stonemason whose doctoral fieldwork at Rookwood Necropolis was grounded in a three-year apprenticeship in monumental stonemasonry where he learned the practice of caring for and conserving stone monuments in the cemetery. His research explores the sensual and tactile dimensions of craft, focusing on how stonemasons cultivate intimacy with stone. With support from the 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral Fellowship, he will complete his book Lithic Intimacies: Stone, Skill, and Sensuality in the City of the Dead, which challenges the tendency in anthropologies of material culture and ontology to reduce objects to social, symbolic, or causal functions by bringing anthropology into conversation with Object-Oriented Ontology. His PhD received Macquarie University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence in 2024.

Rodrigo Perez Toledo (PhD, MQU 2024) is a sessional teaching academic at Macquarie University and the University of Technology Sydney. With the support of the 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral Fellowship, Rodrigo will consolidate a book manuscript stemming from his doctoral thesis and submit it to an academic press. Rodrigo’s thesis explores the experiences of same-sex attracted Mainland Chinese and Australian Chinese men in Sydney informed by decolonial and Indigenous scholarships. The most relevant areas explored in his thesis are experiences of migration, relationships with parents, dating in physical venues and in dating apps, and their understandings of tradition and modernity. As the 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral committee argued, such approach “raises grounded challenges to the binary of Western progressivity and non-Western conservatism and traditionality regarding gender and sexual non-conforming experiences.”

Rodrigo can be contacted at rodrigo.p.toledo@outlook.com

Leith Heyman holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of Southern Queensland and has a strong interest in women’s health needs and experiences. The 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral Fellowship will help her to transform her doctoral thesis into a book, provisionally titled Reactive selves: living with autoimmune disease in a neoliberal world. Grounded in a life story life story approach to ethnography and drawing on 55 in-depth interviews with seven women with autoimmune diseases, Reactive Selves examines the experiences of women with autoimmune diseases in regional Australia through the lenses of care, identity, and moralisation. Reactive Selves argues that care must be needs- rather than diagnosis-based, which requires a more equitable understanding of what counts as care and who is considered deserving of care. In advancing this argument, Reactive Selves examines women’s experiences in the context of neoliberalism, which permeates the identities women form and how they react when those identities are threatened by autoimmunity, how women and those with chronic illnesses are moralised, and how care is rationed and provided in Australia.

Leith's work contributes to anthropological understandings of autoimmunity as a category of illness, beyond specific diagnoses, as well as anthropological understandings of the relationship between chronic illness and neoliberalism. It builds on existing bodies of work on care by examining the relationships between care, identity, moralisation, and neoliberalism to demonstrate how these intersecting themes can affect when and how people seek care, how healthcare providers respond, and how the Australian healthcare system supports or creates barriers to accessing care. These contributions are important to the field of anthropology, for healthcare providers and policymakers seeking to improve the healthcare system for people with autoimmune diseases and other chronic illnesses, and for women with autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses seeking legitimisation and shared understandings of their experiences

Laura McLauchlan is a multispecies anthropologist at UNSW. With support from UNSW’s Social Policy Research Centre and Environment and Society group, the 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral Fellowship will help Laura to finalize the manuscript, Killing and Kindness: Hedgehogs and the practices of coming to care. Killing and Kindness develops her doctoral thesis exploring the complex terrain of ending and preserving life in the name of conservation. At the heart of the book are the material, storied and affective aspects of how people come to care for other species as well as how we learn not to. Using illustrated autoethnographic approaches, the book attends to both how people come to care for hedgehogs in the United Kingdom (where hedgehog populations are declining) as well as how people in Aotearoa/New Zealand (where hedgehogs are introduced and increasingly recognized as predators of native species), come to kill them. Wondering whether killing and kindness might be held together in dominant conservation practice, the book also attends to constraints arising due to norms of certainty, optimism, and ‘rationality’ within contemporary regimes of conservation practice and asks what resources for living well with others might be found in the shadows of public conservation practices. The manuscript is currently under contract negotiations.

Killing and Kindness builds on Laura’s previous work looking at otherwise undervalued affects of sadness, delight and desire in multispecies care, as well as in the power of co-creating with hedgehogs, and of non-heroic, and humble collective actions in ecological care and campaigning. Laura has an ongoing interest in the development of multi-being and multispecies methods as well as in what queer intersectional environmental feminist theory might have to offer in matters of academic and pedagogical inclusion.

Continuing to attend to the generative possibilities of marginal and emergent ontologies, Laura’s current work attends to blocks to participatory policy reform approaches and the potentials of interpersonal and empathetic approaches to participatory inclusion and non-oppositional change-making. For more information or article access, Laura can be contacted at @ShadowEcologies or laura.mclauchlan@unsw.edu.au.

Justine Chambers is a Visiting Fellow in Anthropology in the School of Culture, History and Languages at the Australian National University. With the support of her colleagues at ANU, the 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral Fellowship will help Justine to finalise her book manuscript, Pursuing Morality: Everyday Ethics among Karen Buddhists in Southeastern Myanmar, with the National University of Singapore Press as part of their Southeast Asia Publication Series (in alliance with the University of Hawaii Press and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS)).

Pursuing Morality is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015-2019 in Myanmar’s Karen State, an area which was closed off to international researchers for six decades because of conflict. It adds valuable insights into the lives of Plong (Pwo) Karen Buddhists from Myanmar and shows how the pursuit of morality is varied, performative and embedded in an affective notion of the self as an ethical agent. Readers of her dissertation describe her work as ethnographically rich and offering original and important contributions to studies of the Karen and other Buddhist minorities in Theravada Southeast Asia as well as anthropological theory on ethics and morality. Her forthcoming book will be welcomed by anthropologists and scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, as well as journalists and development studies practitioners who are looking for in-depth insights into an area of the world that remains largely defined by conflict and now military dictatorship.

In December 2021, Justine will be starting a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) working on a new research project exploring the interplay between climate change actions, conflict and peacebuilding in ethnic areas of Myanmar. You can read more about Justine’s work in a special issue she co-edited on 'Moral authorities in Myanmar’ for stine has also co-edited two volumes for the ANU Myanmar Update series, with the latest 20 by the ISEAS-Yusok Ishak Institute in Singapore. Beyond academic publications, Justine is also a regular commentator in the media on Myanmar's affairs and has worked for the British Council's MyJustice programme researching housing land and property rights and plural justice systems Myanmar.

Muhammad Kavesh is a Sessional Lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian National University. The 91��Ƭ�� Postdoctoral Fellowship will help Kavesh to finalize his book manuscript and develop a special journal issue with the ongoing support of his teachers, colleagues, and friends at the Australian National University.

Kavesh's upcoming book, Animal Enthusiasms: Life beyond Cage and Leash in Rural Pakistan, explores the entanglement of care and violence existing in human-animal relationships in Pakistan. It examines the passions and desires of Pakistani men as they engage with non-human actors to produce masculinity, accumulate social capital, and construct pleasure, illustrating how more-than-human relationships inform concepts of the self. The book will be published as part of Rebecca Cassidy and Garry Marvin’s Routledge book series “Multi-Species Anthropology: New Ethnographies”. The 91��Ƭ�� judging committee said, "this book manuscript promises to make a unique contribution to multispecies ethnography, even as it breaks free of the state security and religious studies paradigms that have dominated the scholarship of Pakistan".

With Dr Natasha Fijn, Kavesh is also guest editing a special issue for The Australian Journal of Anthropology on sense-making in a more-than-human world. We are delighted to be able to help support these important publishing projects.

In late 2020, Kavesh will be starting a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anthropology at the University of Toronto and embarking on a new project that examines the ethics of air-surveillance through “spy pigeons” on the Indian-Pakistani border, and the moral, ethical, and political debates this generates in contemporary South Asia. You can read more about Kavesh’s work in an interview with Dr Sophie Chao on . For a wider conceptual framing of Kavesh’s work, please see  with Prof Kirin Narayan on the cultural category of “enthusiasm” in South Asia.

Gil completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2018 under the supervision of Terry Woronov, auxiliary supervisors Jadran Mimica and Yasmine Musharbash. His project explores contemporary forms of self-improvement in urban China. Focusing on pedagogic activities in interpersonal ‘soft’ skills, Gil describes self-improvement as an engagement with ideals of personhood. Through affective moments in workshops for self-improvement, participants perceive transient transcendence above local norms and in turn realise their 'non-ordinary' ideals. Gil's perspective prioritises an understanding of self-improvement as a practice that reifies some of the contradictions in Chinese society’s distinct experience of modernity. Gil will use the 91��Ƭ�� honorarium to compose a book manuscript while enjoying the continuous moral and intellectual support of the Anthropology department at USYD.

Sean received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Western Australia in 2012 for his thesis ‘The politics of cultural production in the DIY hardcore scene in Bandung, Indonesia’, which was based on ethnographic research into the ‘Do It Yourself’ production practices, social organisation and values of the Bandung hardcore punk scene. He will be using the 91��Ƭ�� honorarium to develop this thesis into a book manuscript. The book, tentatively entitled Running in Circles: The Politics of Value in an Indonesian Punk Scene, will focus especially on the ways in which the global punk values of autonomy and community have been expressed and implemented by DIY activists in Bandung. He will receive additional support from the University of Western Australia.

Lindy grew up in Western Queensland and moved to Sydney to study pharmacy. After graduating, she left Australia and has since worked around the world as a pharmacist and for various NGOs. Her scientific background and interest in other peoples and their cultures has formed the basis of her anthropological research. Lindy used the honorarium to turn her thesis into a book manuscript, which she has now submitted to a University Press. She received additional support from Macquarie University (office space and library access).