Dr Thomas Owen is an author, teacher, filmmaker, and passionate advocate for peace, social justice, and the eradication of arbitrary inequality. Thomas’ research, writing, and films explore ways to address the multiple inequalities that characterise our globalised, colonised, and increasingly commercialised planet. 

His most recent project focuses on privilege loss, exploring how we experience and communicate relative losses of privilege, across a variety of social categories relating to age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexual identity, and physical and mental health, among others. 

Thomas is also a Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies at AUT - teaching Intercultural Communication and Global Crises and the Media, while supervising postgraduate research, the author of ‘Patents, Pills and the Press’ - a book about global HIV/AIDS medicines access and intellectual property protections, and ‘Our Stories’ - a film about decolonising education in the Canadian Yukon. 

He is a father, husband, Quaker and musician, living between Auckland and the Yukon, Northern Canada.

Talk