Murdoch Stephens

Murdoch Stephens founded the successful campaign to double New Zealand's refugee quota in 2013. The tactics and strategy of campaigning was described in his 2018 book, Doing Our Bit: the campaign to double the refugee quota. Subsequently he has remained involved in refugee advocacy, working with a number of organisations and working with other campaigners to remove restrictions on African and Middle Eastern refugees in New Zealand's annual quota. He has written extensively for mainstream media in New Zealand, published numerous academic articles on migration advocacy and has been quotes in stories on this work in the New York Times, The Guardian and The Economist.

Stephens was awarded a PhD in 2018 for his thesis on reconciling emancipatory political struggles with the doubt that grounds critical theories with a particular focus on environmental communication. That work was also published in a book in 2018, Critical Environmental Communication: how does critique respond to the urgency of climate change? From 2015-19 he worked as an adjunct lecturer in communication and media topics at Massey University in Wellington.

He lives in Te Whanganui a Tara/Wellington where he is also involved in the literary community as an editor of Lawrence & Gibson publishing, and the author of the 2020 housing-crisis satire Rat King Landlord. For more details, see his personal website murdochstephens.com