Diversity & Belonging:
This Australian Life

Dr Gen Ford is a single, happily childfree woman living in Melbourne. She has a PhD in international relations and has spent her career loitering around universities in various capacities, holding strong beliefs in the power of education to change people's lives.

Gen started Solo Advocacy Australia in early 2022 in recognition of the way people doing life solo are still largely unrecognised and disadvantaged in society and as a love letter to the role that friendship and her community of solo friends has played in her own life. When she's not trying to survive on a single income or working on Solo, you'll likely find her browsing a garden or an op shop, hiking, or deep in a book. In mid 2020 Gen gave a large piece of her heart to her little cat Evie and has no regrets.

‍Donna Ward established the micro-press Inkerman & Blunt Publishers in 2013, and indigo, the journal of Western Australian creative writing in 2007. From 2011–2012 she edited the online poetry magazine, Sotto, for Poetry Australia. She has past lives as a psychotherapist, social worker, and organizational consultant. Her prose has appeared in Griffith Review, Southerly Magazine, Island Magazine, Huffington Post, and Westerly Magazine. Her hybrid memoir, She I Dare Not Name, A Spinster’s Meditations on Life, was published by Allen & Unwin 2020.

When life suddenly changes, so do your dreams and aspirations. Shaun never imagined becoming a Paralympian or a disability advocate. Shaun shares his incredible life story; how he overcame expectations and how you can create a more meaningful life despite all life’s curveballs.

Every day Shaun helps people living with disability and disadvantage to find meaningful and sustainable employment through Employment Services, as well as helping spread the word of the power of a diverse workforce.

Dr Sophie-May Kerr is a Research Associate at City Futures Research Centre UNSW. With experience across the University and non-profit sectors, Sophie-May has worked on contemporary urban challenges including planning for diversity in high-density housing, transportation and neighbourhood amenity; refugee settlement and workplace inclusion.

She is an advocate for city design, governance, and practices that are informed by diverse, material, and emotional complexities of residents' everyday lives. Her PhD research examining the experiences of families raising children in apartments in Sydney, Australia, revealed the need for shifts in design, regulation, and cultural norms for families to be included within compact city agendas.  

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Dr Scott Avery is a Senior Lecturer in Indigenous Disability at Western Sydney University and the research partner of First Peoples Disability Network (Australia). He is a descendant from the Worimi people and is profoundly deaf.

His research area on the intersection ofIndigenous and disability rights and social policy. He has authored the research monograph Culture is Inclusion: A narrative of Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander People with disability and is the lead investigator in the ‘Living our ways’ research program that established a community-based disability research agenda from Australia’s Indigenous people.

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Melissa Cooke has worked in the community services sector for over 18 years completing a bachelor’s degree in community and human services.

Melissa has worked across disability, aged care, young adults in a mental health setting, leaving care, youth, crisis work, residential care, homelessness, family, and children work and community during her career to date. She believes that how we engage with others has a huge impact on people’s lives which drives long-term outcomes and change. She believes that when we connect genuinely, we build self-resilience and resilience of a community which is the driver for change and belonging, if we don’t belong, we don’t connect.

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Dr Kathleen McPhillips is a sociologist of religion and gender and teaches at theUniversity of Newcastle, Australia. Kathleen employs feminist, psychoanalytic and sociological frameworks to issues around gender and religion and explores women's status and participation in religious traditions and the institutional child sexual abuse crisis in religious organisations. Kathleen has extensive experience in attending, reporting on and analysing the CatholicChurch at theRoyal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse and has held numerous research grants. Her most recent publications are inChild Abuse and Neglect, Feminist Theology, Journal of Australian Studies,Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Journal for the Academic Study of Religion

Dr Rachael Jacobs who is a lecturer in Creative Arts Education at Western Sydney University and a former secondary arts teacher (Dance, Drama and Music). Her research interests include creativity and assessment, language acquisition through the arts and decolonised approaches to embodied learning. Rachael has facilitated art projects in community settings all over Australia, including in refugee communities, in prisons and in women’s refuges. She has consulted for the OECDin the development of the Sustainable Development Goals and to UNESCO’sInternational Commission on Futures of Learning. She is also a community activist, a freelance writer, aerial artist, South Asian dancer, and choreographer and runs her own intercultural dance company. 

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Karen Loon is a Non-Executive Director and a former Financial Services Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She is a 4th generation Asian-Australian; she has been based in Singapore for nearly 30 years.

Karen led numerous audit and financial due diligence assignments with many of the world’s leading banks, funds and capital markets players operating in the Asia-Pacific. Further, she was their Asia-Pacific and Singapore Diversity Leader and a Global Diversity Leadership Team member. 

Karen is a passionate diversity advocate, thought leader and speaker on diversity and inclusion. Her upcoming book, Fostering Culturally Diverse Leadership in Organisations: Lessons from Those Who Smashed the Bamboo Ceiling, will be released in August 2022.

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Dr Catherine Barrett is the founder and director of Celebrate Ageing, a not for profit challenging ageism and building respect for older people.

Catherine has worked with older people for over 35 years as a nurse in residential aged care, and then as a senior research fellow at a La Trobe university, Melbourne and in her current role, for the past 6 years.

Catherine believes that building a culture of respect for older people requires that we make ageism visible and challenge the notion of aging as a binary (e.g., young = good and old = bad).

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She believes cultural change begins with each and every one of us challenging our own internalised ageism.

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Is there really such a thing as 'puppy love'?

Mark Yin is a youth researcher through the Explore program, run jointly by the Centre for Multicultural Youth and the Centre for Resilient and Inclusive Societies. He completed an Honours in Criminology at the University of Melbourne in 2021 while working casually across the youth and community sectors. He has a migrant background, having been born in China, and came to Australia aged 4.

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Rhonda is an early career researcher interested in geographies of diversity, multiculturalism and belonging in urban spaces. Her PhD research on the geographies of Islamophobia in Sydney, Australia and the San Francisco Bay Area, USA revealed the need for local and context-specific anti-racism policy practice, public education campaigns and policy initiatives that respond to the spatial imaginaries and lived experiences of racialised groups.  

Prior to her appointment with the Centre for Western Sydney, Rhonda was a community program manager at UTS, and a researcher with the Challenging Racism Project (CRP) at Western Sydney University. In her role with the CRP, she collaborated on multi-stakeholder projects focused on geographies of diversity and racism in Australian cities. She was also previously appointed as a Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley where she developed research and resources for countering Islamophobia in the American context.

Peter Bansel is a sociologist and member of Sexualities and Gender Research in the School of Sciences at Western Sydney University. His scholarship and research interests respond to political questions about how social differences are made, not given, and how thinking differently about differences might inform both a diagnosis of the present and anticipate future possibilities for human becoming.

In contesting taken for granted accounts of what it means to be human, natural, or normal, Peter’s work explores how the social world of people, and the material world of things, are interrelated. This intertwining of worlds generates conversations about the body as matter, which bodies come to matter, and how we might reorient our thinking about what matters for our collective survival.  

Cat Pause is a Fat Studies scholar and fat activist in Aotearoa New Zealand. Dr. Pause's scholarship focuses on the impact of fat stigma on the health and well-being of fat people.

Mneme (Nee Mee) or Mne, is a 30 year old, fat, queer, disabled and chronically/mentally ill artist and content creator living on Kaurna Yerta (so called Adelaide) She/They has a long history of being involved with activism, social justice etc, but due to complex and intersecting marginalisation often finds herself falling through the proverbial cracks. She considers her very existence to be revolutionary.

This episode opens up with an introduction of Nida and what has influenced nearly two decades of research on racism and anti-racism.

Nida Denson is an Associate Professor at Western Sydney University. Her research aims to combat racism and discrimination, to improve the health and wellbeing of various marginalised groups (e.g., people of colour, people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people who are gender and sexuality diverse). Her research background is in the areas of higher education and psychology. She has been a Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery and Linkage projects and other nationally-competitive grants, projects and tenders. Her 2015 systematic review and meta-analysis which examined the effects of racism on health has been cited over 1000 times (Google Scholar, July 2021). She is also internationally-recognised for her anti-racism work in higher education, with her research being cited in U.S. Supreme Court Cases as evidence supporting race-conscious admissions practices as well as anti-racist education in American schools by the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Dr Rachel Sharples is a Sociologist in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. She is a member of the Challenging Racism Project and the Diversity and Human Rights Research Centre. Rachel’s research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, anthropology, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies and political science. Key areas of research involve displaced persons, refugees and migrants in local and global settings; statelessness, citizenship and belonging; and constructions of ethnicity, culture and identity.

She spent two years living and working along the Thai-Burma border in the noughties and returned numerous times over the subsequent decade to conduct research. Her book, Spaces of Solidarity, published by Berghahn Books in 2020 examines notions of activism and spaces of solidarity as practiced by displaced persons in the Thai-Burma borderlands.

Dr. Matt Fisher is a Senior Researcher in Public Health at the Southgate Institute for Health, Society and Equity, at Flinders University. He has worked in public health research for over 10 years, focused on the intersection between public policy and social determinants of health equity in Australia. Matt’s passion lies in understanding the social factors that affect chronic stress and mental illness, and what they mean for public policy and social change. Recently he has extended on this work to develop a public health theory of psychological wellbeing, looking at what wellbeing is and the social conditions needed to promote wellbeing.

Dr Alanna Kamp is Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies in the School of SocialSciences at Western Sydney University. She is an academic member of theChallenging Racism Project (WSU), Diversity and Human Rights Research Centre(WSU), Young and Resilient Research Centre, and think-tank consortium Centre ofResilient and Inclusive Societies.

Dr Kamp’s research contributions lie in the areas of Australian multiculturalism and cultural diversity, experiences of migration and settlement, racism and anti-racism, national identity, citizenship and intersectional experiences of belonging/exclusion. Her work utilises national-level quantitative methods as well as smaller-scale qualitative techniques that are influenced by multi-disciplinary research (post-colonialism, feminism, history, diaspora etc).

She has published pioneering (and award winning) work on Chinese Australian women’s experiences of national and cultural identity, participation and contribution, racism and belonging. She has also published in the areas of IndigenousStudies, Asian Australian Studies, and Islamophobia.

She is currently leading the project Asian Australians' Experiences of Racism during the COVID19 Pandemic, funded by the Centre of Resilient and InclusiveSocieties, and the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria.

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Sharlene Cruickshank is an Aboriginal person. She is a descendant of the Wandi Wandandian - Wodi Wodi and Jerrinja peoples of the Yuin nation on the New South Wales’ South Coast. Her story line or song line covers from one end of the state to the other, from Far West New South Wales to the South Coast of New South Wales with a few diversions along the way. Sharlene has over 30 years experience working in health-related areas including the past 13 years in community mental health, social and emotional wellbeing particularly working in Indigenous communities and with women's health. Currently she is working for NSW Health as the Aboriginal Mental Health Clinical Leader at Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District.

Dr Susan Sisko is a registered psychologist, clinical supervisor and lecturer at a major university. She is engaged in research with the Challenging Racism Project | Diversity and Human Rights Research Centre at Western Sydney University. With a background in counselling and psychology, Susan brings her clinical expertise to academia. Susan strives to develop meaningful learning communities, which reflects powerful dimensions of feminist and multicultural pedagogy.

Amongst other publications, Susan is author and co-editor of Cultural Responsiveness in Counselling and Psychology (2021). The book focuses on Australian populations and systemic structures with a social justice framework. Susan is passionate about changing the debate in the field by moving away from cultural competence based on a Eurocentric position and focus on social justice and systemic issues – ultimately shifting blame from vulnerable and non-dominant groups to exploring systemics issues as related to quality of care and the inequity gap in accessing mental health services.