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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Working on Social Change

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Paste-up drawing on a wall, showing two women. One woman is sitting and holds an electric drill. The other woman stands and holds scales of justice

Happy New Year! Today I summarise my major projects for the past year, covering public health, vocational training, disability, technology, and gender equity.

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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.

Interview: The Folk Devil Made Me Do It

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
A large building at dusk is obscrured by trees and darkness. A lit sign says: PANIC

I’ve been interviewed by NPR’s Code Switch on the growing political backlash about critical race theory. I discuss my research on moral panics about race. A moral panic is a situation or group positioned as a threat to social values. On the surface, it may seem nonsensical to ban critical race theory from schools, as it’s only taught at specialist university courses. Dig deeper: moral panics have always mobilised against a specific issue, and then moves to scale back other civic rights from minorities or marginalised groups.

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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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Public Science and Tropes

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A dark-skinned hand holds out a microphone against a dark background

My research on harassment of public scientists and racist Hollywood tropes is featured in two new books!

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Interview: Interracial Friendships

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
Two friends sit at a restaurant talking intently

Below is an excerpt from a new interview with me, by Santilla Chingaipe, published on ABC Life.

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Interview: Pandemic Misinformation

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

I spoke with Angeline Chew Longshore from The Mauimama about my article, “Using sociology to think critically about Coronavirus COVID-19 studies.” We talked about how I was motivated to write about the sociology of science because I saw so many people struggling to make sense of the pandemic. We discussed how national cultures are impacting responses to the virus, why precarious employment in healthcare is causing high rates of infection, and how we can better check whether the information we hear is credible.

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Interview: Moral Panic

Posted on by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

The past of the month has proved especially busy. I’ve done a few media interviews and launched a new webseries with Associate Professor Alana Letin, called Race in Society. More on these projects in the coming days. Today, I look back on my interview with 3CR Diaspora Blues about my article, Pandemic, race and moral panic. Listen below, with a transcription for accessibility further down.

3RC Diaspora Blues Moral Panic with Dr Zuleyka Zevallos
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