Environmental Scientist, University of the Witwatersrand Prof. Mulala Simatele is an Environmental Scientist by training and specialized in Geographies of the Environment and Sustainability. He holds a DPhil in Environmental Management and Sustainability from the University of Sussex in the UK. Prior to joining Wits, Mulala worked for the University of St. Andrews in Scotland where he was part of the team which established the St Andrews Sustainability Institute. His main areas of research interest revolves around community based natural resource management with a special focus on water management, education for sustainability, climate change adaptation, environmental justice, environmental impact assessments, marine resource management and disaster risk management. In additional to academic engagement, Mulala is one of three technical advisors to the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) on the Cultivate Africa Programme. He is also a board member for Hanell International and has diverse experiences working with policy related institutions notably on environmental management, climate change adaptation and environmental sustainability. Notable among these institutions include: The World Bank; The Scottish Environmental Think Tank, and the Ford Foundation. He has also served as an environmental consultant for different governments; the government of Bolivia; Botswana, Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Sweden, Zambia and Zimbabwe. He has also worked with various NGOs on environmental and climate change issues including community development. Mulala is very passionate about research and working with students from diverse backgrounds. Since arriving at Wits in 2013, he has successfully supervised 20 PhD students and over 80 Masters and honours students.
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto Paula Maurutto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and holds a cross-appointment at the Centre of Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in the fields of law, criminal justice and punishment, as well as security and surveillance. In the area of preventive security and surveillance, her work questions the extent to which counter-terrorism practices and border controls erode fundamental aspects of justice and reproduce racial hierarchies. She has worked extensively on the use of risk assessments and criminal records in the field of punishment and penal management.
Chair Professor of Global and Environmental Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong PAUL G. HARRIS is the Chair Professor of Global and Environmental Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong and a Senior Research Fellow in the Earth System Governance global research alliance. His research explores climate governance, global environmental politics, ecological justice and international ethics. Professor Harris is author/editor of Pathologies of Climate Governance (Cambridge University Press), Global Ethics and Climate Change (Edinburgh University Press), Climate Change and Ocean Governance (Cambridge University Press), What’s Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It (Polity), the Routledge Handbook of Global Environmental Politics (Routledge) and 20 other books. For more information, visit the following website: www.paulgharris.net
Lecturer, Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex Dr Pen Woods is currently a Lecturer in Drama and European Literature at the University of Essex. She specialises in early modern and current theatre spectatorship, focusing on the flipside of performance studies to examine the significance of the reception of drama and how audiences produce the meanings and legacies of art both now and in the past. She collaborated with Shakespeare's Globe and Queen Mary University of London on a PhD project on Globe Audiences from 2007-2012 and was appointed to a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Australian Centre for Excellence for the History of the Emotions at the University of Western Australia 2012-2015. She was awarded a SLAM Fellowship to spend a year at Sydney University. Between 2014-2016 she received funding from CHE and Shakespeare's Globe to accompany the Globe to Globe Hamlet World Tour and collaborated with Dr. Malcolm Cocks on the compilation of the largest global audience data set for one production. From 2015-2021 she was a Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary University of London, spending six months at The Graduate Centre, in the City University of New York. In 2022 she was appointed to a temporary position as Lecturer of Early Modern Studies at Newcastle University. As well as a historian of performance, audience and spectatorship, Woods is a cultural theorist of affect and a historian of the emotions with a focus on how emotions underpin the social and cultural scripts we live by and how we can intervene in these. As part of this research and education-led activism she co-founded the organisation Poetry Vs Colonialism with Poet Laila Sumpton and Professor of Education Victoria de Rijke which works with arts and heritage organisations, schools and Universities using poetry workshops as a springboard for processing the legacies of colonialism in society and the arts and forging new futures. She is currently finalising the manuscript of her first book The Audience at Shakespeare's Globe. Her next project is on the spectatorship of weather both now and in the past.
Associate Professor in Geography, University of Galway Pat Collins is a native of Galway and has worked as an Economic Geographer at NUI Galway since 2012. Prior to that he was a researcher at the Whitaker Institute where his work looked at the location decisions of multinational tech companies. More recently, Pat has turned his attention to Creative Economies and Cultural Production. Through a number of EU funded projects, Pat has sought to better understand the relationship between culture, creativity and production as well as identifying the unique role played by Geography. Pat has contributed to both of Galway’s designation of UNESCO City of Film and European Capital of Culture. He has published over 20 internationally peer reviewed journal articles and two books. He is currently Director of the newly formed UrbanLab Galway at the University of Galway. His forthcoming book ‘Galway: Making a Capital of Culture’ will be published by Orpen Press.
Senior Lecturer, School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand Although trained in chemical engineering, I am practised in pyrometallurgy and in chemistry at high temperatures, mostly in the chemical thermodynamics and kinetics of gas-solid reactions (oxidation, reduction and chlorination of oxide and sulfide minerals). I have also worked in teams testing and designing novel processes. My work in R&D over the last three decades has fostered an invaluable set of skills. I combine a grasp of principles and techniques in "process mineralogy" and chemistry with an understanding of processes in chemical and metallurgical engineering. I retain a practised hand in the laboratory. I communicate clearly in English through writing, speaking and discussion. I have mentored students and colleagues in the craft of research: in critical thinking around process fundamentals and theory; in developing arguments; in marshaling data and evaluating hypotheses; and in communicating.
