Gay Hawkins

Gay Hawkins is a research professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Before this she was the Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. She researches in areas of economic sociology and the social life of markets; political materials; and the relationships between everyday conducts and forms of rule. Her most recent books are Plastic Water: the social and material life of bottled water, co-authored with Kane Race and Emily Potter (MIT, 2015) and Accumulation: the material politics of plastic co edited with Mike Michael and Jennifer Gabrys. She is currently working on a major project investigating the relationship between plastic and food called ‘The Skin of Commerce’.  A key focus is on how plastic has reformatted food production and consumption and the new regimes of value and contestation this mundane material has generated.