Our UNESCO Chair team

Deakin Distinguished Professor Mansouri is the Director of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia, and holds an Alfred Deakin Research Chair in migration and intercultural studies. He is the Editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Citizenship and Globalisation Studies and founding co-editor of the International Journal of Social Inclusion.  Since 2010, Professor Mansouri has served as an expert advisor to the UN on cultural diversity and intercultural relations and is currently the elected convenor of the UNITWIN Network for Inter-Religious Dialogue and Intercultural Understanding (IDIU).

His recent books include The Global Politics of Forced Migration: An Australian Perspective (2023), Racism in Australia Today (2021), co-authored with Amanuel Elias and Yin Paradies, L’interculturalisme à la croisée des chemins: Perspectives comparatives sur les concepts, les politiques et les pratiques (editor, 2019) and Contesting the Theological Foundations of Islamism and Violent Extremism (co-editor, 2019).

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Dr. Amanuel Elias is a research fellow for the UNESCO Chair, Cultural Diversity and Social Justice at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. He received Masters in Economics from Monash University (2012) and Ph.D. in health economics from Deakin University (2015). His latest research estimated the economic cost of racial discrimination in Australia (BMC Public Health, 2016). Prior to his academic career, Dr. Elias worked in development projects in Eritrea where he worked for a local government until 2005. His research interests include the: socio-economic and health impacts of racial discrimination; experiences of migrants and cultural minorities; and intercultural relations and cultural diversity.

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Dr Enqi Weng is an interdisciplinary scholar with emerging expertise in religion, ethnic relations and decoloniality. She completed her PhD from the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University in 2018 and has since published Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia: Of Dominance and Diversity (Routledge, 2020). Her doctoral thesis analysed media representation of religions in Australia, and revealed that public discussions about religion were not only primarily constructed and influenced by white male perspectives, British influences also problematically continued to shape these discussions in post-colonial Australia. Her research interests include: decolonising ‘religion’; decolonising methodologies; race and religion; media and religious/social changes; cultural/religious diversity; religious literacy in journalism.

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Dr Valentina Baú is a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University (WSU) Institute for Culture and Society, Co-Director of WSU Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative (HADRI), a member of WSU Young & Resilient Research Centre, and an affiliate with Monash Global Peace and Security Centre. Her work focuses on the use of development communication in both peacebuilding and humanitarian contexts, and she has published extensively on both academic and industry platforms. She holds a MSc in Communication for Development from the University of Reading (UK) and a Ph.D in International Communication from Macquarie University (Australia). Valentina has worked in different African countries, Asia and the Middle East, and collaborated with international development and humanitarian agencies including UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, Search for Common Ground, Mercy Corps, FilmAid and the Italian Development Cooperation. She was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at UNICEF Innocenti and her work has received funding from the Australia Research Council and the IPRA Foundation. Her experience involves the implementation of both research and media projects with victims and perpetrators of conflict, displaced people, refugees and people living in extreme poverty. More details about her work and publications can be found here.

Dr. Taghreed Jamal Al Deen is an Associate Research Fellow for the UNESCO Chair at Deakin and a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sydney.

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Alma Chowdhury is completing her PhD on the topic of Identity Negotiation of Muslim Women in the Social Media Era.

Angelique Stefanopoulos is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Deakin University. Her PhD research is a sociological analysis of social and cultural capital of three generations of migrants and descedants of migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds. Angelique’s research interests lie in the fields of migration, class, social and cultural capital.

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Jeevika Vivekananthan is a social researcher in the intersection of humanitarian, development and diaspora studies. She is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her PhD research seeks to understand the nature and impact of diaspora humanitarian assistance from the perspectives of crisis-affected communities, using Sri Lanka and Tonga as case studies.

Jeevi is interested in modernity/coloniality/decoloniality. She broadly explores decolonial alternatives for knowing, being and doing. As a dancer and a poet, she also experiments with creative encounters to link theory and practice.

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Scheherazade Bloul is PhD scholarship recipient for the UNESCO Chair in Comparative Research on Cultural Diversity and Social Justice. Her previous research focused on Islamic modest fashion as multi-use intermediary, specifically via digital communication technologies and representations of Muslim women in Australian media. Coming from a media background, her interdisciplinary research interests include the intersections of digital media, youth and political participation, journalism and communication studies. She is also a Director at the Australian Middle East Journalism Exchange, an organisation that facilitates tours to the Middle East and North Africa for Australian journalism students.

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Uroosa Mushtaq is completing her PhD, which is entitled Testing Intercultural Dialogue in Fragile Contexts: Case Study of Jammu &Kashmir. Uroosa is undertaking her studies as part of a Cotutelle PhD Program, which has allowed her to study both at Deakin University in Australia and Coventry University in the UK.

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