The Council of the Society was delighted to learn that Dr Sophie Chao MRSN, DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, has been awarded a 2024 Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

The prestigious award recognises Chao’s cutting-edge ethnographic and interdisciplinary research on the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. This research includes her multiple award-winning monograph, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, co-edited volume The Promise of Multispecies Justice (both published by Duke University Press in 2022) as well as a range of articles in high-profile journals including Cultural Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Environmental Humanities. Dr Chao’s current research examines Indigenous experiences and theories of hunger in West Papua, the lifeworlds and afterlives of plantation capitalism, and wildlife-human entanglements in settler Australia.

The Paul Bourke Award is named after the late Professor Paul  Bourke who served as Social Sciences Academy President from 1993 to 1997 and honours the nation’s most exceptional early-career researchers in the social sciences. The award has been received by some of Australia’s leading social scientists as the Paul Bourke Award since 2008 and as the Academy Early Career Award from its inception in 1987.