George Morgan, Acting Director
George taught cultural studies and sociology for thirty-five years, a period that saw the rise of corporate managerialism and the gradual erosion of critical thinking and academic freedom in universities, with overworked colleagues suffocating under the weight of metrics and administrivia. Having left higher education, he is more optimistic about the radical intellectual and pedagogical possibilities offered by the Charivari Institute. George holds degrees in history (ANU), cultural studies (U.Birmingham UK) and sociology (Macquarie U). He has taught thousands of undergraduates, supervised many dissertations, published five books, around fifty academic papers, and numerous columns in newspapers, magazines and online blogs. See Publications.
Antoinette Abboud
Antoinette is currently employed at Western Sydney University The College. She has amassed more than two decades of experience in tertiary education and curriculum development. Antoinette previously worked inside a progressive think-tank, the Centre for Policy Development and the Australian union movement’s international aid arm, Union Aid Abroad APHEDA. In 2016, Antoinette was a co-founder of the Free University of Western Sydney, an accessible and autonomous space for critical debate and learning outside the formal academy. Antoinette lives in Western Sydney and is the daughter of Lebanese migrants. See published articles.
Tim Briedis
Tim is a radical historian and long-time troublemaker. He is the co-host of the podcast People’s History of Australia, and Substacks at History in the Streets. He has written extensively on the history of youth protest in Australia. He enjoys books, boardgames and has a cat called Clara.
Elise Adams
Upon completion of her 2015 PhD in cultural anthropology at ANU, Elise recognised that the academic tide was turning (globally) against the humanities and took leave of academia for the private sector. She has now worked in the market research industry for over a decade, founding her successful Insights business three years ago. While no longer working within the Academy, she laments the decline in discourse – both locally and globally – and strives to foster human capital via civic interrogation of power structures that pervade the dawning age of AI. See LinkedIn profile.
Cristina Rocha
Cristina is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Western Sydney University and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She has held Visiting Professorships at universities in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US. She co-edits the Journal of Global Buddhism and is on the board of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). Her research focuses on the intersections of globalisation, religion and (im)mobilities. She is the author of two award-winning books: Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (2024), and John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing (2017), among other publications. See Wikipedia page.
Lesley Branagan
Lesley is a social anthropologist, lecturer and documentary filmmaker, whose experience spans Australia, Germany and India. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the social, political and moral dimensions of health, medical knowledge, technologies and gender. Most recently, she was a postdoctoral scholar, project leader and lecturer at the University of Hamburg. Her films have screened in international festivals and broadcasters, and won awards. Alongside academia and filmmaking, Lesley has worked with NGOs in Australia and India in documentation, communications, strategy and management roles. See personal website.
Ben Etherington
Ben Etherington is an Associate Professor at Western Sydney University and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. Broadly, he works in postcolonial and world literary studies; his areas of specialisation are primitivism in literature and theory, and Caribbean poetry and poetics. He holds honours in Musicology and English from the University of Western Australia and an MPhil and PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. Publications include Literary Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2018), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (edited with Jarad Zimbler, Cambridge UP, 2018), and an essay on world literature as a ‘speculative literary totality’ with Modern Language Quarterly (2021). His current project is a history of poetry in Anglophone Caribbean creole languages in the period between the abolition of slavery and decolonisation. See detailed profile.
