Schools are critical spaces for young men from refugee backgrounds. They play an integral role in literacy development, educational attainment, and providing a sense of belonging. Inclusive education practices for this group are largely absent in Australian schools. Research shows focusing on these young men from a non-deficit position assists with inclusivity. There is a lack of research exploring the agentic practices of young men from refugee backgrounds within schools. This paper explores the symbolic value of swagger for a group of young men from refugee backgrounds at a high school in Australia. A Bourdieusian theoretical framework guided critical awareness of power in schools. This research shows how a group of young men found a meaningful way to acquire social and cultural capital. Despite the school's constraints, this group developed a group identity reflected in their clothing and embodied dispositions referred to here as swagger. Our findings demonstrate the complex power relations at work, including the opportunity for the young men to resist and be included. In the spirit of Bourdieu's concern for reflexivity our findings point to the need for schools, teachers, and education policy makers to consider the workings of power in schools in more considered ways.
There’s a particular ‘common sense’ required of the contemporary neoliberal subject to ‘self-regulate, self-fashion, and self-produce’ ( Houghton, 2019 : 618). Crucially, this work on the self happens within a political context of a dominant discourse which valorises the resilient, self-regulating and enterprising individual. It is somewhat unsurprising then, that children who struggle to contain intense emotions are referred to therapy. Their experience of therapy, however, ought to then be examined within this broader socio-political context. This article examines the power dynamics of a therapeutic encounter with a child ostensibly in need of greater emotional self-regulation. To investigate how children are positioned in therapy, therapy transcripts are investigated, drawing on Derrida’s concepts of hospitality and deconstruction. Utilising a critical discourse analysis of therapy transcripts, we explored the tensions in hosting children in therapy interactions from a counselling session with a 9-year-old girl, Emily, along with her female caregiver, Kate, and her social worker, in the role of therapist. Our Foucauldian inspired power analysis revealed these tensions at work in the therapeutic encounter. We show how Emily enacted her own deconstruction of the story ‘The boy who cried wolf’, opening the door to a relational understanding of emotional regulation. The findings highlight the need for social workers to engage in reflexive practice; to be able to listen to children without transforming their insights into opportunities to reinforce dominant narratives.
This paper aims to develop a sensory methodological framework to explore older user's landscape experience. Applying empirical experience in Australian aged-care facilities, it addresses a methodological gap in the current literature to help move beyond the current taken-for-granted approaches such as interviews, cognitive mapping, behavioural observation and visual methods. We propose a more holistic method which enables the exploration of older people's in situ environmental experience. The multisensory framework we propose here is based on the first author's doctoral fieldwork experience that took place in two aged-care facilities in Brisbane, Australia. Findings suggest this framework facilitates an understanding of users’ olfactory, auditory and visual responses to the physical environment, and promotes a deeper engagement with the landscape. We argue that this is essential to promoting good landscape design which genuinely connects with older people's needs.
Social connections are foundational to the human condition and are inherently disrupted when people are forcibly displaced from their home countries. At a time of record high global forced migration, there is value in better understanding how refugee-background individuals engage theirsocial supports or ties in resettlement contexts. A mixed methods research design aimed to understand the complexities of how 104 refugee-background women experienced their social networks in the first few months of resettlement in Australia. One of the research activities involved participants completing a survey with both quantitative and qualitative components. The quantitative analyses identified the impact of post-migration living difficulties that represented social stressors (worry about family, loneliness and boredom, feeling isolated, and racial discrimination) on the women’s mental health outcomes in the months following resettlement. The qualitative data highlighted the complexities of social relationships serving as both stressors and sources of support, and the importance of recognizing extended families and supports around the globe. The findings point to the need for nuanced accounts of the social contexts surrounding refugee resettlement as important influences able to promote trauma-informed and gender sensitive practices to support mental health and well-being in new settings.
_Aim:_ Explore the experiences of Indigenous academics teaching Indigenous peoples’ history, health and culture in Australian Bachelor of Nursing programs. _Methodology:_ Theoretical framework comprises of Indigenous methodologies including Indigenous women’s standpoint theory and Indigenist research principles. Methods: One-on-one research yarns that were voice-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed through an assemblage approach. _Findings:_ Participants of this study shared their doubts about the legitimacy afforded to them and Indigenous health curriculum by some of their colleagues and their school and faculty leaders. They highlighted that strategic and careful disruption of the status quo is a quality imperative. Participants identified the paradox of revisiting personal trauma as pedagogy and curriculum, suggesting a lack of preparedness of their schools to adequately support them. Relational engagement with other Indigenous peoples was emphasised, however, the implicit expectation for them to capitalise on personal relationships involved risking their reputation for their schools, who seemingly demand their resourcefulness as substitute for resources. _Conclusion:_ Indigenous academics care for quality learning and teaching of Indigenous peoples’ history, health, and culture. This care extends to nursing students, fellow academics, as well as school and faculty leadership, despite the lack of care afforded to them. Realising relational and reciprocal care, through providing appropriate support and resources, would benefit them and their academic practice.
Issue addressed Health promotion, the process of enabling people to increase control over their health, implies advocacy and empowerment on behalf of others. This does not account for the phenomena whereby Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have advocated to strengthen the determinants of their own and their communities' health. This paper provides a systematic scoping review of the published literature that documents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocacy to improve community empowerment during the time 1940-1970. The objectives of the review were to establish: 1. The extent to which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advocacy has been documented; 2. The extent to which the literature is written from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective; 3. The extent to which local community-level advocacy has been documented; and 4. How advocacy occurred. Methods The Informit database was systematically searched, publications selected against inclusion criteria, and themes synthesised to map key concepts, types of evidence and gaps in research. Results Based on this systematic search, 30 papers were found. The four key themes identified were: individual advocates, black organisations, international solidarity and black and white people working together. Conclusions Despite the many gaps in the literature, there is documented evidence of considerable outcomes from advocacy. So what? The concept of advocacy and indeed, health promotion itself, may need to be decolonised, and that the concept of "everyday resistance" may more accurately encompass the diverse repertoire of actions which took place between agents of resistance and agents of dominant power.
Women living in rural Australia who are labelled as depressed, by either themselves or professionals, contend with spatial injustices of limited service provision that converge with the dominant constructions of mental health and knowledge authorisation. Informed by a feminist social constructionist standpoint, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 women living in rural New South Wales in Australia. This paper explores how rural women navigate experiences labelled as depression. The women's stories conveyed an overwhelming sense of loss, abuse and betrayal, and the pathologisation of their experiences of structural violence and oppression is of significant concern. Yet, the women also showed agency by using to their best benefit multiple and often divergent explanations for their experiences of depression. While many accepted the diagnosis of their symptoms, most resisted a sole pathological cause and actively created individually meaningful narratives of their depression experiences. The language of 'depression' provided a passport for some, allowing access to formal supports that would have otherwise been unavailable or highly stigmatised. Rurality and the associated structural disadvantage, particularly in regard to service provision, was only marginally present in the women's stories. The alternative narratives of healing uncovered challenge the centrality of formal service delivery to the wellbeing of a community. Further, while the pathologisation of structural oppression must be resisted, the women's stories demonstrate the importance of not invisibilising the agency they demonstrate in this difficult and contested space.
The mental health of women has been largely neglected in the refugee literature, notwithstanding the specific gender-related issues that confront women seeking asylum. Furthermore, a specific category of women, deemed to be women-at-risk, face particular challenges in their journey and resettlement process. This longitudinal study investigated psychological distress in refugee women-at-risk one year after resettlement in Australia. Follow-up survey of 83 women-at-risk (mean age = 33.41 years; SD = 11.93) assessed: trauma events and symptoms; loss events and loss distress; level of post-migration problems; anxiety, depression, and somatic symptoms; and absence of trust in community members. Participants demonstrated no symptom change since initial assessment (p > .05). Substantial proportions of women reported traumatization (39%), PTSD (20%), anxiety (32%), and depression (39%) above clinical cut-offs, and high levels of somatization and loss distress. Post-migration problems, trauma events, and region of birth were associated with all symptoms, with post-migration problems the strongest predictor. Absence of trust in community members was associated with trauma, depression, and somatic symptoms. Initial trauma and somatic symptoms were associated with follow-up traumatic and somatic symptoms. Loss and trauma events were associated with loss distress. Findings underline the role of post-migration problems on psychological distress and the need to consider women's psychological wellbeing in the context of their trauma and loss history, potential impacts of ethnicity, and complex socio-cultural dynamics underpinning issues of trust within communities. Effective service delivery requires that practitioners screen for and address psychological distress in women-at-risk at least up to 18 months after resettlement.
This paper outlines the development of Indigenist Health Humanities as a new and innovative field of research building an intellectual collective capable of bridging the knowledge gap that hinders current efforts to close the gap in Indigenous health inequality. Bringing together health and the humanities through the particularity of Indigenous scholarship, a deeper understanding of the human experience of health will be developed alongside a greater understanding of the enablers to building a transdisciplinary collective of Indigenist researchers. The potential benefits include a more sustainable, relational, and ethical approach to advancing new knowledge, and health outcomes, for Indigenous people in its fullest sense.
International evidence suggests migrants experience inequitable access, outcomes and treatment quality across the cancer care continuum. There is currently limited research assessing equity across the cancer care continuum for culturally and linguistically diverse migrants living in Australia. A detailed protocol and search strategy were developed and used to identify all relevant literature, utilising the Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewer's Manual. Systematic searching was conducted via multiple databases and identified studies were screened against pre-identified inclusion and exclusion criteria. 71 studies met the inclusion criteria for analysis. Most studies examined cancer detection via screening. Very few studies examined cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment or palliative care. Most studies focused on patient-sided barriers to care and there was a paucity of information regarding institutional barriers to health. Cancer-related outcomes were seldom examined, and most studies were qualitative or behavioral analysis. Results highlighted significant communication issues spanning the cancer care continuum and a context of inadequate support for both patients and clinicians. There is a demonstrable need to examine equity in access and outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse cancer populations. This requires the identification of cancer-related disparities and an examination of institutional barriers to care. Through addressing this dearth of information, future research and health policy can support the operationalisation of health equity.
For young people from refugee backgrounds, schools are often a critical part of their resettlement experience. Currently, there is a lack of research about the role of sport within the Australian school environment in helping these young people address resettlement challenges. Research on community sport suggests that sport can be a significant and effective platform for introducing young people from refugee backgrounds to Australian society during the resettlement process. School sport may play a similar role. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork over a 12 month period, this paper explores the meaning of sport for young women from refugee backgrounds who were students (in years 7-12) at a publicly-funded state high school in Brisbane. A Bourdieusian theoretical framework was used to guide the need for critical awareness of the workings of power in the school environment. The findings show how sport creates tensions of habitus as students must balance their desire to participate in sport against competing sets of values and dispositions toward sport. The gendered nature of sport further complicated this tension in the way it structured different opportunities for participation in sport between young women and men. Our findings suggest the need for a more deliberate reflexive consciousness to inform the practices of educators and policymakers to ensure sport is both inclusive and culturally safe.
Little is known about the predictors of quality of life among refugee women. 104 refugee women-at-risk were recruited within 6 months of arriving in Australia. A structured questionnaire was administered using standardized tools to assess pre-migration trauma, post-migration living difficulties, social capital, social networks, and quality of life. Hierarchical multiple and logistic regressions assessed factors predicting quality of life. Post-migration factors such as low trust in the community, and lack of support from individuals in their social networks predicted poorer quality of life. These findings have implications for community and social programs for refugee women-at-risk.
There is widespread acceptance of the damaging consequences for mental health and well-being as a result of exposure to the trauma of war (e.g. De Antiss, Ziaian, Procter, Warland, & Baghurst, 2009; Hsu, Davies & Hansen, 2004; Mann & Fazil, 2006; Murray, Davidson & Schweitzer, 2008). Historically, the mental health discourse has looked at the impact of war through concepts developed within Western countries. These concepts, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), other stress disorders, and depressive disorders, have been extended beyond those directly involved in combat and applied to civilian populations affected by war. The application of diagnostic labels accommodates the fact that the landscape of war has changed and modern warfare often deliberately targets civilian populations. Research identifies that refugees often meet the criteria for diagnoses such as PTSD, but that symptoms present as part of complicated constellations of problems for which there is no consensus regarding treatment approaches (Palic & Elklit, 2010). Diagnostic labels may well be useful in drawing attention to problems and the need for support and intervention. However, confusion about the suitability of psychosocial interventions indicates that the kinds of problems experienced by people from refugee backgrounds are not necessarily well understood within the current mental health diagnostic nomenclature of universalized individualistic labels. This problem highlights the need for consideration of more context specific responses, rather than universalized symptom identification and rigid imaginations of appropriate response...
Abstract This study takes a retrospective look at the educational experiences of Indigenous health professionals who graduated from The University of Queensland's Indigenous Health Program between 1994 and 2005, to understand the enablers for growing an Indigenous health workforce capable of advancing the health of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the qualitative accounts of 31 students and 9 staff members, this paper examines the enablers to educational success at this time, juxtaposed against current Indigenising agendas in higher education, of aspiration and capacity building alongside the task of embedding Indigenous knowledges within curricula. We look back not as a call to return to Indigenous-specific cohort courses but rather reconsider both the measures of and strategies for success in Indigenous higher education, within health and beyond, interrogating the ideological assumptions that inform them.
Gardens play a vital role in homemaking for many older people living in aged-care facilities. A garden is where residents can assert ownership, agency, and recall significant memories, especially after relocation in later life. This research addresses a gap in literature about aged-care gardens by expanding notions of therapeutic benefits. It adopts a phenomenological framework and applies unstructured interviews, Go-Along videorecording and digital storytelling for data collection. Findings suggest residents are not merely passive users of gardens, they are active creators, shaping their outdoor environment through gardening and creating meanings in their local landscape that contribute to their experience of being 'home'.
Online platforms for delivering mental health information and services are increasingly prevalent to improve pathways for mental health supports within the general population. Given the potential for this resource to deliver mental health information at high speed and low cost, it is important to identify how accessible this information is for people who experience language barriers to mental health services and information. The present study used a systematic approach to sampling major mental health websites in Australia for analysis (N = 33). Content analysis evaluated access to information and resources (e.g., interactive chat rooms) in languages other than English. Results found that the majority of sites (88%) did not include any translation tools, and only two websites (6%) placed a translation tool on the homepage for ease of access. Interactive forums were available for web-chat services, email services, and forums on between 4 and 7 websites but none were available in a language other than English. Three websites (9%) offered telephone counseling with an interpreter. Despite foreign-born individuals representing nearly one third of the Australian population and approximately 20% of people speaking a language other than English at home, non-English mental health resources online are significantly lacking. Online mental health resources offer a great opportunity to increase access, particularly for people who may experience language barriers to accessing services. It provides a cost-efficient platform for delivering information, yet is highly underutilized within an Australian context despite it being one of the most multicultural societies in the world today. If digital platforms are to deliver on promises to be a great tool for increasing equity, there is a need to address the current linguistic barriers that exist.
OBJECTIVE:To understand strengths-based practice as articulated by urban Indigenous community workers and to consider its application for public health approaches to Australian Indigenous health advancement. METHODS:Semi-structured interviews with community workers from an urban Indigenous community. Interviews were video and audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed using thematic analysis, using an Indigenist research framework. RESULTS:For our participants (11 Indigenous and one non-Indigenous), a strengths-based approach was fundamental to their practice. This approach reconfigured the usual relationship of client and service provider to fellow community member. They understood the strength of Indigeneity that empowers individuals and communities. They were not blinkered to the challenges in the community but resisted defining themselves, their community or their community practice by these deficits. CONCLUSIONS:Our participants had a sophisticated experiential understanding that a strengths-based practice is not simply a 'culturally acceptable' way for non-Indigenous peoples to work for Indigenous peoples, but rather it is the only way of working with Indigenous people. Implications for public health: Strengths-based practice requires a reconfiguring of relationships of power, of attending to structure over stereotypes, and privileging Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing. This reconfiguration is an ethical prerequisite for an approach that is genuinely strengths-based.
This chapter provides a critical reflection on an ethnographic approach led by a non-Indigenous researcher in partnership with an Indigenous community-controlled health organization, and a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous supervisors, advisors, critical friends, and mentors. The chapter explores the way the three interrelated principles of Indigenist research informed the study, as a critical reflection of the methodology’s achievement of a decolonizing research agenda. The flow of Maiwah (the Brisbane River in Australia) provides a metaphor for the chapter’s diverse authorship. Maiwah’s tributaries, inlets, and banks represent author voices at different points while the one River flowing represents coming together to form a broader collective story of the research that still respects the authors’ individual positioning. Maiwah’s flow also signifies the dialogical approach of the research – “tricky ground” (Smith 2005) for non-Indigenous researchers seeking to privilege Indigenous voices while remaining accountable to their own White privilege, particularly given that at its most basic level, research requires the “extraction of ideas” from participants. Yet, the flow of Maiwah also shows us the possibilities of research, where in this case, researcher and participants together cocreated new knowledge in support of their agendas. This process enabled both research outcomes and increased research capacity and confidence in the host agency and researcher. On this account, decolonizing research is perhaps more about relationship and devolving control over the process than it is about particular methods, and the respectful negotiation of epistemological meanings and representation of particular knowledges that can result.