Dr Joan Daw
Dr Joan Daw has occupied a variety of teaching positions in Catholic secondary schools, and since 1990 has been a sessional lecturer / tutor in sociology at various tertiary institutions, including more recently Swinburne University of Technology and Australian Catholic University. Her doctorate at ACU National was on ‘The relationship between “the religious” and “the secular”: the case of Australian Catholics’.
She has previously been involved in research on the way Australian Muslims manage religious diversity and on the religious beliefs of Vietnamese immigrants in Melbourne. She is a member of the Catholic Interfaith Committee and is membership secretary of the World Conference of Religions for Peace, Australia.
Awarded funding from the Melbourne College of Divinity, this project investigates "the religious and non-religious factors associated with the engagement of youth in social justice activities.” The Yarra Institute expects that Dr Daw's research will arouse considerable interest in the general community, and be especially significant for church, educational and community organisations.
Please click HERE to read more on Dr Daws current research project.
Dr Cal Ledsham
Dr. Cal Ledsham lectures at Catholic Theological College in Melbourne, where he is a member of the Department of Philosophy. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia, a Master of Arts from Monash University, and from Belgium the Master of Arts from the Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven and the Doctor of Philosophy also from the Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven. His studies for these awards all had philosophy as the major or exclusive topic. His current academic interests including areas of research are medieval philosophy (John Duns Scotus), early modern philosophy (Hume), the problem of philosophical proofs/treatments of the necessity of revelation, contemporary ethics and political philosophy. He is also a sessional lecturer in the United Faculty of Theology (MCD), Parkville and at ACU National.
Please click HERE to read more on Dr Ledsham's current research project. Dr Kirsty Sangster
Dr Kirsty Sangster’s primary area of research and expertise is in socio-legal studies and victimology. This interest has been focussed on the status of victims of human rights abuse and war crimes. This interest has taken her to the field as a researcher and advocate for refugees. It has also involved post-graduate study and research assistant work at the University of Oxford, where she completed a year of international human rights and refugee law and more general coursework on the socio-legal aspects of forced migration.
Her doctoral thesis was on truth and reconciliation commissions, exploring through in-depth interviews the perspectives of survivors of human rights abuse and their understandings of what truth, justice and reconciliation mean in the light of their personal experience. She has written several articles out of this thesis and has been re-writing the thesis for publication.
Since graduating in 2003, she has taught and worked as a researcher in the broad areas of health and illness, and political and economic sociology. Her recent research focus has been on the relationship between health and political and social disadvantage, and she taught a postgraduate seminar series on health and its relationship to human rights issues. As well as some time with refugees on the Burma-Thai border, she has also worked as a researcher in projects with refugees and survivors of torture. In these projects the two areas of political sociology and the sociology of health were conceived as very much interrelated. The key issues dealt with in these studies were at once political, social and physical.
Please click HERE to read more on Dr Kirsty Sangster research project.