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Home About Curtin Learning and teaching Humanities School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry Advisory Board

Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry Advisory Board

Professor Michael Kent

Head of School
Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry (MCASI)

Razanne Al-Abdeli

Current Curtin University Student, Journalism and Public Relations
Student Representative appointed by the Head of School

Professor Crystal Abidin

Staff representative with relevant course coordination, and expertise in learning and teaching and/or research appointed by the Head of School

Pauna Truong

Customer Engagement & Relations Manager, Carbon Neutral
External member appointed by the Head of School

Dr Vannessa Hearman

Staff representative with relevant course coordination, and expertise in learning and teaching and/or research appointed by the Head of School

Travis Vladich

Principal, John Curtin College of the Arts
External member appointed by the Head of School

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Professor Shamit Saggar

Staff representative with relevant course coordination, and expertise in learning and teaching and/or research appointed by the Head of School

Mrs Listiana Operantanta

Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia (WA)
External member appointed by the Head of School

Ally Paolino

Director Strategic Engagement WA – Australian Public Service

Professor Angus Buchanan

Staff representative selected from another school outside of the Faculty of Humanities, appointed by the Head of School

Mr Frederick Yasso

Curtin University Centre for Aboriginal Studies
Staff representative selected from another school outside of the Faculty of Humanities, appointed by the Head of School

Professor Kit Messham-Muir

Standing Observer
Director, Research & Creative Production, MCASI

Associate Professor Kathryn Shine

Standing Observer
Deputy Head of School, MCASI

Dr Bruce Slatter

Standing Observer
Deputy Head of School, MCASI

Professor Jo Elfving-Hwang

Standing Observer
Deputy Head of School, MCASI

Mr Andrew McLean

Executive Officer
School Business Manager

Ms Cherie Galvin

Secretary
Administration Officer

Ally Paolino

Ally Paolino is a Director of Strategic Engagement in the Australian Public Service located in WA.

Ally has worked for the Australian Public Service for over 19 years in both Canberra and Perth, and brings a range of experience from corporate roles in HR and Security to more recent roles with a stakeholder engagement focus.

Ally currently leads the WA Community Engagement team prioritising building trusted relationships with community on behalf of the Australian government. This includes providing information on government priorities and ensuring whole of government messaging is delivered and allows a channel for community to provide feedback and recommendations to inform future policy and programs.

Ally values curiosity over all, and loves being able to engage with communities to understand the threats they face to social cohesion. Working with community on strategies and supports that build resilience and create connections is a great demonstration of the value of public service and the dedication of community to making our corner of the world a better place to live.

Pauna Truong

Pauna handles customer enquiries, account management and basic carbon footprint consulting at Carbon Neutral. She joined the company in February 2020 and wants to assist all businesses and organisations in their journey to become “carbon neutral”.

She is also completing her PhD research at Murdoch University, focusing on Environmental Education and the potential impact on Social Capacity Building for Youth.

Her main passion is travelling. She spent 3 years living abroad in Japan and travelled extensively through North America, Europe and Asia. The experiences and interactions with locals and other travellers sparked her interest in sustainability and carbon footprint reduction practices.

In her previous lives, Pauna taught English in Japan, worked in banking and B2B sales and marketing for FMCG. Transitioning to the environmental sector has provided Pauna with a steep, yet enjoyable learning curve.

Pauna has a B.A. in Communication Studies, a B.Comm (Hons) in Marketing and a Graduate Diploma in Environmental Science.

Crystal Abidin

Crystal is a digital anthropologist and ethnographer of vernacular internet cultures. She researches influencer cultures, online visibility, and social media pop cultures especially in the Asia Pacific region, and has published over 60 articles and chapters on various aspects of internet celebrity and vernacular internet cultures. Her books include ‘Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online’ (2018), ‘Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame’ (co-editor Brown, 2018), ‘Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures’ (co-authors Leaver & Highfield, 2020), ‘Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media’ (co-editors Warfield & Cambre, 2020), and ‘tumblr: Curation, Creativity and Community’ (co-authors Tiidenberg & Hendry, forthcoming).

Crystal is Associate Professor, Principal Research Fellow, & ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies, Programme Lead of Social Media Pop Cultures at the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. She is also Affiliate Researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. She was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia and Pacific Standard 30 Top Thinkers Under 30, and recently received the International Communication Association Popular Communication Early Career Scholar Prize and ABC TOP 5 Humanities Fellowship. Reach her at wishcrys.com.

Vannessa Hearman

Dr Vannessa Hearman is a historian of Southeast Asia and senior lecturer in History in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry. Her research deals with the 1965-66 anti-communist violence in Indonesia and its aftermath, the politics of memory and human rights, and transnational activism related to Indonesia and East Timor (Timor-Leste).

Dr Hearman teaches in history and international relations at Curtin University. As well as in these fields, previously, she has also taught in the areas of political science, Indonesian Studies and Asian Studies at Charles Darwin University, the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne.

Dr Hearman supervises Higher Degrees by Research and Honours students in the fields of history and Asian Studies. She is a native speaker of Indonesian and a NAATI certified interpreter (Indonesian-English) and translator (into English).

Dr Hearman has held several administrative roles, including as Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) and member of the College executive team at Charles Darwin University, and acting department chair and coordinator of academic programs at the University of Sydney.

Angus Buchanan

Professor Angus Buchanan has 35 years of experience working in human services and academia with a recognised track record of translation of research to practice and learning environments.

Angus commenced working at Curtin University in 2008, and is currently Head of School, Curtin School of Allied Health. Prior to this Angus held the role of Head of School, Occupational Therapy, Social Work and Speech Pathology (2015 – 2021). Before commencing at Curtin, Angus held senior management and leadership roles at the Disability Services Commission of Western Australia, implementing significant service developments and reforms in therapy and community coordination for people with disabilities.

Andrew McLean

Andrew commenced at Curtin University in 1993 and has since held various positions at the university in student administration, project management (Prince 2 Practitioner), strategic planning, research administration, learning and teaching, governance and area management. In October 2014 he joined from within Curtin the then School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts (MCCA) as School Business Manager (now School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry). He is committed to excellence in tertiary education management as an Associate Fellow of the Australasian Association for Tertiary Education Management (ATEM).

He was until recently a member of Curtin University Council having been elected by the professional/general staff for a three year term from June 2016-June 2019.
He is both a passionate education activist and disability advocate for his son and others with a disability. Together with his family he has successfully advocated for policy change and has on occasion met with Prime Ministers, Premiers, Ministers and Senior Public Sector Managers.

Andrew was previously Chair of the IPS School Boards at both Canning Vale Education Support Centre and Canning Vale Primary School. He was previously also a member of the Canning Vale College IPS School Board.

He holds both a Bachelor of Arts with Honours (History and Politics) and a Graduate Certificate in Public Administration from Curtin University.
In 2017 he graduated from the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) Company Directors Program.

Andrew has a keen interest in history, politics, public policy, literature, film, dogs and the music of The Beatles.

Mike Kent

Mike Kent is the head of school for Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry.

He is also a professor on the Centre for Culture and Technology where his research and writing focuses on the overlapping areas of Social Media, Disability and eLearning.

Cherie Galvin

Cherie is an Administrative Officer for the School of MCASI with over ten years of experience working alongside the executive teams at Curtin University. Cherie is responsible for educating other employees new to the School on using systems and applications and uses her positive can do attitude to encourage others to work hard and succeed. Although her whole career has been in administration Cherie believes you should never hold the job to yourself and sharing roles/responsibility is for the greater good.

Cherie is inspired daily by her partner and her two young adult children and as such encourages a strong and better life-work balance.

Jo Elfving-Hwang

I am an Associate Professor of Korean Society and Culture in the Discipline group of Social Sciences in the School of Media Creative Arts and Social Inquiry (MCASI) at Curtin University. I am also Dean Global, Korea, with the Office of Deputy Vice Chancellor Global, Director of the Korea Research & Engagement Centre at Curtin University and Major Coordinator of the Korean Studies program at Curtin.

My research focuses on the body in Korean culture and society, and in my previous work I have examined how beauty work and cosmetic surgery in Korea relate to embodied and material expressions of performing social class and status, race and celebrity beauty work as a form of somatic entrepreneurship. Recently my work has examined social meanings attached to beauty work as the body ages, how middle aged men relate to technologies of the body in everyday corporate contexts, and the semiotics of K-pop pop masculinities on stage. Her monograph drawing on the findings of the project is titled Beauty Matters: the Body in Korean Culture and Society.

I have 25 years of experience in the field of Korean Studies, and have been involved in developing academic networks in Australia, Germany and the UK. I have worked in major Universities in this area (Sheffield University, Leeds University, Frankfurt University and UWA) in various teaching, research, and leadership positions, and with specific focus on developing internationalisation of the curriculum. I have served as the President, Vice President and Treasurer of the Korean Studies Association of Australasia (KSAA) over the past decade, as an elected member in the Executive Board Member of the Australia-Korea Business Council of Western Australia (AKBCWA), Director of the Korea Research Centre of WA, and am currently a member of the Australia Korea Business Council Education Subcommittee. I have also worked to advocate for Korean language education in WA, and am currently leading a research project on this topic funded by the Australia-Korea Foundation.

Kathryn Shine

Dr Kathryn Shine is an Associate Professor in Journalism at Curtin and Deputy Head of the iSchool within MCASI, which includes journalism, internet studies, communications and library and information studies. She previously held the position of Director of Learning and Teaching in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts.

Dr Shine’s recent research has focused on the inclusion and portrayal of women in the news. She is collaborating with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at ANU and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on a project to support and encourage more women to provide media commentary.

Dr Shine has previously worked as a journalist at news outlets including The Sunday Times Magazine (STM), The Sun Herald and The Australian, and she continues to work as a freelance journalist and moderator. She has served on the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance (MEAA) WA committee and as a member of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) executive.

Kit Messham-Muir

Kit Messham-Muir is Professor of Art at the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, in Perth Western Australia. His expertise is in contemporary art and visual culture with a particular focus on conflicts of various kinds, including political violence, terror and war. Since the 1990s, his work has drawn upon and critiqued aspects of affect and trauma theory in the humanities, particularly in art theory, and he has investigated contemporary war art in Australia and internationally, Holocaust museums and memorials and the politics and aesthetics of ‘culture war’.

His books include The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture: Populism, Politics, and Paranoia (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2021), both co-authored with A/Prof Uroš Čvoro, and Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Prof Messham-Muir is the lead editor on The Politics of Artists in War Zones: Art in Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Professor Messham-Muir is Lead Chief Investigator on Art of Peace: New perspectives in visual art on peacekeeping from the 1990s, an Australian Research Council Linkage project in partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the National Trust of NSW. The overall project budget is $1,884,136, with partner organisations contributing $576,518 in cash and in-kind, and with ARC funding of $435,984. Art of Peace will centre different perspectives in the art that addresses peacekeeping, from artists in former peacekeeping conflict zones of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Timor-Leste.

Professor Messham-Muir holds a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of New South Wales (2000). His doctoral thesis examined the role of affect in political conflicts surrounding contemporary art in the 1990s. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art Honours Class 1 from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney (1996), majoring in the Painting Studio.

Since 1997, Prof Messham-Muir has taught art history at universities in Australia and Hong Kong and won multiple awards for teaching. Prof Messham-Muir has supervised to completion 16 PhD and 6 Masters, and currently supervises 10 PhDs at Curtin University. He publishes frequently in peer-reviewed and popular press (Artforum, Art & Australia, The Conversation) and since 2012 has directed the StudioCrasher online video project, which has received over 130,000 views.

Razanne Al-Abdeli

Razanne is a Journalism and Public Relations student at Curtin University, studying a Bachelor of Communications.

During her time at Curtin University, she has founded and taken up leadership positions in a number of Curtin Student Guild societies, giving her the opportunity to encounter a multitude of student perspectives which she believes are central to improving outcomes for the student experience.

 

Travis Vladich

Travis joined the College in 2010 as Head of Drama, before taking on various leadership roles such as Dean of the Arts. Travis is now the Principal of the College, providing expert guidance, direction and leadership to staff and students. Travis is an advocate of the Arts and for Gifted and Talented Education.

Travis holds a Bachelor of Arts in Secondary Education and a Bachelor of Education from Edith Cowan University. After completing his further education, he started his teaching career in a remote Kimberly community in 1993 before returning to Perth to teach in his field of Drama. Travis has had vast leadership experiences with the School Curriculum and Standards Authority and the Department of Education through his roles in Students Services, Curriculum and Assessment and as a Principal Consultant working on system wide initiatives.