Meg McInnes
Meg McInnes' research focuses on barriers to equitable access to health care and associations with social and cultural diversity and social inequity. Meg, a former paramedic, is a lecturer in paramedicine and health sciences and has a particular interest in teaching cultural safety and bioethics.
Meg is currently completing her PhD which is investigating associations between cultural diversity and ambulance use in heart attacks. The PhD involves two key projects. The first is a big data study involving the analysis of all patients admitted to Victorian public hospitals with an acute coronary syndrome (heart attack or angina) between 2014 and 2016 to identify associations between cultural characteristics such as country of birth and preferred language and clinical outcomes such as emergency department wait time, length of stay in hospital and death. The second study is a multilingual survey that explores heart attack patients' knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about heart attack and angina.
Angela Paredes Castro
Angela’s interests are in women’s empowerment, investigating inclusion and exclusion dynamics addressing the overlapping positions of power, in particular for women from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Her PhD project aims to identify the dynamics in which CALD women develop and foster strategies to access education and employment opportunities in community-based support program. In addition to exploring the interactions between and within dominant systems to understand what is required to ensure women are provided with culturally responsive support.
Roshani Jayawardana
Roshani's research interests focus on youth-empowerment, navigating ethnic identity and responding to displacement and racism, especially for young people from culturally and racially diverse backgrounds. Her PhD project is in partnership with Brimbank City Council's Neighbourhood Houses, located in Melbourne's West. The project seeks to respond to the structural and symbolic violence which persists and subjects Young People of Colour (YPoC) to racialised violence within neoliberal spaces. The study aims to create a proactive process of change surrounding the responses and resistance to racism by challenging YPoC's diminished sense of power within organisational spaces through a youth-led approach, and giving them a platform to challenge discourses which construct them as 'other' through community-based arts practice and self-determined cultural activity.