Professor and Lead of Critical Mental Health, Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University Renata is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of critical mental health studies, critical social theory and medical humanities. She utilises qualitative research methods, with particular expertise in narrative approaches to mental health. She is co-founder and director of Healthtalk Australia, a unique digital archive of mental health narratives, promoting personal narratives of mental health as evidence for improving mental health support in the community.
Research assistant and early career researcher, Critical Mental Health research group, RMIT University I am an early-career researcher at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT. My research is situated within RMIT's Social and Global Studies Centre, as part of Critical Mental Health research group. My research focuses on embodiment, identity and psycho-social approaches to mental health and well-being. My expertise is in embodied and arts-based methods for participatory research inclusive of non-normative ways of knowing. Currently I works across a number of research projects exploring experiences of emotional and mental health distress among various populations with a focus on enhancing the public dialogue about, and the development of, ‘human-centric’ approaches to mental and emotional health and wellbeing. PhD (Philosophy) - The University of Melbourne M.A. (Education) - The University of Novi Sad (Serbia) B.A. (Education) - The University of Novi Sad (Serbia)
Emeritus Professor - History, La Trobe University Richard Broome AM is Emeritus Professor in History at La Trobe University and President of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. He is the author of 16 books, including Aboriginal Australians. A History since 1788 5th edition (2019) and Aboriginal Victorians. A History since 1800 (2005). He has consulted for the RCADIC, Museums Victoria and The National Museum of Australia.
PhD Candidate & Teaching Fellow, McMaster University Marika Avenel Brown is currently an ABD PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She also has an undergraduate specialization in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality and a graduate specialization in Digital Humanities. Her dissertation work looks to speculative fiction to trouble the division between natural and unnatural and to posit better future entanglements between human, nonhuman, and more-than-human life and she has written about critical veganism as a mode of speculative possibility.
PhD Candidate in English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University Melissa Montanari (she/her) is a writer and PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She is currently completing her dissertation, which is funded by SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and which aims to bring food and literary studies into critical discourse. In the Fall of 2021 Melissa taught a second year undergraduate course on Food in Media and Popular Culture. Inspired by students in her course she started a monthly newsletter called "foodstuff," which wades through the cultural, political, environmental and emotional entanglements that food elicits.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, University of Toronto Katie is a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow with the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) at the University of Toronto (2022-2024). She completed her PhD at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto in 2022. She researches social, infrastructural and political histories of the web, including early uses of the internet by young people in the 1990s, and ethical uses of historical platform data. Her work has been published in Internet Histories Journal, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (JICES), Jeunesse, and Studies in Social Justice.
