Short Story

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

On 5 September 2025, I was awarded second prize in the adult category of the Melton City Libraries Short Story Competition. The competition received over 300 entries. My story, ‘The Foreboding,’ is a speculative fiction set in the near future:

An onyx ring has appeared on the outer corners of Dalia Quispe’s eye. As the darkness spreads, Dalia must fight her job’s human resources automated system to seek medical treatment. Meanwhile, her work threatens to drain more than her sight.

The competition judge was the imitable Alice Pung OAM. It is a profound honour to receive Alice’s feedback. Her books about Chinese Cambodian women in the Western suburbs of Naarm, Melbourne, have been nourishing and inspiring. (Alice signed my copy of Unpolished Gem!) My work similarly focuses on migrant women of colour from working class backgrounds, on the west of Wurundjeri Country. I explore alternate futures of family, work, and the environment. Below is part of Alice’s comments about my story.

‘I loved this story for its slight speculative fiction bent, its inventiveness. I admire how it builds an alternate world that is just convincing enough to seem real, but that has a few details that are off-kilter enough to unsettle the reader. The premise is so ambitious, yet the subtlety and attention to detail is there, saving it from becoming an outlandish Black Mirror episode to a disquieting and powerful satire on work culture.’

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Race at Work Within Social Policy

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Hands of a person of colour typing on a laptop

My chapter ‘Race at Work Within Social Policy,’ has been published in the book, Critical Racial and Decolonial Literacies: Breaking the Silence, edited by Dr Debbie Bargallie and Dr Nilmini Fernando. Read an excerpt below.

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Critical Race Studies and Intersectionality Responses to COVID-19

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
People walking outside Central Station, Sydney, near a COVID-19 testing clinic sign

My latest book chapter, Critical Race Studies and Intersectionality Responses to COVID-19, is available online now. The hardback textbook forthcoming.

This chapter is published as part of the book, Overlapping Inequalities in the Welfare State. It’s edited by Dr Başak Akkan, Dr Julia Hahmann, Dr Christine Hunner-Kreisel, and Dr Melanie Kuhn, and published by Springer. Read the abstract and introduction sections below.

Abstract

Race is a pervasive system that categorises and stratifies people in ways that maintain institutional and systemic inequality. Race has impacted the evolving management of public health responses to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic around the world. In Australia, state governments imposed harsh policing of migrant and refugee working class people that were not applied to white middle class people. The Government failed to meaningfully engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in early public health planning, leaving communities who were at high risk from the virus to autonomously coordinate action without substantial state support. This chapter presents a case study of the webseries, Race in Society. The series featured Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars and practitioners, and other people of colour researchers from Australia who examined public discourses of race and the pandemic. The chapter uses the concept of intersectionality to illustrate how the welfare state exercises multiple domains of power to maintain racial inequality, even during the public health crisis of COVID-19. This chapter provides guidance for educators and researchers on how to apply critical race perspectives into their own scholarship, teaching, and activism.

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Public Harassment Prevention

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Two figures walk from a brightly lit room into a neon blue corridor, where a man waits

My research has been published in Italian! Le Sociologie has translated my advice on how institutions can improve policies, practices and resources in response to public harassment of academics and researchers. Read ‘Sociologia Delle Politiche di Prevenzione Delle Molestie Pubbliche.’

The Pandemic Reader

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Sticker on the window of a train, says: Please wear a mask on public transport

My work on ‘Pandemic, Race and` Moral Panic’ has been published in a new book, ‘The Pandemic Reader: Exposing Social (In)justice in the Time of COVID-19.’ Edited by Assistant Professor Mako Fitts Ward, Professor Jennifer A. Sandlin, Michelle McGibbney Vlahoulis, and Dr Christine L. Holman, the book explores the social and political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Pandemic Reader offers critical perspectives on the sweeping injustices intensified by COVID-19 and the resurgence of racialised state violence. It offers context, data, viewpoints and solutions to collectively teach, learn, and thrive. It takes up abolitionist teaching methodologies—focusing not only on the many ways the pandemic has exacerbated injustice, but also on how individuals and communities are healing, expressing vulnerability, and building community—to amplify intersectional racial justice strategies across learning spaces. This collection is a pedagogical intervention to locate how individuals and communities propel us forward through the multiple pandemics of 2020.”

Read more here.

Media Representations of Race and the Pandemic

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Published on Seattle Star

In Episode 3 of Race in Society (video below), Associate Professor Alana Lentin and I lead a panel about how mainstream media create sensationalist accounts of the pandemic, and the proactive ways in which Aboriginal people and Asian people in particular lead their own responses. We spoke with Dr Summer May Finlay, a Yorta Yorta woman and Public Health Researcher at the Universities of Wollongong and Canberra. In our video below, she details how Aboriginal community controlled health organisations have effectively dealt with COVID-19 using social marketing campaigns. We also chatted with Dr Karen Schamberger, an independent curator and historian. She covers the history of Australian sinophobia (the fear of China, its people and or its culture), and how anti-Chinese racism plays out in media reports on racism and the COVID-19 pandemic. This issue remains pertinent, given that the suburbs currently under strict lockdown in Sydney have relatively large Asian populations.

Even though we filmed this discussion 10 months ago, the commentary illuminates the current COVID-19 crisis.

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My Work Translated Into Italian

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
A White person is seen from behind, mostly out of frame. They sit in a field reading an eBook

My work on “What is Applied Sociology?,” has been translated into Italian and published by Sociologia Clinica and Homeless Book publishers. The translation is published as a free eBook, Che cos’è la sociologia applicata una breve introduzione.

Check it out!

My work has been previously translated into French and a forthcoming publication will be in Persian.

Indigenous Sociology for Social Impact

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Published on The Sociological Review.

The history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice activism to destabilise and overcome colonial practices in Australia began with the British invasion in 1788 and has continued to the present-day. These acts of social and political organisation have strong sociological resonance that should centrally inform sociological inquiry in Australia. Yet Indigenous knowledges are peripheral to the discipline of sociology. This post is the first in a series exploring ways to decolonise sociology, through the leadership of Associate Professor Kathleen Butler, sociologist and Aboriginal woman belonging to the Bundjalung and Worimi peoples of coastal New South Wales.

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Racial and Gender Justice for Aboriginal Women in Prison

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Published on Women’s Policy Action Tank, 18 July. Read an excerpt below.

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The Sociology of Abortion Politics, Aussie-Style

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

Published on Seattle Star.

This week, on 11 May 2017, a bill to decriminalize abortion in the state of New South Wales, Australia, was defeated 14 to 25. This means abortion, despite a two year legislative campaign ,remains a crime under the Criminal Act.

Continue reading The Sociology of Abortion Politics, Aussie-Style

Ring a Bell? Charles Murray and the Resurgence of Scientific Racism

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

My latest article is now on The Humanist (first published 15 May 2017). Below is an excerpt.

In his latest podcast episode titled “Forbidden Knowledge,” atheist author Sam Harris guides political scientist Charles Murray through an extensive defence of Murray’s widely debunked body of work, focusing mostly on The Bell Curve. Co-authored with psychologist Richard Herrnstein (who died around the time it was published in 1994), the book was universally critiqued as an example of modern-day scientific racism.

The Bell Curve was founded on a flawed premise that inferred a correlation between intelligence, socio-economic achievement, and genetics, without accounting for the effects of discrimination. The research was funded by the eugenics-promoting Pioneer Fund, while academics like Stephen Jay Gould showed that The Bell Curve obscured data.

Time has proven the book to be scientifically “reckless.” It enjoys a resurgence in 2017, the era of Trump, specifically because it is read as proof that White people are superior to racial minorities, especially Black and Latin people. […]

Harris’s characterizations of Murray’s critics are a projection of the push back he feels he’s unfairly faced. “You were one of the canaries in the coal mines,” Harris tells Murray. Having previously dismissed Murray, Harris now feels an affinity due to facing rebuke for racism (while continuing to espouse similar views).

The atheist movement has changed. Once the almost-exclusive domain of White men, calls for equality have challenged conversations, as diverse groups of women and minorities seek a more inclusive vision for atheism. It is telling that aggrieved White men feel more comfortable hosting uncritical discussions on scientific racism than engaging in anti-racism practices to reform the movement.

Read more on The Humanist.

We must fight the doctrine of The Bell Curve both because it is wrong and because it will, if activated, cut off all possibility of proper nurturance for everyone's intelligence. Prof Stephen Jay Gould
We must fight the doctrine of The Bell Curve. – Prof Stephen Jay Gould