Dr. Maria Armoudian is an associate professor in politics/international relations, Director of the University of Auckland Sustainability Hub, co-director of Nga Ara Whetu, Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Society, the founding host/producer of the radio program, The Scholars' Circle, and the author of three acclaimed books, Lawyers Beyond Borders Advancing International Human Rights through Local Laws and Courts; Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World; and Reporting from the Danger Zone: Frontline Journalists, Their Jobs and an Increasingly Perilous Future. 

She has published widely on human rights, environmental politics, communication, and good governance. Before coming to Auckland, she served as a commissioner in the city of Los Angeles for six years and worked in the California State Legislature for eight years, working environmental sustainability to good government and corporate reform. In addition to her academic publications, her articles have been published by the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Psychology Today, the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, The New Zealand Herald, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Progressive, Salon.com, Truthout, Alternet, Inc., Daily Variety and Billboard. Maria is also a song-writer & musician. Her CD is titled Life in the New World.


Distinctions/Honours:
Royal Society of New Zealand Research Excellence Award
Human Rights Book of the Year
Research Excellence Medal
Research Excellence Award
Early Career Research Excellence Award


Responsibilities:

MA & Graduate Advisor

Postgraduate Advisor (past)

Seminar Convener (present)

Undergraduate Advisor (past)

Areas of Expertise:
Political Communication, Media, Conflict, Genocide, American Politics, Human Rights, Environmental Communication, Environmental Politics.

Media Keywords:
Media, journalism, human rights, genocide, conflict, peace processes, American politics

I joined the Global Studies Programme and the Faculty of Arts and Education of the University of Auckland in 2019 after completing my doctoral studies.

I specialize in Sino-Italian cultural mobilities. My research focuses on in cross-cultural encounter, identity construction and political discourse and draws on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. I am also interested in the connections between national literature, identity construction and political activism/dissent in modern and contemporary society.

My book The Distance to China (Peter Lang, 2022), was awarded the Jo-Anne Duggan Prize for Best Publication 2023. The monograph identifies the political uses of travel narratives on China in twentieth century Italian society.

Distinctions/Honours:

Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award Early Career 2024

Jo-Anne Duggan Prize for Best Publication 2023

Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award Early Career 2022

ACIS Publication Grant 2022

Qualifications:

PhD in Comparative Literature - University of Auckland

MA in Comparative Literature - University of Oriental Studies “L’Orientale”, Naples (cum laude)

BA in Comparative Languages - University of Oriental Studies “L’Orientale”, Naples (cum laude)

Responsibilities:
PhD Advisor for Anthropology
Subdisciplinary Convenor for Biological Anthropology

Areas of Expertise:
Biological anthropology, biosocial and biocultural approaches, infectious disease, history of epidemics, pandemics, historical demography, historical epidemiology, 19th century, 20th century.

Media Keywords:
infectious disease, epidemics, pandemics, polio, disability

I'm a lecturer in Public Policy and Technology with the Public Policy Institute in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Auckland (UoA), here in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

I have also been a Research & Policy Lead at an NGO working in digital equity and technology policy. Before that, I was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute at UoA, researching approaches to address systemic gendered effects in public sector budgets.

In 2020 I completed my PhD in Public Policy at Victoria University of Wellington, studying online political participation as part of my wider interest in the intersection of technology and the social & political.

My background is as a Sociologist (tho my first degree was in Physics!), with particular foci on online political & social behaviour, technology policy, gender, and politics, having studied previously at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Canterbury.

I've lectured courses on Public Policy, Politics, Gender, and Sociological Theory, worked as a research assistant, a graduate assistant, and I've been a teaching-assistant/tutor in too many courses to count off the top of my head (I've even worked in financial legislative compliance outside academia!).

Basically, I'm a big nerd. Seriously.

I'm a feminist, introvert, geek, lesbian, politics-junkie, pākehā, Apple-fangirl, urban-space & urban-design addict, car-free, train-loving, espressoholic, who is often just out on her motorbike for the joy of the ride (fully electric!)

I have a love for my kobo ereader, mid-century & scandi interior design, local history museums, comic books, small apartments, neo-impressionist art galleries, Wonder Woman & Captain Marvel, wood floors, SFF/UF, quiet icy-cold early mornings with my breath misting, Star Trek, cheeses that don't come in 1kg cubes, anything pickled, craft beer & good red wine, electric motorcycles & EVs, and Ikea. Let me have a nice long subway, tram, or train ride and I kinda turn into a kid again. I've lived in the Netherlands, the United States (Chicago!), and New Zealand.

Tatjana is a Programme Co-Director and Senior Lecturer in Global Studies.

Tatjana has an interdisciplinary background in medicine, history and philosophy and the social studies of science. Much of her research has situated sciences of human development and heredity in their global social and political contexts – from demonstrating connections between innovative fetal medicine and the pastoral economy of New Zealand to the intersections between the field of ‘fetal origins of adult disease’ and social policy in the 1990s. Relatedly, Tatjana has long been interested in how national politics, urban space and social movements shape the development of scientific disciplines, and how urban publics engage with science. This interest inspired her recent research in deliberative democracy. Between 2019 and 2023, she led an MBIE Smart Ideas project that examined how democratic innovations based in deliberative democracy can improve public involvement in decision making around complex issues. This research led to collaborations with public organizations and local government that changed public policy, for instance, on the pilot use of recycled water in Auckland water supply.

Ever since her childhood in former Yugoslavia, a founding member of the non-aligned movement, Tatjana has been interested in strengthening educational and research links between the Global North and the South. Alongside her academic research, Tatjana worked with the International Network of Government Science Advisors (INGSA) to train and connect scientists and policymakers in the Global South. From 2020 to 2024, through the International Public Policy Observatory (IPPO) she worked on fostering links between the Global South research and Global North policymakers.

Tatjana has taught undergraduate courses, supervised postgraduate students from Honours and Diploma to PhD level, and mentored junior researchers at the University of Cambridge, the Medical University of Vienna, University of Dubrovnik and Central European University. She is a former Associate Editor of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (currently board member), and council member of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology. Between 2023 and 2025 she was a Mercator Fellow of the research project Return of the Organism in the philosophy of biology group at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany.

Kia ora. I currently teach graduate and undergraduate courses in sociology. My research program explores questions of science, technology, power, collaboration, and social and environmental sustainability. My current research projects focus on the politics of nuclear waste, artificially intelligent robotics in agriculture, and collaborative research for sustainable technofutures. I am a member of the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN) and co-convener of the Feminist, Anti-Colonial, Anti-Imperial, Nuclear Gathering (FACING Nuclear).

I did my BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara where I had the opportunity to participate as a student and facilitator in the innovative Education for Sustainable Living Program, and served as an inaugural intern in the LabRATS Program. After spending some time living and working in India, China, and Japan, I moved to Europe to begin my MSc in agroecology, a double degree program with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and ISARA-Lyon. I was also able to spend a semester at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria, where I spent time learning from agroecologists and participatory methods specialists at the forward-thinking Institute for Development Research. This provided me with an opportunity to participate in the 5th International Training Course on Organic Agriculture at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. That summer, I also participated in the inaugural Global Environments Summer Academy held at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. I graduated from my MSc program in 2012. My MSc research explored people’s perceptions and actions related to food safety in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy disaster.

I did my PhD in sociology at the University of Otago, graduating in 2018. My dissertation drew on the fields of feminist STS, material semiotics, and institutional ethnography to ethnographically explore everyday eating in the Kansai region of Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

Following my PhD, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Research Fellow with the MaaraTech Project, based out of the University of Otago’s Centre for Sustainability. I continued to work on the project as I transitioned to my role at Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland. The project has given me an opportunity to study the social dimensions of new AI robotic technologies being produced for viticulture and horticulture in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the collaborative research and skills necessary to create more (environmentally and socially) sustainable technofutures. 

I am an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in finance, economics and political theory. My research lies at the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. Particularly, it is concerned with the ways in which we theorise our subjectivity and its social and political consequences.