Madeleine Miller

Email: madeleine.miller@unsw.edu.au

Supervisors: Matthew Kearnes, Tema Milstein

I am a third year Environmental Humanities PhD student at the University of New South Wales. My PhD research explores claims of restoration and the politics of nature in the emergent alternative food movement, regenerative agriculture. I examine how livestock are rendered with biocultural belonging through practices pre-occupied with restoration. My work critically engages with energy transitions and imagined sustainable futures.

From 2018 onwards I have held many casual academic positions across the University of New South Wales, The University of Sydney, The University of Western Sydney and Macquarie University. From 2018 to 2023 I have tutored the subject, ARTS1240 Environment and Society at UNSW and in 2023 I was appointed the subject convenor. In 2023 I tutored for the department of Geosciences at The University of Sydney for the subjects GEOS2121 Environment and Resource Management and SUST1001 Introduction to Sustainability. From 2022 to 2023 I have held a variety of academic assistant positions within the Master of Environmental Management course at The University of New South Wales.

Following the devastating flooding along the east coast of Australia in 2022, I was employed as a research assistant for a Natural Hazards Research Australia investigation into community experiences of the 2022 Floods in New South Wales and Queensland. In this role I worked with the department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University to help conduct 200 interviews with flood victims, both in-person and online, and to code and collate the data. This research produced a series of co-authored reports and journal articles.

Currently, I am employed as the Executive Officer of the Geographical Society of NSW, where I am responsible for office management.

In 2019 I published my first sole author journal article with the Australian Geographer which was awarded the winner of the David G Stead Award for Best Paper by an Early Career Researcher. The following year, I was asked to be a reviewer for the Australian Geographer and in November of 2020, I spoke as a panelist at the Geographical Society of NSW Honours and Masters Conference, encouraging other students to pursue their interest in Geography.

During 2018 I delivered conference presentations at John Hopkins University and Macquarie University on my Honours research exploring the cultural construction of biosecurity concerns within the contemporary disease incursion in Far Northern Queensland banana plantations. From 2019 onwards I have delivered a variety of conference presentations, seminars and invited guest lectures on my PhD research at The University of New South Wales, The University of Wollongong, The University of Sydney, CEA CAPA Education Abroad, the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Institute of Australian Geographers annual conference.

In 2022 I was the HDR representative for the Humanities and Languages School at The University of New South Wales where I founded and facilitated the HAL Seminar Series and the Environmental Humanities HDR Reading Group.