Research focus

• RESILIENCE: Disaster resilience, resilience thinking, theory, policy and practice. An emphasis on how resilience thinking is translated into policy and practical interventions. This encompasses work on the management and production of 'smart' and 'resilient' cities, inter-state relations, citizen-state relations, governance, governmentality, assemblage, affect and complexity science.
• SOCIAL AND SPATIAL THEORY: Including but not limited to Lefebvre, Foucault, Deleuze, Nietzsche, North. Emphasising the complexity of institutional and organisational change through applied genealogical and discourse analytical research. This project advances a theory of interplay and assemblage as co-constitutive frameworks for understanding complexity.
• COLLABORATIVE ACTION RESEARCH: Conducting policy evaluations related to disaster resilience with local community groups. Exploring resilience as a system of values, standards of practice and as an institutional frame for understanding how we are to be governed in the 21st century. This work seeks to improve communication, collaboration and trust between stakeholders and communities - i.e. building collaborative resilience to disasters of any kind.
• GAMES, COMMUNITY BUILDING AND MEDIA: Exploring the creative interplay of online participatory communities and gaming culture this research explores social media, content creation and subcultural community building, particuarly in gaming cultures, such as: Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The gathering, and wider video-gaming and 'internet' culture.

TEACHING

I teach primarily in the sociology and social theory at Macquarie. My philosophy of teaching aims to forge a collaborative community of learning in which students gain improved self-confidence, a sense of achievement and greater personal responsibility for their learning. I never aim to simply tell students the answers to the questions posed by a given subject or assessment. I aim to open up the tools they will need to (a) find the right way to ask a question about a given subject, and (b) to find their own answers as a result of our time studying together. I continue to contribute guest lectures on several courses (at MQ and other universities) on diverse topics, these have included: criminal and social justice; research methods and design; disasters, risk and resilience; surveillance and security; urbanism and public space; political activism and collaboration with government and non-government organisations.

General information

• Programme Director - Sociology (2016-2019)
• Programme Director - Bachelor of Social Sciences (2008-2012)
• Co-director - Climate Futures at MQ (20012-15)
• Faculty Standards and Quality team (2009-2013)
• Academic Standards and Quality Committee (2011-2016)
• Co-director - Masters of Research. Sociology (2012-2015, 2020-present).