As a political and ethical theorist I explore human-nature relations via the prism of the nuclear age.
My current project, sponsored by The University of Technology Sydney, aims to evaluate and transform Australian nuclear stewardship of radioactive wastes consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which demands “free, prior and informed consent”. Recently completed projects include an archival research fellowship at The University of Queensland that sought to (re)construct the nuclear ethics and politics of the pioneering environmental philosopher Richard Sylvan, an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowship that approached the Australian nuclear fuel cycle as future cultural and environmental heritage, and an Australian Academy of the Humanities fellowship that is cataloguing and digitising materials relating to the world’s first two nuclear photographers—Berlyn Brixner and Yoshito Matsushige—that are held by the Atomic Photographers Guild, for whom I also served on the advisory board.
Prior to holding these research-only appointments, I taught for thirteen years in Australia and the United States. Initially drawing on my experience as an award-winning applied ethicist in the pension and sovereign wealth fund industry, I began by teaching environmental, social and governance risks at a Graduate School of Management. More recently, I designed and delivered courses at the cultural interface of Australian aboriginal and settler environmental philosophies that drew, in part, from my earlier work on the extractive industries. I now teach into the Social and Political Sciences programs at The University of Technology Sydney.
The impulse for my sustained interest in human-nature relations is documented in several published works of narrative and visual auto-ethnography—from a prize-winning article of field philosophy, to a series of essays that work through various familial traumas, and a monograph of my partner’s pre- and post-pregnancy paintings and drawings.
I live and work on Gulidjan land and waters, with my partner and daughters.