Katherine Gibson new advisory board member

Prof Dr Katherine Gibson is Deputy Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, where she has been researching and teaching as a professor since 2009. The award-winning academic has been researching alternative economic development opportunities in the Pacific region, the relationship between feminism and economics as well as research and activism since the 1990s. She trained as a human geographer with expertise in political economy and, with her collaborator for over 30 years, the late Professor Julie Graham, developed a distinctive approach to economic geography drawing on feminism, post-structuralism and action research. “We are delighted to have won Katherine Gibson for this role,” say Directors Susanne Leeb and Erich Hörl, “she not only covers key areas of LIAS, but also provides important impetus for the integration of research in the Pacific region.”

Katherine Gibson is Professor at the University of Western Sidney at the Institute of Culture and Society. From 1999-2008 she was Professor and Head of the Department of Human Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University and Director of Women's Studies at Monash University (1992-1995). She has led research projects with communities in Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. Together with Julie Graham, she co-founded the “Community Economies Collective”, an ongoing collaboration between academic and community researchers and activists in Australia, North America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Her recent publications include Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies co-authored with Gerda Roelvink and Kevin St. Martin (2015); Take Back the Economy: an Ethical Guide for Transforming Communities, co-authored with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy (2013). Under the pen name J.K. Gibson-Graham, Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham published The End of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy in 1996. It was republished in 2006 with a new Introduction and named a Classic in Human Geography by the leading journal Progress in Human Geography in 2011.