About

 



Dr Michele Lobo is a cultural geographer who explores race, climate change and belonging by storying worlds across the Indian Ocean, in particular, Australia and India. She decolonises climate change scholarship by braiding knowledges from Indigenous as well as subaltern ethnic worlds to produce choreographies of places as sites of difference, encounter and human/more-than-human co-belonging. 

Her research interests are:

  • Place, climate change, multispecies justice and co-belonging

  • Affect, race, encounter, Anthropocene urbanism, co-becoming

  • Decolonising climate change scholarship: Archipelagic and Oceanic thinking 

  • Decolonising the white settler university

  • Thriving Ethnic Minority Worlds/Indigenous Country

  • Political engagement, placemaking and everyday Islam 

  • Planning, public spaces and diversity

  • International students and Asian transnationalism 

  • Freedom and Love in carceral places

  • Creative methods – participatory photos, video, films, drone cultures

I draw on transdisciplinary theoretical insights and have developed considerable expertise in using participatory visual methods (photographs, video and films) to illuminate the diversity of political engagement and the agency of racialised and socio-economically disadvantaged Indigenous peoples and ethnic/ethno-religious minorities of colour (including Muslims, international students, asylum seekers, refugees) in Australian cities (in particular, Darwin, Melbourne), Paris, Detroit, Kolkata and Pune. 

I am committed to decolonising public institutions and places evident in a recent webinar held in March 2022 (https://www.iag.org.au/our-journal) and open-access publication – Lobo, M. (2021) Breathing spaces of fearlessness and generosity in the Anglophone/Western University. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-5871.12491).

I have authored one book (published doctoral thesis, Lap Academic Publishing, 2009), co-edited 2 books (Routledge 2011, Common Ground, 2011), published 37 peer reviewed articles in journals of international repute, 13 book chapters and 6 refereed conference papers. In addition, I have also produced non-traditional research outputs, written policy reports and editorials for journal special issues and led several Critical Dialogue forums in the Postcolonial Studies Journal on books by leading scholars 

I have held 3 highly competitive Australian Grants. In 2017/2018 I was awarded a collaborative Australia-India Council/Australian Department of Foreign Affairs grant ($50,000). From 2013 to 2016 I held 2 highly competitive category one Australian Research Council national grants - Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE 130100250, 2013-2016, $404, 529) and a Discovery Award as a Chief Investigator (DE 130102601, 2013-2016, $277,694). I received the Vice Chancellor’s Award and Pro-Vice Chancellor’s for the Best Early Career Researcher, Deakin University in 2014 and 2013 respectively. I was nominated for the Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research, Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, 2015. 

I hold leadership positions in academia and has well-established activist networks in Australia, India and beyond. I serve as editor of Social & Cultural Geography, a prestigious international journal (Impact Factor – 3.606) and Editor, Book Reviews/Critical Dialogues, Postcolonial Studies Journal. I am a Council Member of the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) and Chair, IAG Equity Research Group. 

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