Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, Sheffield Hallam University Darcy White is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) where she teaches the history and theory of photography on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. White’s research concerns the visual representation of people and places in relation to issues such as class, gender and ethnicity. In recent years this has focussed on questions of social justice and the role played by visual culture in shaping understandings and attitudes to climate and ecological crises. White has enjoyed a varied career in the visual arts – beginning as a painter and printmaker with a particular interest in landscape. From 1997 she taught art history for the Worker’s Education Association and ran Public and Community Arts Projects. She joined Sheffield Hallam University as a researcher in 2000, working on a sustained project to document the sculpture and monuments of Sheffield and South Yorkshire under the auspices of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, as part of their National recording Project. This culminated in a the publication of The Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool University Press (2015) for which she is editor and co-author. In 2015 White founded the Northern Light Landscape Photography Research Group at SHU and has co-convened international conferences and co-curated related exhibitions. These have resulted in the production of three anthologies in the “Northern Light” series on landscape photography of the north, published by Transcript Verlag, for which she is co-editor and co-author: Northern Light: Landscape, Photography and Evocations of the North, 2018; Proximity and Distance in Northern Landscape Photography: Contemporary Criticism, Curation and Practice, 2020; Disturbed Ecologies: Photography, Geopolitics, and the Northern Landscape in the Era of Environmental Crisis, Spring 2023 (in press). In 2018 White co-founded the Visual Activism Research Group at SHU to investigate contemporary political art and the aesthetic practices of social movements and protest across the globe. She is co-editor and co-author of Visual Activism in the 21st Century: Art, Protest and Resistance in an Uncertain World, Bloomsbury, 2022.
Lecturer in Interior Architecture, UNSW Sydney Demet Dincer is a lecturer in the UNSW Faculty of Built Environment, Interior Architecture Program. She received her B.Sc. in Architecture from Yildiz Technical University (2007) as the highest-ranking honour student and M.Sc. in Architectural Design from Istanbul Technical University (2010). She was enrolled in the Urban Design Program in TU Delft for her M.Sc. studies (2009). Demet went to Columbia University as a Fulbright Visiting Researcher for her doctoral studies (2013-14) and received her PhD from Istanbul Technical University (2016). She has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at IKEA x UTS Future Living Lab at the University of Technology Sydney (2018-19) and as an Assistant Professor at Istanbul Kultur University, affiliated with architecture and design studies. Most of her research has been funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and she has also been an executive board member of the Fulbright Alumni Association Turkey.
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Queen's University, Ontario Dr. LaPointe-McEwan’s research has primarily focused on enhancing professional learning outcomes for educators and students in the context of K-12 education, particularly emphasizing how educators use multiple forms of classroom and program data, including video, to inform professional learning and practice across educational systems. She has led multiple education-based program evaluations, working collaboratively with school districts, education networks, the Ministry of Education, and educational organizations to enhance evidence-informed practice and valued program outcomes for stakeholders. In all of her work, Dr. LaPointe-McEwan prioritizes authentic partnerships that bridge research and practice and foster meaningful change for systems, educators, and students.
PhD candidate in Sociology, exploring the lives of religious and spiritual sex workers, Nottingham Trent University I am a third year PGR student at Nottingham Trent university. I hold an interest in identity management of sex workers, lived religion and intimacy. I utilise creative research methods throughout my PhD to analyse lived experiences of sex workers. I also am interested in policy related research which advocates for the decriminalisation of the sex industry.
Professor and Gerry Higgins Chair in Positive Psychology, Centre for Wellbeing Science, The University of Melbourne Professor Dianne Vella-Brodrick (PhD) holds the Gerry Higgins Chair in Positive Psychology and is Director and Head of Research at the Centre for Wellbeing Science at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She is the inaugural Director of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program (2013 – 2015) and is a registered psychologist and a Member of the Australian Psychological Society and College of Health Psychologists. She founded the Positive Psychology Network in Australia and has previously served as Treasurer and Secretary of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) and is currently on the IPPA Council of Advisors and was made an IPPA Fellow in 2019. Dianne has been an inaugural Editor in Chief of the Psychology of Well-Being:Theory, Research and Practice journal (2011-2016) and has Co-Directed the 2008, 2010 and 2014 Australian Positive Psychology and Well-being Conferences. She serves on numerous research advisory boards, regularly reviews scientific papers for leading journals and has received over $3 million funding for her research. Dianne’s research interests include the development and evaluation of well-being programs, particularly in the areas of positive education and performance optimisation. Her work draws on innovative mixed method designs which utilise the latest technology, experience sampling method and biological indices of well-being. Dianne served as the Ethics Chair at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education from (2014 - Feb 2020). She has been involved in the development of numerous well-being measures and programs including the Wuzzup and MoodPrism apps, the Wellbeing Profiler and more recently she founded the Bio-Dash wellbeing and optimal performance program (bio-dash.com).
