Three Fellows elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences

Three University of Adelaide researchers have been elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences.

Professor Sarah Wheeler from the Centre for Global Food and Resources, Professor Megan Warin from the Department of Sociology, Criminology and Gender Studies and Professor Amanda Nettelbeck from the Department of History are Fellows who have been
elected by their peers.

The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia brings together over 700 of Australia’s leading researchers and professionals across the social science disciplines who provide advice to governments, promote an understanding of social sciences and collaborate in the social sciences.

Each Fellow is elected on the basis of a sustained and internationally distinguished contribution to their field.

Sarah Wheeler is Professor of Water Economics and is the current 2020 President for the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES).

Professor Wheeler’s research interests focus on issues with the environment, agriculture, natural resources, climate change, water markets, food and health. She has spent considerable time influencing and engaging with national water policy issues in Australia (primarily water issues in the Murray-Darling Basin) and she is one of the leading researchers in the world on water markets. One of her key research focuses at present seeks to understand the behavioural implications of various policies to address resource issues, and the reciprocal relationship that exists between attitudes and behaviour, especially in relation to climate change.

Professor Megan Warin is an interdisciplinary scholar who has held academic positions in anthropology, gender studies, public health, and psychiatry.

She has made significant contributions to the anthropology of food, establishing a strong foundation for the study of eating disorders and obesity in anthropology, broadening this to the international field of epigenetics and developmental origins of health and disease and its investigation of maternal and fetal over-nutrition. She is a biosocial research leader in the Robinson Research Institute and recent Director of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide.

Her research investigates gender and class differences in obesity, public understandings of obesity science, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander views on health, eating and intergenerational transmission, phenomenological approaches to embodiment and the nature of desire in disordered eating. Current ARC projects with colleagues at Deakin and Flinders Universities include investigation of discourses around Indigenous epigenetics, and alcohol consumption among Australian mid-life women, as well as industry projects with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Uniting Communities (Family by Family).

Professor Amanda Nettelbeck’s research centres on the history and memory of colonial violence, Indigenous/settler relations, and the legal governance of Indigenous peoples. She is author, co-author or co-editor of eight books in these fields.

Her 2019 monograph Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood explores how imperial policies designed to protect Indigenous rights sat within a larger policy framework that operated around the British Empire to draw colonised peoples within the embrace of the law and to reform them as governable subjects.

She is currently working on two collaborative projects funded by ARC grants: ‘Envisaging Citizenship: Australian histories and global debates’ (with Jane Lydon, Melissa Miles and Fay Anderson) and ‘Reconciling with the Frontier: accounting for colonial conflict’ (with Robert Foster, John Carty, SA Museum, State Library SA, History Trust SA, State Records SA and Reconciliation SA).

The new Fellows will have the opportunity to give a three-minute presentation on their work at the Academy’s New Fellow Presentations. This public event will be held online from 4.30 – 7pm (AEDT) on Wednesday 25 November.