Professor Victoria K. Haskins, FAHA is co-Director of the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre at the University of Newcastle. She has published extensively on gender, labour, and colonialism, with a focus on cross-cultural relationships in Indigenous domestic service, including One Bright Spot (Palgrave, 2005), and most recently Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel. She has held an inaugural ARC Future Fellowship (2009–13) and the NSW Centenary of Anzac Commemoration History Fellowship (2013–15). Her current project, undertaken with Claire Lowrie and Swapna Banerjee, is a history of the “travelling ayahs and amahs,” the mobile women who worked as childcarers for British and elite South Asian families during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is also part of a collaborative research project led by Worimi historian John Maynard and four other Aboriginal historians, on the history of the NSW Aborigines Protection/Welfare Board and its impact on Aboriginal lives.
Associate Professor Katharine McKinnon is Director of the Centre for Sustainable Communities, University of Canberra. She is also Chair of the Board for the Community Economies Institute, which is dedicated to furthering ethical economic practices for “surviving well together.” Working with a broad range of communities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, Katharine’s research explores questions of how to put an ethics of care for people and the environment at the heart of economies and livelihoods. Her work has pursued efforts to achieve place-based visions of gender equity in people’s lives and livelihoods, and to reshape organisations around priorities of care and inclusivity. Katharine has published extensively on social geographies, community economies, and care. Her most recent book Birthing Work: The Collective Labour of Childbirth (Palgrave, 2020) provides an insight into the collective endeavours that shape birth,highlighting the interdependence at the foundation of family life and livelihood.