DrSimone Bignall

Simone Bignall is a Senior Researcher in the Jumbunna Research Hub for Indigenous Nations and Collaborative Futures. Simone is best known for her theorisation of 'excolonialism' - or 'exit-from-colonialism' - as a political philosophy of collaborative transformation. Her work provides conceptual resources to support social practices and processes of decolonisation that seek to break with prevailing conditions of contemporary Australian life and so to more genuinely exit-from-colonialism.

Simone completed her PhD in Philosophy in 2007, supervised by Professor Moira Gatens at the University of Sydney, before receiving a Vice-Chancellor Postdoctoral Award and being appointed a Faculty lecturer in Philosophy at the University of NSW. Before taking up her current role at UTS in 2019, Simone was employed from 2015 as Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Strategy and Engagement at Flinders University.

Simone's primary research interests and expertise fall within the fields of political philosophy and postcolonial theory, informed particularly by her work with Indigenous peoples engaged in sovereign Nation rebuilding for self-determination, treaty and decolonisation. Her academic work is guided by a specialist interest in the Continental European philosophical lineage from Spinoza to Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben. Her research traverses critical theory, anarchism, colonial and postcolonial politics and culture, posthumanism and biopolitics, theories of embodiment and agency, feminism and ethics.