ORCID Profile
0000-0002-2317-0438
Current Organisations
Queensland University of Technology
,
Griffith University Logan Campus
,
University of New South Wales
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Public Health and Health Services not elsewhere classified | Gender Specific Studies | Public Health and Health Services | Other Studies in Human Society |
Gender and Sexualities | Visual Communication | Health and Support Services not elsewhere classified | Women's Health | Health Related to Specific Ethnic Groups | Health Inequalities
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 07-2021
DOI: 10.1386/JAAH_00061_1
Abstract: To demonstrate the health and well-being benefits of facilitated arts engagement with women veterans, we draw on a key practice-based ex le from the Australian National Veterans Arts Museum (ANVAM), an organization with expertise in collaborative art-making with veterans. We outline ANVAM’s framework and the processes art therapists use to create facilitated art exhibitions. We discuss how veterans’ involvement with art-making has therapeutic benefits, can contribute new knowledge on health and well-being, and convey nuances of gender-specific experiences. We briefly outline the trend in evidence from academic literature on arts-health research with veterans and the sparse creative research with women veterans to highlight the potential of art-based methods in veteran health and well-being research, given growing numbers and the expanding roles of women in defence. Arts-health research using erse methods has yielded promising results in this field. As such, interdisciplinary, co-designed, and strength-based art-based research with women veterans can add to knowledge co-creation on this topic.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-03-2020
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2018
DOI: 10.1016/J.PUHE.2018.03.010
Abstract: Refugee women entering resettlement countries on woman-at-risk visas represent a particularly vulnerable population. While their specific gender-based resettlement will likely differ from the general refugee population, little is known about their experiences of early resettlement, with which to inform resettlement policy and practice. This research aimed to explore lived experiences of recently resettled refugee women at risk in Australia. Qualitative research used focus groups and a framework approach to identify and explicate common themes in participants' experience. Two focus groups with a purposive s le of African and Afghan refugee women at risk (N = 10), aged 22-53 years, were conducted in South East Queensland, Australia (October 2016), recruited with the assistance of a local resettlement service. Discussions were audiotaped, transcribed, and themes explicated. Six superordinate themes emerged: (1) sentiment of gratitude (2) sense of loneliness and disconnection (3) feeling incapable (4) experiencing distress and help-seeking (5) experiencing financial hardship and (6) anticipating the future. Findings indicate that resettlement policy, programs, and practice that explicitly target the needs of women-at-risk refugees are warranted, including a longer period of active service provision with specific attention to strategies that address the women's social connection, self-efficacy, emotional well-being, and financial hardships.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 16-11-2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 20-10-2018
Abstract: The emotional reaction and outrage following the publication of photographs of Alan Kurdi who drowned while crossing borders in September 2015 highlighted the major impact visual representations of refugee deaths at border crossings can have on public opinions and political will. The impact of these photographs also shows that depictions of deaths as a result of border crossings are relatively rare in the media analyses of such representations and their potential impact on policy are also neglected in the literature. This article offers a commentary on the key themes linked to visual representations of refugee deaths at border crossings by considering three recent ex les, and argues for further interdisciplinary discussions on such images. It focuses on two points: that depicting refugees alone has a greater impact on viewers and is more likely to trigger sympathy or outrage concurrently, that anonymity can reduce viewers’ ability to connect with the tragedy. This discussion adds to the body of literature on the links between media representations and policymaking, and on the mediation of human vulnerability through visual means. The themes outlined here have much currency in contemporary discussions on refugee deaths at border crossings.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-06-2013
Abstract: This article offers a critical exploration of the concept of resilience, which is largely conceptualized in the literature as an extraordinary atypical personal ability to revert or ‘bounce back’ to a point of equilibrium despite significant adversity. While resilience has been explored in a range of contexts, there is little recognition of resilience as a social process arising from mundane practices of everyday life and situated in person-environment interactions. Based on an ethnographic study among single refugee women with children in Brisbane, Australia, the women’s stories on navigating everyday tensions and opportunities revealed how resilience was a process operating inter-subjectively in the social spaces connecting them to their environment. Far beyond the simplistic binaries of resilience versus non-resilient, we concern ourselves here with the everyday processual, person-environment nature of the concept. We argue that more attention should be paid to day-to-day pathways through which resilience outcomes are achieved, and that this has important implications for refugee mental health practice frameworks.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-05-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 18-09-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-10-2018
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 09-12-2013
DOI: 10.1093/JRS/FET045
Publisher: BMJ
Date: 2022
DOI: 10.1136/BMJOPEN-2021-057393
Abstract: To use the digital story completion method to prompt participants to describe thoughts, fears and mental health experiences in response to a story stem about COVID-19, to capture a specific sociohistoric moment. We used digital story completion, a qualitative research method, to gather narratives from Australians coping with physical distancing and social restriction measures. Our reflexive thematic analysis of the data was underpinned by a constructionist approach to reflect the importance of social context in understanding health experiences. Australia. 52 people living in Australia (aged 18 years and over). Four meta-themes were prevalent across 52 stories submitted: (1) expressions of mental distress linked to COVID-19 (2) various coping strategies offered by characters in stories (3) narratives outlining social support offered to alleviate distress and (4) specialised COVID-19 vocabulary . We cautiously propose that points of convergence across stories indicate a level of shared experience among participants relating to COVID-19 in Australia. We suggest this is due to intensive media coverage of the pandemic, persistent public health messaging, engagement with social media and instant messaging technologies, and extended lockdowns that impacted the mental health of vast numbers of Australians.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-04-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2017
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 26-03-2017
DOI: 10.5204/SSJ.V8I1.354
Abstract: The School of Human Services and Social Work at Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia) developed the Common Time program in 2002 for its first year undergraduate students to increase student success in academic learning and to facilitate student engagement with staff and fellow students. Common Time consists of a series of facilitated forums during the initial weeks of each semester, where the first year cohort meet weekly to discuss general first year issues and receive information relevant to the first year university experience. As the program underwent changes in 2013, this paper discusses the findings of an evaluative research initiative. The results indicate that the revised 2013 Common Time program was, for the most part, effective in orientating and engaging these first year students during their transition into university study. However, further revisions to the program are needed to improve students’ opportunities to build meaningful social networks in particular.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 10-05-2013
DOI: 10.1108/14439881311314621
Abstract: This paper aims to reinforce the significance of visual ethnography as a tool for mental health promotion. Visual ethnography has become an established methodology particularly in qualitative studies, to understand specific themes within participants’ everyday realities. Beyond providing a visual element, such methods allow for meaningful and nuanced explorations of sensitive themes, allowing richer sets of data to emerge rather than focussing on conversations alone. The participants in this study evaluated how far they had come by exploring complex circumstances using visual ethnographic means. Research with single refugee women in Brisbane, Australia, demonstrates how discussing photographs and creating digital movies yielded a sense of achievement, pride and accomplishment, health and wellbeing, and ownership for some women, while for others it was a burden. Studies with single refugee women have been scarce with limited use of visual ethnographic methods. Visual ethnography is particularly suited to understanding refugee narratives, as complex experiences are not always conveyed through textual representations alone.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-11-2019
Publisher: University College Cork
Date: 12-2019
DOI: 10.33178/ALPHA.18.13
Abstract: The five-minute film Mouth of a Shark (Isobel Blomfield, 2018) conveys a young woman’s experiences and precarious situation while she awaits an outcome on her refugee status determination in Australia. Aasiya (pseudonym) lives in community detention. Her interest in creating the film stemmed from her own acknowledgement that she had a platform as a young, literate asylum seeker woman with a “strong” story, and was therefore in a position to portray asylum seekers in a positive light. However, she cannot be identified in the film, even though it depicts her story, due to concerns over safety and her claim for asylum. We use this ex le to illustrate issues of anonymity and representation, and suggest strategies in line with our commitment to avoid depersonalising tropes in filmmaking. While we are committed to ensuring that people from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds exercise agency in filmmaking, protecting Aasiya’s identity had to prevail. We wanted to avoid depersonalising tropes, and instead devised filming strategies that were more respectful of the protagonist and, within the constraint of anonymity, ensured that Aasiya could still represent her story in meaningful ways. We argue for an ethical model that reconciles the need for both anonymity and representation in filmmaking, especially through collaborative editing.
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Date: 2018
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 15-08-2023
Abstract: The topics of intergenerational trauma, resilience, and wellbeing as they relate to forced migration are receiving more attention in the arts and health literature. Yet, we know very little about how refugee-background young adults manage their psychosocial wellbeing when they grow up surrounded by stories of conflict, loss, and trauma. Achol has been writing poetry to represent and lify the narratives of those around her (parents, family, and the South Sudanese community in Sydney, Australia). These stories are central elements of her lived experience and the erse experiences of her community. Using collaborative poetic inquiry, this paper identifies key themes in one of her poems, My dad was, is a soldier, to illustrate how poetry is an important artistic mode of expression that can improve our understanding of intergenerational trauma, resilience, and wellbeing. Rather than conveying interview data through research poems, we place Achol’s poem at the centre of our collaborative poetic inquiry to gain new insights into refugee lived experiences. This paper contributes to contemporary debates on how artistic means enrich our knowledge of psychosocial wellbeing through trauma-informed, culturally safe, and decolonial research methods.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-05-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2022
DOI: 10.1177/16094069221077764
Abstract: Story completion is a narrative inquiry method where participants complete a story from an opening hypothetical scenario or ‘stem’ that researchers create. While interest in this method is growing across disciplines due to its emancipatory potential, the literature fails to address how story completion can be used in culturally safe ways. Cultural safety in research means that it is the participants who determine whether the process values and privileges their unique standpoints and perspectives. Culturally safe research approaches and methods are crucial to decolonisation efforts in the academy. To illustrate this topic, we draw from our experience using a digital version of story completion in May 2020 to prompt thoughts on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We received 52 responses from Australian residents using a stem relating to a pandemic-related scenario. When we noted the lack of ersity in ethnic backgrounds in participant demographic information, we wondered whether story completion was reinforcing rather than disrupting norms about narrative inquiry and what constitutes a story, and we questioned our recruitment strategy. In this paper, we highlight the importance of decolonising research methodologies rather than merely adapting or validating methods by using them across different cultural contexts. We explain how our story completion project led to reflections on western constructions of storytelling, how to create the stem, and how to improve our recruitment approach. In response, we propose a rhizomatic perspective, which values multiple entry and exit points in research, to frame practical strategies that can improve the potential of using story completion in culturally safe ways. These include: embracing messy stories exploring erse notions of storytelling favouring story fragments (rather than stems) and story assemblage (rather than completion) co-designing story fragments with target groups and collaborating with local communities to co-design culturally appropriate and sensitive recruitment strategies and projects.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 21-05-2019
DOI: 10.1007/S10903-018-0750-5
Abstract: Refugee women-at-risk represent a distinct and vulnerable refugee population. We investigated the psychometric properties of the Multidimensional Loss Scale (MLS) with 104 women-at-risk, recently-arrived in Australia. Cross-sectional survey included: the MLS (indexing loss events and loss distress) Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (Indexing Trauma Events and Trauma Symptoms), and Hopkins Symptom Checklist-37 (indexing anxiety, depression, and somatization symptoms). Exploratory factor analyses of MLS loss distress revealed a six-factor model (loss of symbolic self loss of home loss of interdependence loss of past aspirations interpersonal loss, and loss of intrapersonal integrity). Cronbach alphas indicated satisfactory internal consistency for loss events (0.83) and distress (0.88). Correlations supported convergent validity of loss distress with trauma symptoms (r = 0.41) and ergent validity with anxiety (r = 0.09), Depression (r = 0.29), and somatic (r = 0.24) symptoms. Findings support MLS use in assessment of loss and associated distress with refugee women-at-risk.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-01-2019
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 09-2022
Abstract: Social connections are foundational to the human condition and are inherently disrupted when people are forcibly displaced from their home countries. At a time of record high global forced migration, there is value in better understanding how refugee-background in iduals engage theirsocial supports or ties in resettlement contexts. A mixed methods research design aimed to understand the complexities of how 104 refugee-background women experienced their social networks in the first few months of resettlement in Australia. One of the research activities involved participants completing a survey with both quantitative and qualitative components. The quantitative analyses identified the impact of post-migration living difficulties that represented social stressors (worry about family, loneliness and boredom, feeling isolated, and racial discrimination) on the women’s mental health outcomes in the months following resettlement. The qualitative data highlighted the complexities of social relationships serving as both stressors and sources of support, and the importance of recognizing extended families and supports around the globe. The findings point to the need for nuanced accounts of the social contexts surrounding refugee resettlement as important influences able to promote trauma-informed and gender sensitive practices to support mental health and well-being in new settings.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 25-10-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-05-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-12-2013
Abstract: The theme of mistrust in resettlement contexts is largely overlooked in refugee discourses. Through a qualitative inquiry of post-migration experiences of four women raising children alone in Brisbane, Australia, this paper outlines how the presence of mistrust could at times create difficult resettlement circumstances for these women, who then needed to negotiate additional obstacles in everyday life. The definition of social mistrust used here is a form of deliberate and ongoing suspicion about lone refugee women’s choices and lifestyles from other community members. Importantly, the women achieved a sense of well-being despite experiencing mistrust, both in inter-group and intra-group contexts, indicating that they conceptualised access to and benefits from social networks with different emphases on trust. Sociocultural narratives of mistrust, particularly gender-specific perspectives can enrich refugee discourses and challenge established notions of trust inherent to understandings of social networks in resettlement. The findings discussed in this paper contribute to debunking the ‘myth’ of homogeneity in relation to refugee groups and demonstrate the ersity of experiences among sub-groups of refugee women. The theme of mistrust, particularly among women, is an oft-neglected aspect and requires further attention.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 06-2020
DOI: 10.1093/RSQ/HDAA001
Abstract: University students from refugee and asylum-seeker backgrounds (SRABs) have unique resettlement experiences related to disrupted education, family expectations, financial pressures, and visa uncertainty. These arduous experiences often translate into a strong determination to access education and persevere with tertiary studies. Supportive educational trajectories are crucial to increase social cohesion and help redress the personal and social disadvantages SRABs face. Yet, there is virtually no attention paid to aspirations about progression to postgraduate studies despite the erse aspirations and talents of many. This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the perspectives of six SRABs and two academics at an Australian university on aspirations to postgraduate studies. Participants identified several obstacles and opportunities at personal, institutional, community, and policy levels. Many existing recommendations in the enabling pathways literature focus on what universities could do differently, but we argue for a whole-of-person approach that considers institutional as well as personal issues, to increase prospects of SRABs progressing to postgraduate studies. Universities can assist with better institutional support structures, mentoring, raising staff awareness about SRABs, and financial aid. While institutions might not be able to directly address financial, visa, and personal concerns, universities can implement simple strategies to minimise their impact.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 19-11-2015
DOI: 10.1093/BJSW/BCT184
Start Date: 2014
End Date: 2017
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2020
End Date: 2022
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2018
End Date: 2019
Funder: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 11-2014
End Date: 12-2017
Amount: $225,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 05-2020
End Date: 05-2023
Amount: $202,851.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity