The Unworlding Collaboratory

Convenors

Sophie Chao

Sophie Chao is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates ecology, capitalism, health, food, and justice in the Pacific. She is author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (2022) and Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger (2025) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (2022) and Beyond Bios: The Life of Matter and the Matter of Life (2026), all published by Duke University Press. Chao is of Sino-French heritage and lives on unceded Gadigal lands in Sydney, Australia.
www.morethanhumanworlds.com

Blanche Verlie

Blanche Verlie is a multidisciplinary social scientist whose work focuses on climate change. Her research investigates how people understand, experience, and respond to climate change, and how we might do this differently and better. She is the author of Learning to live-with climate change: From anxiety to transformation which is available as a free e-book.

At the University of Sydney, she is a Sydney Horizon Fellow in Gender and Cultural Studies, and one of the leaders of the Environmental Justice theme at the Sydney Environment Institute.

Thom van Dooren

Thom van Dooren is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Humanities and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, Australia. His work focuses on the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (2022).
www.thomvandooren.org

Members

Hannah Della Bosca

Hannah Della Bosca is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sydney, and a practicing visual artist. At the Sydney Environment Institute, Hannah works at the intersection of critical environmental, climate, and multispecies justices, and has a sustained focus on the social and material politics of place and community.

https://www.lennoxstreetstudios.com/hanna-della-bosca

Freya Grace MacDonald

Freya Grace MacDonald is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney and a doctoral fellow at The Sydney Environment Institute. Her research, embedded in the Environmental Humanities, elucidates how contemporary literature is simultaneously reflecting, perpetuating, forging and transforming social, national, climate and future climate imaginaries in the post-2020 conjuncture. Through her research, Freya strives to encourage individual and collective recognition of the agentic capacity for reimagining futures, even under the immense weight of planetary-scale environmental emergency.

Tom Melick

Tom Melick is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney. His dissertation research looks at the unlikely ways the ocean floor and its lifeforms come to be known and not-known as a site of industry, science, and cartography. With the artist Simryn Gill he runs Stolon Press, a publisher of books and other printed matter; with the translator Elisa Taber he edits Slug, an online pamphlet series.

Thomas McManus

Undergraduate Almost-Honours student situated in the Environmental Humanities. Particularly interested in multispecies studies, environmental history and new materialism. 

Emerging project: Honours at Sydney University commencing Feb 2026. Will be researching the bioinvasion of Fire Ants through shipping containers to make sense of human/nonhuman agency.

Myles Oakey

Myles Oakey is an early career researcher in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney and a research member of the Sydney Environment Institute. His research is situated in the broad field of the environmental humanities but emerges at the intersection of multispecies studies, science and technology studies, philosophical ethology, and extinction studies. 

mylesoakey.me

Jamie Wang

Jamie Wang is an urban environmental humanities scholar and writer. Her current writing and thinking examine sustainable urban-making, technological imaginaries, and multi-modal environmental narratives in the context of climate change and environmental injustice.
https://jamiewang.org/

Ed White

Ed White is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Southern Cross University. His research combines field ecology and multispecies methods to explore the interactions of humans, dung beetles and soil microbiota in managed grasslands. He is particularly interested in the potential of insects to solve environmental challenges.

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