Projects

Leads: Professor Alex Broom and Dr Michelle Peterie
Research Team: Imogen Harper

Care is a constant presence throughout our lives, from the moments of our births, through our experiences with illness and aging, right through to our eventual deaths. We require care for our survival and flourishing. Equally, we are often called upon to care for others, be they kin, kith, acquaintances or strangers. The forms these caring entanglements take shape who we are in our everyday lives – and, indeed, who we are permitted to be.

As part of this project, we are exploring the experiences of ‘carers’ across a broad range of sites and contexts, interrogating care’s complexities, contradictions and embeddedness in the (sometimes coercive, often unjust) systems and structures of contemporary life.

Exploring carer experiences in contexts as seemingly different as illness and unemployment, immigration detention and climate catastrophe, we are examining the unwieldy nature of care and caring, troubling romanticised renderings of the carer experience and exposing care’s darker underbelly.

This project will culminate in the publication of a co-authored book (currently under contract with Polity Press) that offers a new analysis of caring relations that integrates rich human stories, cutting-edge social science and humanities theory, and a focus on the social, political and economic transformations that are rapidly reshaping carers’ lives.

This project is funded through the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney.

Leads: Dr Michelle Peterie,  Dr Katherine Kenny, Professor Alex Broom, and Professor Gaby Ramia

Care is fundamental to our individual and collective wellbeing. Yet care is also steeped in power and deeply implicated in historical and present-day inequalities and injustices. Taking seriously the darker potentialities of care as a relation of exploitation and domination, this collaborative project interrogates the social and governance infrastructures that variously shape, expropriate, necessitate and unravel care at the ‘private’ interpersonal level.

Building on the momentum generated through two collaborative workshops/conferences in 2022, this project will culminate in the publication of an edited collection (currently under contract with Policy Press). Combining rich empirical analysis and theoretical rigour, the collection will paint an evocative picture of: (a) entrenched inequalities in the distribution of both informal care responsibilities and the resources needed to undertake them, (b) the intimate relationship between care, exploitation and expropriation, including the embeddedness of informal care in colonial configurations of power, and (c) the importance of reforming, resourcing and valuing informal care at the infrastructural level. Ultimately, it will bring together cutting-edge scholarship on social infrastructures and social care to ask how care might be reconfigured in the service of healthier and more equitable societies.

This project is funded through the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney

Leads: Professor Alex Broom and Associate Professor Alice Motion (Sydney Nano Institute) and Dr Katherine Kenny
Research team: Dr Jianni Tien

Project Description

New and emerging nanoscale biosensing technologies promise to revolutionise the detection of airborne pathogens circulating in any particular environment prior to their infection of human bodies.

While the development of nanoscale biosensors has drawn increasing attention in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the social consequences of such innovation have not been as comprehensively considered.

In collaboration with The University of Sydney Nano Institute (SydneyNano), this interdisciplinary research project examines the social dimensions of scientific and technological innovation, grounded in the specifics of the development of nanoscale biosensing technologies.

This project examines how we can bring social science and nanotechnology expertise into closer dialogue, and how we might do so further upstream in the innovation process than is usually the case.

By exploring the people and processes behind technological innovation, we are building a clearer understanding of the intersection between technoscience and society. By centring the social consequences of new nanoscale technologies, we examine how we can firmly embed a focus on ethics, politics, and power relations into the innovation process.

 Aims and objectives of the project:

• To explore the intersections of technoscience and society including issues of envisioned futures, technocratic imaginaries, sustainability and social justice, using qualitative methods;
• To bring social science and nanotech expertise into productive dialogue further ‘upstream’ than is usually the case;
• To explore how this collaboration might serve as a model for ‘upstreaming’ ethical, legal and social issues/implications and responsible research and innovation approaches and more firmly embedding the social sciences within the innovation pipeline.

Partner Organisation: The University of Sydney Nano Institute (SydneyNano)

We are seeking research participants for this project

We are currently looking for research participants for this project. If you are involved in the field of nanotechnology and are an academic, scientist, researcher, HDR student, research assistant or project manager at a university or tertiary institution, we would love to hear from you. Please contact Dr Jianni Tien at jianni.tien@sydney.edu.au

2022 - 2024

Leads: Dr Michelle Peterie
Research team: Nadeen Madkour

This project brings together key scholars from Australia, North America, the UK and Europe to interrogate the harms immigration detention imposes within and beyond detention centre walls. The project will culminate in the publication of a forthcoming edited collection (currently under contract with Routledge), structured in three parts:

• Part 1: Human Costs examines the harms immigration detention imposes on people who are not personally incarcerated, but are nonetheless touched by detention regimes. These chapters paint an evocative picture of immigration detention facilities as carceral institutions that impose punishment beyond the detainee, causing multiple layers of (often politically expedient) harm.
• Part 2: Societal Consequences takes a wider view, exploring the ramifications of immigration detention for society at large. The chapters in this section offer critical perspectives on the embeddedness of immigration detention regimes in broader systems of exploitation and extraction. They show how (racialised and gendered) immigrant detention naturalises and perpetuates gross inequalities and injustices – reproducing harm at the local and global levels. Chapters in this section also draw attention to the corrosive impacts of immigration detention on the law and democracy. Ultimately, the chapters in this section attest that the social harms of immigration detention are at once disproportionately felt by marginalised communities, and ultimately borne by us all.
• The final section of the book – Part 3: Ending the Harm – considers how the reverberating harms documented in this book might be addressed through detention reform and detention abolition.

This international edited collection will be a key reference text for scholars and students in the social and behavioural sciences who are interested in immigration detention, human rights and/or incarceration.

This project is funded by a University of Sydney Robinson Fellowship

ARC DECRA 2024 - 2026

Lead: Dr Leah Williams Veazey

This project investigates the experiences of Australia’s migrant and mobile health workforce in the context of increasing care needs and worker shortages worldwide. It explores how healthcare workers’ family relationships and informal care responsibilities shape their migration decisions, experiences in the workplace and plans for the future.

People who provide healthcare are more than just workers. They live multidimensional lives in which their professional skills, home environment, national identity and personal histories and biographies are crucially important in their migration decisions. Yet, current attempts to attract and retain healthcare workers are often overly centred on professional skills, rather than on healthcare workers as members of families, networks and communities, as well as skilled professionals. This narrow view neglects many dimensions of their lives, including their informal care commitments and attachments – caring for children or elderly parents, for example. Healthcare workers, as participants in both formal and informal care, provide an exemplary case for examining how care and work interact in contemporary Australia. The Australian healthcare system is globally connected via the movement of people and sharing of knowledge. This project investigates how these connections shape, and are shaped by, the delivery of care in the workplace and beyond.

Aims and objectives of the project:

• Document the experiences of Australia’s mobile and migrant healthcare workforce (including healthcare students), from the perspectives of healthcare workers and students, and their caring and collegial connections.
• Develop a nuanced picture of the complex interplay between work, care, knowledge and emotion and how these shape the migration trajectories of healthcare workers in a digitally-connected world.
• Deliver novel theoretical insights into the intersecting geographic, affective, occupational, epistemological and relational dimensions of migration decisions by centring the family (in all its diverse forms) and networks of care.
• Work with policy and industry stakeholders to develop study findings into effective policy solutions to future-proof the healthcare workforce and maximise Australia’s capacity to attract and retain healthcare workers and the expertise they bring to Australia.

This project is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award grant (DE240100074)

Leads: Professor Kevin Dew, Professor Alex Broom, Professor Kerry Chamberlain, Professor Chris Cunningham, Associate Professor Richard Egan and Dr Liz Dennett

Although cancer survival is increasingly common, some people have exceptional cancer trajectories (ECTs). Unexpected survival can be understood in various ways: from statistical outliers to posing serious challenges to current understandings of cancer. There is a need to explore these contested interpretations, where biophysical understandings and lay accounts of illness and healing meld and clash. This project will investigate how survivors, their companions and supporters, and their health and medical carers represent, understand and negotiate survivorship, to gain insights into anomalous survivorship. By delving into the complexity of the extraordinary we open the prospect of turning the exceptional into the normal.

Aims and objectives of the project:

Overall, our goal is to greatly advance our understanding of ECTs and the complex and elusive phenomena they encompass. To achieve this, we have multiple objectives. We will:

• Develop new knowledge about how ECTs are experienced and understood by cancer patients, their significant companions and the practitioners involved in their care and seek insight into how these multiple perspectives align and clash;
• Identify the values and moral imperatives underpinning responses to, and claims about, ECTs;
• Identify the strategies that patients and health practitioners use when responding to understandings of exceptional cancer outcomes;
• Advance understanding of patient identity construction and reconstruction in relation to cancer diagnosis, experiences of cancer and the therapeutic approaches taken;
• Explore contested or controversial claims and identify their underlying assumptions;
• Examine the normative systems at play in ECTs (what understandings are allowed).

2018 - 2023

Leads: Dr Katherine Kenny & Professor Alex Broom
Research team: Associate Professor Emma Kirby & Dr Stefanie Plage 

Two out of every five Australians – almost half of us – will be diagnosed with cancer before our eighty-fifth birthday. Even so, we generally don’t fully understand what cancer diagnosis, treatment and survivorship are really like until we go through them ourselves. Before that, we hear about ‘fighting the battle’, see #fightcancer hashtags and go-fund-me pages, and know – in general terms – how tough treatments like chemotherapy can be. But the representations of cancer that we typically see in the media are fairly narrow and so we get only limited glimpses into the day-to-day experiences of people who are living (and sometimes dying) with cancer. These glimpses rarely show the full picture of what day-to-day life with cancer is like – away from the hospital and back in ‘everyday’ life. This isn’t easy to document. It takes place both within and well beyond the walls of the hospital or clinic, can be quite private and is sometimes difficult to talk about or explain.

So, we gave some of the participants in our study a camera and asked them to show us, with photographs, what living with cancer was really like, for them.

Aims and objectives of the project:

In addition to the aims of the ‘Changing Landscapes of Cancer Survivorship’ Project, of which this project is part of, ‘Picturing Cancer Survivorship’ also seeks to:

• Document how people experience cancer in a person-centred way, that is, not only as a ‘patient’, but as a mother, father, daughter, son, husband, wife, or grandparent, as a person at home, or at work, as a friend, neighbour, or member of the community.
• Develop innovative visual methods for studying topics that can be difficult to discuss
• Build a better understanding of what people actually go through when they’re living with cancer.

Visit the Picturing Cancer Survivorship website

Download a copy of the project book: Picturing Cancer Survivorship: A Collection of Photographs from the Changing Landscapes of Survivorship Study (2022) (PDF).

Partner organisation: Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital

The Picturing Cancer Survivorship project is part of ‘The Changing Landscapes of Survivorship’, an Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project (DP150100414)