Diverse Lives. Equal Futures.
A collection of research projects gathered under the theme Diverse Lives. Equal Futures.
ARC Linkage Project - Managing at the Margins: Women Making it Work in Precarious Times
Professor Lyn Craig, Dr Brendan Churchill and Dr Signe Ravn
This Australian Research Council-funded project aims to investigate the economic, social and emotional impacts of precarious work on women. Focusing on the challenges that arise from juggling precarious work with care responsibilities and / or demands from the social support system, the project identifies the strategies women have to manage these demands, and the impacts these demands have on everyday lives across different life stages. By combining otherwise separate bodies of literature with innovative quantitative and qualitative data, the project seeks to generate new knowledge about the impacts of precarious work on women and families. This knowledge is expected to inform policies and services to improve women’s lives and promote economic inclusion and social cohesion. This project is in partnership with Good Shepherd Australia and New Zealand, Australian Institute of Family Studies and Victorian Women’s Trust.
ARC DECRA Project - Family Secrets National Silences: Intergenerational Memory in Australia
Dr Ashley Barnwell
This project investigates the inherited family secrets, stories, and memories that inform Australians’ understandings of colonial history. So far, efforts to address historical silences focus on how we can change narratives at the macro level – in national museums and school curriculums. The role of the family as a place where colonial histories are told, edited, and hotly debated, has received far less attention. But the stories we inherit within families – stories that anchor our very sense of identity and belonging – may be the most impactful and deep-seated, and the most difficult to transform. The projects uses qualitative methods, archival research, and narrative analysis to investigate family practices such as secret-keeping, truth-telling, silencing, remembering, and forgetting. By examining how families negotiate difficult memories, emotions, and silences, this study seeks to reveal how Australians deal with historical responsibility, inherited trauma, and diverse cultural histories in everyday life.
Urban Studies Foundation (Glasgow) Project – From Garden City To Eco-Citadel: Global Greenbelts
Dr Max Holleran
This project focuses on the history of municipal greenbelts in the UK, USA, and Australia. It engages with environmental sociology and city planning to better understand how communities use land banking as a means to select ‘ideal’ populations and, in doing so, often hoard resources. The study considers how this method of limiting urban sprawl is a useful tool to mitigate the future effects of climate change despite the fact that it can fragment regions socioeconomically and based on governance capacity.
ARC Discovery Project – The Intergenerational Transmission of Joblessness
Associate Professor Irma Mooi-Reci
This project unpacks the mechanisms, channels and factors that drive joblessness from one generation to the next in Australia and across Europe, Asia and the United States. By creating a rich longitudinal dataset on families across the selected countries, this ongoing project continues to challenge existing theories by asking whether aspects of family’s work-welfare trajectories, values and dynamics play out differently across multiple nations, over time and in different labour market, institutional and family contexts. Project results have been published in renowned academic journals and have provided evidence-based knowledge for the development of effective interventions to avert the persistence of joblessness across generations. Interested to know more about this project? Email Irma Mooi-Reci
ARC DECRA Project – Girls Growing Up
Dr Signe Ravn
Girls Growing Up is a qualitative, longitudinal research project that examines the everyday lives and imagined futures of young girls and women aged 15-25, who have left the mainstream school system before finishing Year 12 or have in other ways have their transitional pathways interrupted. The project is funded by the Australian Research Council and runs from 2017 to 2020.
Rather than focusing on specific ‘risk factors’, this project investigates the connections and disconnections in the girls’ everyday lives, as well as the resources that the girls have available. The longitudinal design of the project enables a focus on every day, micro-level aspects of marginalisation processes and how these play out at a subjective level over time; a focus crucial for understanding individuals’ agency and orientations, and the multi-method approach generates rich and nuanced data. By deliberately situating the research in locations undergoing economic and labour market changes, the research will speak to the challenges arising from this for young people growing up in these places. The project engages with key questions about micro-processes of marginalisation, temporality and subjectivity with a particular focus on relations to place and belonging.
Learn more about Girls Growing Up on the project website.
