Associate Professor
Hope Johnson

Biography

Dr Hope Johnson is a socio-legal researcher in food and agricultural law, regulation and governance. She's published on global governance of food systems as well as Australia's regulation of food. Her work has been published in academic journals and used in policy making. Key themes in Hope's research include sustainable diets, food labels, food and agricultural technologies, human rights and regulatory studies. Hope uses a mix of empirical and legal methods to explore how to regulate food systems to improve public health and environmental outcomes, and she draws on various areas of law related to food and agriculture including food standards, international trade law, intellectual property and environmental and planning law. Within this broader field, Hope's research is currently focused on two areas (a)  the regulation and politics of alternative proteins (b) food waste and related plastic packaging waste.

Hope is a Senior Lecturer in the Law School at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research (DECRA) Fellow (DE230100135). Her project examines the regulation and politics of alternative proteins as a case study for advancing knowledge about how to govern food in ways that ensure public health and sustainability.

She is also a Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project  entitled 'Sequence-defined polymers with optical information readout', which is a transdisciplinary project focused in part on the regulation of plastic packaging.

Hope teaches units on law and policy analysis and international human rights law. She is available to discuss research, postgraduate supervision and broader food-related issues.

Hope is the Chair of the Faculty of Business and Law's Equity Committee.

She is a member of the Law and Society Association's Collaborative Research Network "Law and Food Systems",  and a member of the Centre for Justice and the Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy.