Close family bonds among individuals who are not blood-related are explored here in three works of Australian award-winning children's author Eleanor Spence. Although written in 1967, 1969, and 1982, Spence created narratives with authentic Australian contexts around what is currently acknowledged as evotypical families. These books support the education of Australian young people in developing progressive views of family formation and realizing the significance of family bonds that go beyond blood relatives.

In this paper I explore the research process I undertook to recover from research. For three years from 2013 I was involved in a research project exploring the history of foster care in Australia. At the end I was exhausted and suffering trauma symptoms I initially attributed to the difficulties of juggling a major research project while teaching and undertaking key administrative tasks. Reluctance to write up the research findings, however, made me reconsider this attribution and at the end of 2016 I set out to make sense of what had happened to make me feel so bad while undertaking a research project I was thrilled to be involved with. Recovery came through identifying as a survivor-researcher, exploring the literature on trauma and recovery from trauma, and thinking through a "wish list" of protocols and self-care activities I should have put in place earlier. I conclude the paper with recommendations for ways by which survivor-researchers can look after themselves, and ways for others to support survivor-researchers.

Given the general lack of attention paid to the education of children in state care, and low expectations of them, it is widely accepted that we are unique, two former foster kids with the highest level of academic degrees, doctorates. In this chapter we explore our journeys to and through university and doctoral studies, with attention to our similarities as outliers and differences across time. We also draw into our conversation the experiences of other care leavers who have gone to university and care leavers we have encountered through our research into this topic. We conclude that care leavers can and do complete university degrees and every child in state care should be afforded this opportunity.

In Australia the under-representation of women in computer science reflects the under-representation of women at the highest levels of government and business. In this paper we argue, therefore, that change is going to require a cohesive multi-level analysis and intervention approach. To illustrate how such an approach might look, we draw on social psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner's socio-ecological systems theory to analyse a national survey with secondary school computer science teachers we conducted in 2017. By employing this analysis we can see that student interest and engagement in computer science is impacted by their teachers, peers and parents (microsystem) who sit within a wider community, educational and industry network (mesosystem) which in turn is influenced by their access to relevant human and physical infrastructure (and the policies that shape it) in their school and social environments (exosystem) and by the broader values and rhetoric around gender and Digital Technologies in the wider Australian community (macrosystem).

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott suggests breaking writing projects down into small tasks the size of a 'one-inch picture frame'. To not do so, she says, risks 'your mental illnesses arriv[ing] at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives' (p. 16). In this chapter I riff on Lamott's advice and turn around to confront the various 'mental illnesses' that have arrived at my desk since I became an academic: ontological insecurity, imposter syndrome and reversion to childhood coping strategies. In facing these 'mental illnesses' I also reflect on my capacity to grow beyond them, to develop academic resilience and increased agency.

Computer science, like technology in general, is seen as a masculine field and the under-representation of women an intransigent problem. In this paper, we argue that the cultural belief in Australia that computer science is a domain for men results in many girls and women being chased away from that field as part of a border protection campaign by some males - secondary school teachers, boys and men playing games online and young men on campus at university. We draw on American feminist philosopher, Iris Marion Young's analysis of the five faces' of oppression to suggest strategies whereby Australian universities could support women in computer science and educate men about respectful behaviour and gender equity.

Stories—fictional, biographical, and autobiographical—are one way in which we can imagine what it has been like to experience foster care in Australia. In this paper I look at the trends in stories told about foster care from the nineteenth century, across the twentieth, and into the early twenty-first century. While exploring these trends, I make some observations about the shift from fictional accounts where foster parents and foster children were heroic characters to often searing tales of hurt and trauma inflicted on children in foster care by violent women and men.

In this article, we report on a feminist memory work project conducted with 11 working-class women in Australia. Participants responded to the question: what helps and hinders working-class women study social science degrees? The women confirmed that to succeed at university, they needed opportunities, resources, support and encouragement. We called these enablers and considered the role of enlightened witnesses' [Miller, 1997. Theessential role of an enlightened witness in society. Retrieved from http://www.alice-miller.com/index_en.php?page=2]. Hindering the possibility of university success were detractors of many forms including inadequate resources and social conventions that discouraged the women from study. We describe saboteurs as undermining people and forces that the women had to overcome. We found that enlightened witnesses, broadly conceptualised, go some way but not all, to mitigating detractors and saboteurs that continue to hamper fair and meritocratic access to tertiary education.

It is always an invigorating delight to be in the company of pioneering women whose initiatives, courage and persistence have created more and improved opportunities for women in Australian public ...

Improved education enhances life chances. Yet very few of those who have been in the care of the State proceed to higher education (HE). In Australia, care leavers are a subset of three demographics noted by the Bradley Review (2008) as continuing to be under-represented in HE: those from low socio-economic status (SES), rural, and Indigenous students. However, little is known specifically about care leavers in HE. In this chapter, we report on a small pilot project conducted recently in South Australia. For the project, we consulted with ten young care leavers, who told us about their experience with education and the encouragement they received, if any, to proceed onto HE. What we found was that most young people were neither expected nor encouraged to achieve academically.

This paper reports on our use of a two-phased, feminist memory work in a project conducted with 11 women, social science students at an Australian university. We begin by describing government-led attempts to widen participation in Australian universities because 10 of the 11 women who participated in our project were from non-traditional backgrounds. We discuss qualitative group research, identifying some of the benefits and limitations of focus groups, before differentiating them from feminist memory work and analysing key findings. Using excerpts from participants' written stories and oral discussions, we analyse some of the obstacles the women faced trying to complete their studies. Our attention then turns to methodological concerns where we examine memory work as a feminist inquiry method. As second-wave feminists understood several decades ago through their use of consciousness-raising groups, we describe how we derived many benefits from using feminist memory work. The method invites deep reflection on the intersections between the personal and political and can be productive of insights about how people feel, not just think, about their experiences. A sense of solidarity can stem from this awareness amongst participants who have a chance to workshop and thus reinterpret their own stories and those of others, which can mean a growth in self-confidence and a reduction in self-blame.

While a wide array of service providers and academic scholars apply the use of care in their work, the concept of care itself remains largely undefined. This has widespread implications for applied work with children and young people (CYP), particularly since institutions such as schools and non-governmental organisations are increasingly being expected to care for or about children. In this paper, we use thematic analysis to report on interviews with representatives from four service providers and organisations responsible for the care of children. In our analysis, we explore both how care is defined by these organisations, and the implications for practice when working with CYP.

This is a report on how (pro)feminist social workers might use the qualitative research methodology, memory work. The first section acknowledges the pioneering work of Frigga Haug in the conception and use of memory work and considers the underlying assumptions of the methodology and prescribed uses of the method. In the second section, we use a recent memory-work project conducted with women social science students/graduates, who come from low-socio-economic backgrounds, to illustrate memory-work processes in action. Here, we emphasise the potential benefits of using the method, which include its ability to inspire trust and solidarity in a group setting and connect the personal with the political.

Some interventions by social workers, teachers and parents take time to develop but can produce, in the longer term, powerful and unexpectedly positive results. We were reminded of this in 2013, when we undertook a small qualitative study where we used feminist memory work to explore the experiences of 11 women from low socioeconomic backgrounds studying social sciences at an Australian university. Of the eleven participants, seven were from social work. When asked to remember their journey into tertiary education, the women revealed memorable encounters with social workers, teachers and parents, the impact of which had lasted well into the future. We use the gardening metaphor of 'planting a seed' to refer to interventions that may not blossom in the short term but can bear fruit months or years later. Yet, we also note that 'seeds of doubt' can be planted too. We conclude by suggesting that planting seeds of possibility is a worthy but potentially overlooked professional activity. Yet, since ours is a small study, further research is warranted to explore the influence of social workers who plant seeds of possibility and whose actions help to recruit and retain socially disadvantaged students in higher education.

Inspired by Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin' Up to the White Woman, in this reflection on the beginnings of foster care in Australia I talk back to a dead white woman, Catherine Helen Spence, and argue that she should no longer be honoured for her role in the nascent system because of the classism at the heart of it.

Foster care has been provided for thousands of vulnerable Australian children from the early nineteenth century. Despite the prevalence of this system of care as the preferred means of providing out-of-home care across the country from the late nineteenth century, very few people who lived in foster care as children have written about their experiences, a total of 23 in all. Although a small sample, these few stories tell a larger one of the complexities of lived experience of foster care: for some it was entirely positive, for others it was wholly negative and for most it was somewhere between those two extremes. What I show in this paper is that what many of the stories have in common, no matter where they sit on that continuum, is the painful acquaintance with social stigma at an early age.

Despite increased attention from Universities and Industry, the low representation of female students in Computer Science undergraduate degrees remains a major issue. Recognising this issue, leading tech companies have established strong and committed diversity initiatives but have only reached up to 17\% female representation in their tech departments. The causes of the reduced attraction and retention of female students are varied and have been widely studied, advancing the understanding of why female students do not take up or leave Computer Science. However, few analyses look at the perceptions of the females that have stayed in the field. In this paper, we explore the viewpoints of female academics and postgraduate students in Computer Science with various undergraduate backgrounds and pathways into academia. Our analysis of their interviews shows the influence of family, exposure, culture, sexism and gendered thought on their perceptions of the field, and of themselves and their peers. We identify that perceptions of identity conflict and a lack of belonging to the discipline persist even for these high-performing professionals.