Dr Kristina Vingrys
Kristina is an Accredited Practising Dietitian and Registered Nutritionist, with research interests in public health nutrition and Aboriginal dietary practices in partnership with Moondani Balluk. Her community research explores the role of food and dietary practices in contexts of sustainability, culture and placemaking, and the impacts of colonisation and community dispossession on social and emotional wellbeing factors in food sovereignty and health.
Dr. Rama Agung-Igusti
His research interests have focused on the ways individuals and communities respond to and resist racialisation and structural and institutional racisms, how identity and belonging is negotiated in the context of Australia as a settler colonial nation, and creative practice as community pedagogy and a mechanism for social change. His research draws on critical race and whiteness studies, decolonial approaches, and critical and liberation psychologies, and his present doctoral research examines the role of emancipatory creative practice in the lives of African and other diasporas of colour. Rama is the policy and research director at Democracy in Colour, a racial justice campaigning organisation led by and for people of colour.
Dr Jo Doley (they/them)
Jo completed their PhD, which focused on stigma and eating disorders, at La Trobe University in 2018. Their current research interests are body image in queer women, body image and eating disorders in transgender and gender diverse people, and responses to racism.
Current projects:
Evaluating a Workshop on Bystander Intervention in Racism
This project focuses on evaluating a workshop that assists people in both identifying helpful ways of responding to racism, as well as allowing people to practice those skills. We will evaluate whether the workshop is effective in improving intended and actual bystander responses.
Review of Body Image and Eating Disorders in Transgender and Gender Diverse People
This project aims to review the available literature on body image and eating disorders among transgender and gender diverse people, with the view of better understanding risk and protective factors, as well as differences from cisgender people.
Body Image in Sexual Minority Women
This project aims to explore several aspects of body image in sexual minority women using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Social media use and body image will be explored in sexual minority women, with specific predictors of body dissatisfaction and disordered eating in bisexual women also of interest.
Barriers and Enablers to Reporting Racism
This research focuses on barriers to reporting racism and the consequences related to having limited access to support after experiences of racism, using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Concentrating on Victoria’s multicultural and multifaith communities, we will investigate:
- What discourages individuals from reporting and seeking support after experiences of racism
- How the barriers they experience can be reduced, and
- What support is needed after experiencing racism
Dr Linda Chiodo
Linda is a registered psychologist and Lecturer in the College of Health and Biomedicine. Linda’s research has been located within the areas of psychosocial wellbeing of youth, women and marginalised groups, intersectional understandings of gender performativity, sexism and collective community wellbeing. Her PhD research broadly focused on identity development and understandings and negotiations of normative femininities in the context of a postfeminist and neoliberal sociocultural context. It examined how young women understood and performed girlhood together with the role young women’s school environments and peers play in this negotiation. This research also explored young women’s understandings of sexism and the ways in which they are engaged and disengaged with contemporary feminism. Linda’s research has primarily involved qualitative research methods and extends to evaluations of community, local government and school based programs supporting complex families and diverse young people.
Mr. Bill Swannie
Bill is a qualified lawyer and worked in the community legal sector before entering academia. He has a Master of Law degree in human rights law and he is a member of the Human Rights Committee at the Law Institute of Victoria, and also the Australian Discrimination Law Experts Group. He teaches units on media law and human rights law in the College of Law and Justice.
Bill completed a PhD on Australian racial vilification laws in 2021, and he has published widely on the harms of hate speech and the protective purpose of laws regulating hate speech. He regularly contributes to public debate on human rights and media law issues, and also to law reform in these areas. His particular focus is on the presentation of race in the media.
Dr. Lutfiye Ali
Lutfiye Ali (PhD, BA (Hons.) VicMelb) is a Cypriot Turkish Muslim Australian scholar in the field of Community Psychology. Lutfiye’s research areas include intercultural relations, racialized and gendered dynamics of oppression and resistance, identity, community making and belonging among migrant, second generation Australians and Australian Muslim women. Much of Lutfiye’s research projects are not just scholarly endeavours but are also creative political projects linked to voice, experience, identity, and collective history. In her work, Lutfiye draws on discursive, Third World, and decolonial feminist knowledges to craft qualitative methodologies centre the lived experiences, knowledges and to attend to the ways intersecting relations of power inform, are resisted and in turn renegotiated by racialised and ethnicised communities. Lutfiye’s PhD research titled Australian Muslim Women: Diverse experiences, diverse identities was supervised by Prof. Christopher Sonn and Dr. Karina Smith and was completed in 2015. Lutfiye has worked as a Lecturer in Psychology at Victoria University, Health Promotion Policy Coordinator at Women’s Health West, Research Fellow at Digital Ethnography Research Centre RMIT and is currently working as a Research Fellow at Victoria University.
Her current projects include: Women of Colour (WoC) in academia: Sharing stories, building solidarities across borders - A project by WoC Feminist Collective.
Muslims of Victoria: Our stories of belonging, community and homemaking - A project funded by Public Records Office of Victoria and in collaboration with North Cyprus Turkish Community of Victoria and Cyprus Turkish Islamic Community of Victoria.
Cypriot Turkish migrant life histories digital project in collaboration with North Cyprus Turkish Community of Victoria and CIDRN
Dr. Alison Baker
Her research focuses on the implications of structures that produce inequality in the lives of various disenfranchised groups as well as those in positions of privilege. Her research also focuses on young people’s experiences of racialization and other forms of oppression, particularly their subjectivities, identity and belonging across contexts. Her research draws on theory in critical community and liberation psychologies, in addition to feminist and critical race scholarship. Alison’s research mobilizes creative and participatory research methodologies, specifically visual and sound storytelling modalities to explore and develop young people's sense of social justice and capacity for action.
Dr. Karina Smith
Karina’s research focuses on postcolonial literature and theatre with a particular focus on the Caribbean and Canada. She is both a literary studies and gender studies scholar whose research analyses issues such as low-paid work, sexuality, globalisation, women’s histories as they are represented in literature and other cultural production. She is also interested in migration and diasporic communities, particularly the Caribbean and African diasporas.
Associate Prof. Gavin Ivey
Gavin trained as a clinical psychologist at Rhodes University, South Africa, and went on to lecture and supervise trainee psychologists at University of Natal (Durban) and University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg). He immigrated to Australia in 2010 and is currently coordinator of the Clinical Psychology Masters Program at VU. Gavin’s teaching and research interests converge on the process of adult individual psychotherapy, particularly the unconscious influences on the psychotherapy relationship. He practices part-time as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist and clinical supervisor.
Dr. Nicole Oke
My research focuses on the themes of work, globalization and multiculturalism. Broadly within these themes I am currently working on two projects.
The first project examines the Australian states engagement with Australian mining companies in the Asia-Pacific. These companies are part of a global industry, one in which is extraordinarily inequitable in terms of the economic gain but also in terms of the distribution of social and environmental risk. The mining industry, like others, is increasingly instituting ‘flexible’ work practices including a reliance of subcontractors and temporary work. The focus here is on the ways the Australian state is involved with this industry overseas, and the way companies draw on this engagement as part of their profit making.
The second project focuses on work and migration. Much of my research has been focused on the experience of multiculturalism in the rapidly gentrifying Melbourne suburb of Footscray, as part of a collaborative project (with Chris Sonn and Chris McConville). Within this broader on-going project I am studying the ways in the experience of work has changed for low pay migrant workers in the suburb, examining the ways that Footscray as a place mediates broader national social changes.
Dr. Paola Balla
Paola is an award winning visual artist, highly commended curator and sought-after community cultural development practitioner, speaker, facilitator and writer. She is a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman who lectures with Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre, Victoria University. Her work is specialising in contemporary Indigenous art and Aboriginal women's art and practices of resistance and revitalisation
Dr. Dianne Hall
My research interests are in histories of violence, gender, religion and memory with a particular focus on the Irish both in medieval and early modern Ireland and in the modern Irish diaspora. In analysing violence in Ireland I am interested not in the more usual narrative of wars and rebellions, but in how gender has informed the use of violence and how violent events have been recorded and remembered. Violence is thus defined, not narrowly just in terms of politics or religion, as has been traditional in Irish historiography, but broadly, in such a way as to capture the experience of women and men in as wide a range of everyday circumstances as possible. Violence is studied using gender as the principal analytical tool in order to understand how violence shaped and was shaped by changing understandings of femininity and masculinity.Flowing from my researches into gender, violence and belief in Ireland, I am involved in developing a project on the changing ideas about the racial and social status of the Irish – both catholic and protestant – in nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia. This project will analyse how the Irish – as a racialised group at the margins of whiteness, yet ultimately located as white – fit into Australian racialised hierarchies.
Prof. Christopher Sonn
Christopher teaches in areas of community, cultural and liberation psychology and qualitative research methods. His research is in the area of sense of community, social identity, immigration, and intergroup relations. A major focus of his research is on understanding non-dominant group responses to oppression, including racism. He has investigated the adaptation of different immigrant communities to Australia as well as the responses of Indigenous Australians to dominant group settings and stories. His focus is on understanding the multiple and often concealed resources and structures groups develop to help protect valued cultural identities and to resist oppression and promote liberation. Christopher continues to work with the Community Arts Network Western Australia exploring how community arts can be utilised in community capacity building. He is also a lead researcher on the international Apartheid Archive Project based in South Africa.
A/Prof. Julie Stephens
My research is situated broadly in the field of contemporary social theory and often experiments with multidisciplinary approaches. It is informed by an interest in feminism, social movements and the politics of memory and forgetting. This was reflected in my book Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism(Cambridge University Press: 1998) and continues to shape my current work. Recently, my research has included an exploration of maternalism, the application of values associated with the maternal (nurture and care) to the society as a whole. I am concerned with the way cultural memories of second-wave feminism and current social policy intersect to overlook the maternalism of the past and to limit future possibilities. I am also interested in the ideological dimensions of neoliberalism, in particular the displaced understandings of self, gender, dependency, citizenship and community that have accompanied neoliberal restructuring. Much of my work discusses the harsh penalties these changes have imposed on those least advantaged, especially children, the frail elderly, women in the workforce and at home, mothers, women in domestic labour and childcare and newly arrived migrants and refugees.
Prof. David McCallum
David McCallum researches the history of human sciences and their relation to the conduct of governing. He taught sociology at the University of Melbourne and Victoria University, and his recent book Criminalizing Children, Welfare and the State in Australia (CUP, 2018) won the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize for 2019. David is presently editing a reference work on the history of human sciences for Palgrave Macmillan, and researching a project on welfare policy.
Dr. Amy Quayle
Amy’s research has primarily focused on the experience of racialised oppression and implications for identities, communities, and intergroup relations, as well as the possibilities created through community arts practice for individual, community, and broader social change.
Amy’s PhD research was conducted alongside a community arts and cultural development project, Bush Babies (external link), with Aboriginal, Noongar people in Western Australia. This critical narrative inquiry explored the stories shared in the context of this project, and theorised the role of Aboriginal storytelling on country both within and beyond Aboriginal communities. The research highlighted the history and continuity of oppression, the psychosocial impacts for individuals and communities, as well as the resistance and survival of Aboriginal people and culture.
Amy’s research has primarily involved qualitative research methods including narrative and discourse analytic approaches.
Dr. Natalie Kon-Yu
Natalie Kon-yu is a writer and a commissioning editor of Just between Us: Australian Writers Tell the Truth about Female Friendship (2013) and Mothers and Others: Why not all Women are Mothers and not all Mothers are the Same (2015) and #Me Too: Stories from the Australian Movement (2019). She is currently researching gender bias and cultural diversity in Australian literary culture. Natalie was the co-director of the Stella Diversity Count in 2016, and is currently the lead academic of the First Nations and People of Colour Count which aims to gauge the data on how many First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour are being published in the Australian Industry. She co-edited the Special Issue of TEXT Journal (with Associate Professor Enza Gandolfo) ‘Identity, Politics and Creative Writing,’ (2018). Natalie also sits on the board of Her Place – Women’s Museum and Heritage Victoria, which aims to build a women’s museum in Melbourne.
Dr. Charles Mphande
Senior Lecturer, International & Community Development, College of Arts & Education
His research is in Community Resilience; Discourse and Society; Information, Education & Communication (IEC) in development and change. My current resilience studies research include: Informal Social Networks as Safety Networks among Emerging African Communities in Victoria; and Ageing Well with Dignity of the African Community in Victoria/Australia.
Dr. Bichok Wan Kot
Bichok’s research primarily focus on the dynamic and diverse nature of Australian Nuäär migrant group’s experiences during the period of displacement, transition, refugee life and resettlement in Australia.
Bichok’s PhD entitled “Lost in Transition: Changing Dynamics of Traditional Nuäär Gender Roles and the Migrant Experience” investigates the choices and challenges confronting a little-known and vulnerable migrant group: the Nuäär of Sudan and Ethiopia. It focuses on how the changes in gender roles as result of migration and resettlement in Australia affects Nuäär family life, especially men’s experiences.
His research uses a qualitative research strategy with a constructivist theoretical framework. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups discussion. Constructivist grounded theory is also used as to analyse the experiences of change for the women and men.
Dr. Sam Keast
Sam Keast is a research officer / psychologist / educator at Victoria University, Australia. His work is informed by community psychology and decolonial orientations that prioritise community collaboration for equity and involve intentional processes of critical dialogues on race, racism, and antiracism. Centring creative, multimodal and relational approaches to research, his work is propelled by epistemic justice and a desire to amplify experience-near wisdom and community ways of knowing. He has worked with communities investigating cultural rights and well-being, mental health literacy, youth engagement, and anti-racism in schools. His teaches with Moondani Balluk Indigenous academic unit as a non-indigenous educator focussing on Indigenous Knowledge and Wellbeing for allied health students and pre-service teachers. He assists in coordinating the Community, Identity, Displacement Research Network (CIDRN).