Congratulations to (Un)worlding Collaboratory co-convenors Sophie Chao and Blanche Verlie on being awarded ARC Future Fellowships. These awards, granted by the Australian Research Council, are the most prestigious mid-career research fellowships in the country. They are highly competitive and are awarded to emerging leaders in their research fields. Sophie and Blanche both received Future Fellowships in the 2026 round of funding.
Further information on their planned research projects is provided below.
Sophie Chao
Coffee lifeworlds in a changing climate. This project aims to uncover how multispecies approaches offer new ways of intervening in the relations between agriculture, sustainability, climate justice and resilience at a time of intensifying ecological degradation and vulnerability. It does so through a case study of coffee in Timor-Leste, the country’s second largest export and primary income source for over a third of the population. Anticipated outcomes include a stronger understanding of the transforming biocultural relationships underpinning agrarian lifeworlds, landscapes and livelihoods. This will enrich Australian and global transdisciplinary debates on multispecies justice and inform policy to enhance the resilience of agrarian systems amid growing climactic uncertainty.
Blanche Verlie
Building community climate wellbeing amid multitemporal climate distress. This project will deliver the world’s first qualitative study of multitemporal climate distress—how past disasters, present disruptions, and future imaginaries intersect to shape lived experience. Using an innovative weather-responsive ethnography and interdisciplinary environmental humanities framework, it will document the affective, relational, and imaginative factors that enable disaster-impacted communities to respond collectively and constructively to the knowledge that climate crisis will worsen in future. Its bottom-up, community-led approach will identify everyday strategies that can support community climate wellbeing, and will amplify community efforts to strengthen climate adaptation, social cohesion, and environmental justice.