Place Lab: Creating a Sense of Place for Migrant Communities

Dr. Anne Bunde-Birouste is Founding Director of Football United. She also is the Convener of the Health Promotion at the UNSW Graduate School of Public Health and Community Medicine.

Anne has over 25 years of international practice, policy and advocacy work with focus on health and development, practice-based research, she has focused on health and peace-building, community participation in health, participatory applied research in innovative health promotion approaches for working with disadvantaged groups.

Professor John Simons is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University.  His previous role with Macquarie University was Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts.  Prior to joining Macquarie University he worked at the universities of Wales, Exeter, Winchester, Edge Hill and Lincoln in the UK and has held various visiting Professorships and Fellowships in the USA where he is also an alumnus of the State Department’s International Visitor Program. In the 1990s he worked extensively in Eastern Europe on projects to build universities after the fall of communism. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Higher Education Academy, the Zoological Society of London and the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He is President of CHASS, an Executive Board member of DASSH and an advisory council member of the International Anti-Poaching Federation.

He has published very widely - some seventeen monographs or edited volumes and numerous chapter and articles - on topics ranging from Middle English chivalric romance to Andy Warhol and from codicology to the history of cricket. Since the late 1990s he has mainly concentrated on the issue of animals and his chief publications in the field are Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (2002), Rossetti’s Wombat (2008), The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy (2012) and Kangaroo (2013). He is also a published poet.

Raphael Manirakiza is a clinical psychologist with extensive experience in international, government and not-for-profit organisations. He is also a political asylum seeker.

In his native country of Burundi, he was appointed by the President as the Director General responsible for programs coordination and relationships for the Ministry of AIDS between 2006 and 2010. He also worked as a health expert with the Belgian Embassy to Burundi between 2010 and 2013.

Raphael was also a spokesperson for the opposition political party, PARENA, and the founder of the Africa Mining General Group – an association dedicated to expose corruption and instil transparency in the mining industry.

In 2013, after receiving death threats as a result of speaking out against high-level corruption in the mining industry, Raphael fled Burundi with his partner, Annick and sought political asylum during his attendance at a mining conference in Australia.

Raphael has lived in Sydney since then, where he currently works part-time at House of Welcome and CMRC-Parramatta. He is a prominent leader within the Burundian community living in Australia and is involved in community development as the founding member and Chairperson of Whoever In Need (WIN) and as a workshop facilitator for the Families in Cultural Transition program on behalf of the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS).

David is an internationally recognised leader in brand, communications and legacy strategy. An innovator in creating economic and social outcomes through informed brand strategy, he has led high-profile place and corporate branding projects in Australia and around the world.

As a place branding expert and Managing Director of Generation Alliance, David has led projects for the ACT Government, Penrith City Council, Parramatta City, Warringah and Wyong Shire Councils as well as nation branding projects in Bangladesh, Botswana, Jamaica, New Zealand, The Gambia, Tonga and Zanzibar.

Prior to starting his own business, David worked for 14 years in executive roles at the Australian Trade Commission (Austrade) where he gained a broad international business perspective and a solid understanding of global trade and development.

Dr Lara Moroko is an educator, researcher and consultant to industry. She combines her passion for entrepreneurship, placemaking and innovation with her area of specialisation - creation of value for customers, staff and stakeholders - throughout her portfolio of roles.

Building on a decade in the finance industry, Lara leveraged her early career experience to consult to the banking and finance, pharmaceutical, IT, construction, health, advertising, design and telecommunication industries, before embarking on an academic career in 2005.

Throughout her research and consulting Lara continues to build a bridge between the latest in academic thinking with the challenges and opportunities of doing best practice business in Australasia.

Professor Sherman Young is Macquarie University’s Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching and a Professor in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies where he teaches and researches in the area of new media theory and production. He is the author of The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book (UNSW Press, 2007), co-author of Media Convergence (Palgrave, 2012) and Beyond 2.0 - the Future of Music (Equinox, 2014) - all of which analyse the impact of new media technologies. 

Sherman has a BSc in Design (UNSW), an MA in Media, Technology and Law (Macquarie) and a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies (UQ). Prior to becoming an academic, Sherman ran a multimedia production company building interactive media for a range of corporate and publishing clients.