Gay Hawkins

Gay Hawkins is a Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Institute for Culture and Society a leading interdisciplinary research centre based at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on the interactions between environments, materials and cultures. She is internationally recognised for her work on everyday waste practices and the ways in which changing material and economic practices have provoked new habits. Since 2008 a key focus of her work has been the rise of plastic as a mundane material and the cultural, environmental and political impacts of this profound material transformation. In 2015 she published, with colleagues Kane Race and Emily Potter, Plastic Water – the social and material life of bottled water (MIT Press), a global analysis of how the rise of bottled water has reconfigured water qualities and interfered with the struggle for safe mass supply. She is currently completing a major study into the introduction of plastic food packaging post WWII called The Skin of Commerce.

Prior to joining WSU in 2015 Professor Hawkins was a Professorial Research Fellow and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, an innovative research centre based in the Arts Faculty.