People
Our growing membership reflects the interdisciplinarity of political ecology. PERC began as a collaboration between the School of People Environment and Planning and School of English and Media Studies at Massey University. However, the work that we do has involved collaborations with researchers based in disciplines including: social anthropology, media studies, ecology, geography, sociology, english, zoology, development studies, creative writing, politics, education, chemistry, environmental management, and engineering.
A/Prof. Trisia Farrelly PERC Co-Director
Trisia is a Co-Director of PERC. She is also a co-founder of the New Zealand Product Stewardship Council (NZPSC) and the environmental lobby group Carrying Our Future. Trisia is the Massey University representative for the Association of Social Anthropologists Aotearoa New Zealand and a member of the Sites Editorial Board. Her current research interests include the political ecologies of plastic production, consumption, and disposal; social license to operate (marine industries); and protected area management.
Dr. Sy Taffel PERC Co-director
Sy is a co-director of the Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre and is one of the centre's founding members. His research interests include political ecologies of digital media, digital media and political activism, the material impacts of media hardware, pervasive/locative media, software studies, social media and peer-to-peer production. Sy has published widely around the environmental impacts of digital technologies and along with Nicholas Holm, Sy co-edited the anthology Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene. He has also published in journals including Cultural Politics, Culture Machine, and The European Journal of Media Studies.
Sy also makes documentary/activist films, including for environmental groups such as the Environment Network Manawatu and Carrying Our Future.
Prof. Glenn Banks
Professor Bank's research is primarily focused on the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of large-scale, private sector investment in the extractive industries in Papua New Guinea. He has over twenty five years experience with large-scale mining operations in the region, and includes applied contracted research and consultancy for institutional and private sector actors in the extractive sector in the region. This research is framed by theoretical concerns with development, local agency and empowerment. Professor Banks is currently conducting collaborative research which examines the ways in which customary forms of land tenure can be used by landowners to engage on their own terms with the capitalist economy, based on case studies in Fiji and Papua New Guinea.
Dr. Nicholas Holm
Nicholas Holm is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies. The majority of his research explores the political role of popular culture, but he also has a long running interest in the cultural status of vermin, pest species, and other derided forms of nonhuman life. His most recent work in this area is an article on feral cats in Society & Animals, and a popular piece on 'natural cosmetics' in LA+. Every so often, someone asks him to speak on behalf of possums, which he's happy to do. Nick was a founding member of PERC and directed the 2018 conference “Feral.”
Lisa Vonk
Lisa is the administrator for PERC. She is a Masters student in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University. Supervised by Sy Taffel and Trisia Farrelly, her research explores waste (both human and non-human) in the supply chain for her Apple laptop. Lisa has published in Continuum journal.
A/Pro. Sita Venkateswar
Sita Venkateswar is Programme Coordinator and Associate Professor in the Social Anthropology programme at Massey University. She is also Associate Director of the New Zealand India Research Institute. Her current research interests include agroecological, regenerative and multispecies approaches to farming and food futures. She applies intersectional and decolonizing research methodologies within contemporary contexts of Aotearoa New Zealand and South Asia.
Prof. Ingrid Horrocks
Ingrid Horrocks is a creative writer and literary scholar based on Massey’s Wellington campus. She writes about the long history of the politics of mobility and place and is interested in ways in which we can rec-conceptualise the ecological imagination. Her latest nonfiction book, Where We Swim, is a blend of memoir, travel, and ecological imaginings, both local and global. Ingrid’s other publications include two poetry collections, a book on women wanderers published by Cambridge UP, and the co-edited collection, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a member of the NonfictioNOW International Board and co-organiser of NFN2021.
Romilly Cumming
Following several years working in community engagement roles within Melbourne's charity sector, Romilly completed a graduate diploma in environmental studies at the end of 2020 and recently finished a summer scholarship exploring plastic pollution as waste colonialism in Aotearoa. Romilly is currently working as a research assistant on a project looking at how we encourage our tamariki to be kaitiaki in the age of the anthropocene.
Dr. Jonathon Hannon
Jonathon Hannon is the coordinator of the Zero Waste Academy, based at Massey University in New Zealand. This role involves teaching, research supervision, industry/community consultation and advisory on campus and city sustainability. Jonathon has extensive experience and passion for the Kiwi recycling industry, as a crucial environmental service provider to the New Zealand economy. Jonathon is currently undertaking a PhD exploring and evaluating municipal zero waste methodologies.
Dr. Alice Beban
Alice Beban is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Massey University, New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in the United States. Her research addresses land rights, agricultural production, and gender concerns to understand people's changing relationships with land and water from a feminist political ecology perspective. Recent projects include research on ‘land grabs’ and redistributive land reform in Cambodia, cross-border migration of smallholder farmers in the Mekong Delta, gendered agrarian transformation and the right to food, and mapping cultural change in dam-affected communities along the Mekong river. Her new book, Unwritten Rule (Cornell Press, 2021) examines land politics as a lens through which to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia.
Dr. Tom Doig
Tom Doig is an environmental journalist and creative writing and media studies scholar, based at Massey’s Manawatū campus. His research areas include: disaster studies; literary journalism studies; and the social implications of the climate crisis. He is the author of Hazelwood (forthcoming: Penguin, 2020), The Coal Face (Penguin, winner of the 2015 Oral History Victoria Education Innovation Award) and Mörön to Mörön: Two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure (Allen & Unwin, 2013).
Dr. Karen Hytten
My research is focused on the interface between science, politics and the public. I am interested in the way environmental issues and options for addressing them are constructed in contrasting, often contradictory ways by actors promoting competing discourses. In particular, I am currently exploring climate change politics and the potential to promote more effective climate change engagement in Australia and New Zealand. I am also privileged to work with postgraduate students investigating diverse topics ranging from climate change politics in the Bahamas, to community based adaptation to climate change in Cambodia, forestry policy in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, perceptions of climate change within the tourism industry in Mauritius, and e-waste management in Tanzania.
Dr. Laura Jean McKay
Laura Jean McKay is the author of the Animals in That Country (Scribe, 2020) and Holiday in Cambodia (Black Inc. 2013). She is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University, with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. Her research focuses on interspecies communication, ecofiction, extinction and decolonising literatures. Laura is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari.
Matt Peryman
Matt Peryman is an anthropology student based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Ko Ngāti Awa te Iwi. Matt's research focuses on Indigenous-led plastics pollution mitigation, kaitiakitanga, and anticolonial science.
Comments 9
Hi Trisia. How are you? It was great to attend the previous conference featuring Ass/Prof. Jennifer Silver. It will be great to get updated information about such events in the future. Thanks
Kia ora Jermi,
Thanks for coming! I have added you to our mailing list.
Hi there,
I’m a student at PN doing a Grad Dip in Environmental studies. I heard about this group through Trisia’s Environmental Anthropology class. She mentioned that student buy in was minimal so I’m tentatively sticking my hand up to see if I might be able to help bridge that divide (and I know there’s another student in our class that is interested also).
Lisa – could you please contact me with some more information/next meetings etc? Keen to find out a bir more about what’s going on.
Thanks
Romilly
Kia ora Romilly,
I have added you to our mailing list and emailed you.
Lisa (admin)
Hi Lisa,
I’m currently a PhD candidate in the field of political ecology, and would like to receive updates from this group about any events, research or conferences. Could you please add me to your mailing list?
Thanks!
Kia ora Revati,
I have added you to the mail list. You can also subscribe to our blog for more frequent updates!
Ngā mihi
Lisa (admin)
Hello!
I am a PhD scholar in literature from Central University of Himachal Pradesh (Dharamsala, India) specializing in ecocriticism, ecofeminism and ecotranslation studies. I am looking forward to the E-conference “Extraction: Tracing the Veins” being organized by Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre and Wageningen University. I’d like to know if you could provide me with a certificate of participation (attending the conference) after its successful completion. That way, I would have something valuable to show for my progress in my research area. As it is, good conferences in this discipline are extremely rare to come across.
Please let me know if you need any more information from my end.
All the best for the conference, and looking forward to hearing from you.
Good evening, could I please be added to your mailing list! I am hoping to join the Conviviality conference. Thanks
Hi Lana – of course!
Can you send your email to masseyperc(at)gmail.com?
Ngā mihi
Lisa (admin)