Leanne Morrison

Dr Leanne J Morrison loves to explore the connections between business, nature and people. She uses philosophy, storytelling and art to help understand and problematise these relationships. Her work is informed by a strong sense of social and environmental justice. Current projects include the development of a fairytale methodology to analyse corporate communications; arts-based research to explore community responses to corporate environmental impact, and; projects which aim to improve corporate climate change strategies. In research, her goal is to contribute to the betterment of the corporate relationship with the environment and community.

Dr Morrison is the Climate Change & Environment Lead in the RMIT Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRIGHT). BHRIGHT addresses the human rights impact of business through research, education, innovation and collaboration, and is an interdisciplinary centre located in RMIT’s College of Business and Law. In this role, she leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers to advocate for the abatement of climate change through scholarly publications, public engagement, policy recommendations. Under her leadership, the group has published a number of research papers, blogs, online articles and reports. She has been interviewed by the media (including SBS) and requested to contribute to government-led committees about her expertise in the impact of business on climate change and environmental issues.

Prior to joining RMIT University in 2017, Dr Morrison was at the University of Tasmania, where she undertook her PhD in Corporate Environmental Reporting. Her industry experience includes roles in taxation, and various board positions in the environmental and community not-for-profit sectors. She has governance experience as treasurer for Environment Tasmania (Tasmania’s peak NGO environmental body), and in her various management roles at RMIT (including Co-Deputy Dean for Research & Innovation for the former School of Accounting).

Dr Morrison is a passionate teacher, who has inspired business and accounting students to better understand the impacts of business on society and nature. She has taught and coordinated a number of courses at RMIT including Accounting for Sustainable Management; Financial Accounting Theory and Business in Society. Her teaching is research-informed and draws from her expertise and experience in governance, sustainability management, climate change policy and environmental reporting.

• Tax Consultant, QTax
• Board Member, Environment Tasmania
• Lecturer, University of Tasmania

Dr Morrison's research focuses on the impacts business has on society and the environment, and how these might be improved. As a scholar of Accounting, much of this inquiry examines corporate reporting, and the communication between business and stakeholders. Dr Morrison is currently involved in a number of projects which examine the relationships between business and climate change. Dr Morrison uses a range of innovative methodologies including arts-based research, audio art works, storytelling and narrative lenses.

Environment, Climate Change, Communities, Mining, Climate Policy, Nature, Stakeholders, Sustainability, Reporting, Corporate

• Sustainability Reporting
• Environmental Reporting
• Social Reporting
• Corporate Discourse
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Feminist Accounting
• Environmental Philosophies
• Dialogic Accounting
• Counter Accounts
• Climate Change Policy for Business
• Accounting and Social Justice

• The Role of Blockchain Technology in Promoting Stakeholder Trust for Australian Charities (Andrea Christie)
• Gross National Happiness (GNH) in Business: Invoking Social Accounting (Kinley Wangchuk)
• The implications of dialogue between supplier-countries’ civil society institutions and corporations on adherence to corporate codes of conduct: a comparative case study of China and Brazil (Rao Fu)