Affiliated Members and Centres

Dalaibuyan Byambajav is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Social responsibility Mining (CSRM) of the University of Queensland, Australia. He received his PhD degree in sociology from Hokkaido University, Japan in 2012. He worked as a lecturer of Political Science at the Mongolian State University of Education from 2000 to 2006 and has been involved in many research and capacity building projects in Mongolia.

His main research interests are social and community aspects of resource development, conflicts and agreement making, and socio-political transformations. In the past several years, he has been conducting field research on developments surrounding mining, development and governance in Mongolia.

In 2011, he spent ten months as a visiting PhD scholar at the Institute of Asian Research in the University of British Columbia, Canada and co-initiated Mongolia Focus (formerly "Mongolia Today"), a UBC-based blog that follows Mongolian politics and the mining sector. He is currently on the board of directors of the Mongolia Australia Partners for Development (MAP4D) that aims to contribute to cooperation between Australia and Mongolia.

• Dalaibuyan Byambajav's Publications

• Kirsten Livermore was elected to the Australian Parliament in 1998 at the age of 28. She served for fifteen years representing one of Australia's most significant mining regions. As well as chairing the Joint Standing Committee on Public Works, Kirsten initiated the 2012 parliamentary inquiry into fly-in fly-out mining practices as a member of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Australia.

  An active participant in Australia's bilateral relationship with Mongolia, she led the first Australian parliamentary delegation to the country in 2009, with subsequent official visits in 2012 and 2013.

  Kirsten holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Queensland. In addition, she completed a Masters of Development Management at the London School of Economics in 2014 where she wrote a dissertation on the role of the International Council of Mining and Metals in institutionalising the development activities of mining companies. 

• Kirsten Livermore's Dissertation 

Andrei Marin is interested in the interplay between natural and social processes of stability and change. His research has been focusing on social processes of adaptation to climate change, land tenure reform, and general institutional dynamics in Mongolia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Norway. His understanding such processes and interactions often relies on inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches from political ecology, political economy and historical institutionalism.

His current work in Mongolia includes an investigation of the political aspects of climate change adaptation and a historical investigation of the role large scale socio-economic transformations have played in people's ability to tackle adverse environmental contexts.

• HUMANOR Project

• Recent publications

• Herrmione Spriggs (b. York, 1987) is an artist working between London and Los Angeles. She spent summer 2014 intimately residing with a Mongolian lasso in the Orkhon Valley, as part of Mongolia 360° Land Art Biennial 2014. Her ongoing project "UURGA (irregular loop)" investigates contemporary transformations in the values associated with human-animal relationships in Mongolia and their mediation through material culture, with a particular focus on tools and agentive objects that are made to communicate with horses and other herding animals. 
  

  Spriggs is a UCIRA Major Grant awardee for a collaborative search with Curtis Tamm, and a fellow of Mildred's Lane. Recent publications include writing for The Fox (Mathew Whittington Ed.) and (non-) Essential Knowledge for (new) Architecture (Princeton University Press). Spriggs holds a MFA in Visual Arts from University of California San Diego and a BSc in Anthropology from University College London

• hermione-spriggs.com
• uurga-irregularloop.com