Meet our PhD Students

This study involves child centred participatory and collaborative therapeutic approaches utilizing creativity and imagination to explore how they uniquely contribute to trauma informed practice and bolster resilience in vulnerable children. This study recognises that when children’s capability and agency is acknowledged and embraced in a creative therapeutic relationship, their ability to the navigate the effects of trauma is possible. Central to this study is listening and consulting with vulnerable children to seek their views and experiences in therapy through child centric approaches, in particular, trauma informed expressive arts therapies. A participatory action research method employing arts based and child-centred methods will be used, involving middle years children (ages 7- 11). To support genuine engagement with children, a rights-based approach and a childism lens will be central in elevating the voice and views of children and analysing structural experiences of children in therapy and surrounding systems.

This research investigates how feminist mental health professionals responded to domestic violence in Australia from 1980 to 2020. It explores the capacities of feminist, trauma-informed and victim-centred approaches to domestic violence from within mental health services; professions that have historically blamed and pathologised victim/survivors.

The impact of domestic and family violence (DFV) on children and young people is widely understood with recognition of the need to respond to children directly. However, children and young people continue to be seen as secondary or at times invisible victims in responses to DFV, especially prior to separation. This research aims to develop an understanding of how family focused services ensure that children are heard and responded to when a family presents experiencing DFV.

Lida Shams is a third-year PhD candidate working at the intersection of technology and social work. She specializes in humanizing digital health and driving digital health transformation in social work practice. Her research focuses on "Digital Health for Substance Use Disorder: Technology Acceptance by Social Workers.

Recognizing the profound impact of human connection in social work, Lida is dedicated to facilitating positive change. Her work aims to bridge the gap between digital health and social workers, as well as other clinicians, to understand how their roles are evolving and how to harness the power of technology for the benefit of those they serve

The lyrics of Archie Roach attesting his and his sibling’s removal is a sorrow that he returns to constantly because songs are the story of his life, how he was stolen from parents who loved and cherished him. This study is an exploration of the roles and responsibilities that Aboriginal Health Workers can have in child protection.

Tessa's PhD research involves narrative based, co-design research with criminalised young people to explore the complexity of their everyday lives and lived experiences. It aims to provide criminalised young people a platform to speak to their lived experiences on their own terms, and challenges the individualising approaches that dominate criminological research. Rather than analysing what these narratives say about young people themselves, Tessa's research uses these narratives to explore and analyse discourse and the worlds we, as a society, have created for these young people.

Everyone has the right to feel safe and to feel protected in their own home. Unfortunately, for many people with intellectual disability, safety is not always assured. People with disability are able to realise greater independence living outside of the family home in supported accommodation or supported independent living. With a sense of autonomy, choice, and control, comes an additional factor of safety and self-protection. 

There was a direct collaboration with people with intellectual disability who live in supported accommodation, framed using a post-structural feminist and inclusive citizenship framework. They shared stories of the barriers and facilitators to enacting safety. This provided a platform for exploring what implications these might have in ensuring people feel they have the power to determine their safety in their own homes.