Social change and equity
Social change and equity
Social inequality is driven by structural disadvantages such as race and gender, economic systems, climate change, and lack of access to basic resources.
Achieving social justice and equality requires long term and sustainable action to close the inequity gap.
La Trobe's research into Social change and Equity contributes to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Selected impact stories
Leading Team: Tarryn Phillips and Edward Narain
Fiji is recognised globally as a tourist destination for its beaches, coral reefs, and rainforests. But its colonial history and the complex legacy that this continues to play is less well known. For over ten years, La Trobe researcher Tarryn Phillips has worked alongside iTaukei and Indo-Fijian communities to carry out medical anthropology research on issues including diabetes, nutrition, and inequality. Her husband Edward Narain, a political analyst, was born and raised in Fiji and is the grandchild of indentured labourers, who – along with over 60,000 others - were forcibly moved from south Asia by the British colonial government to work on sugar plantations in Fiji between 1879 and 1916. In 2024, Phillips and Narain decided to use their decades of ethnographic research and lived experience to publish the novel Sugar. A compelling murder mystery, this format is designed to appeal to a broader audience and to resonate with readers more than an academic text. The book raises awareness of the history of colonialism and indentured labour, its legacy of social inequality, and the impact of globalisation and big business on fueling serious health challenges including diabetes in Fiji. The novel is published as part of the University of Toronto Press’s Teaching Culture series, designed to ‘introduce students to the core methods and orienting frameworks of ethnographic research and provide a compelling entry point to some of the most urgent issues faced by people around the globe today’. Phillips and Narain have discussed the social, cultural and historical issues which underpin the novel in interviews with ABC Pacific, SBS Hindiand RRR. The book has become a bestseller in Fiji and is being used in anthropology curriculum internationally. They have also presented their practical learnings about the experience of writing as a couple through a public roundtable discussion with Bruce Pascoe at the Bendigo Writers Festival entitled ‘When Two Heads are Better than One’.
Leading Team: Zoe Cloud and Anna Booth
Most women in the criminal justice system have experienced family violence, and remain at further risk of violence after their release from prison. Further to the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, the Victorian Government (Family Safety Victoria) commissioned a study to determine the factors which could provide most effective protection. A La Trobe research team led by Dr Zoe Cloud and Dr Anna Booth gathered testimony from women with lived experience of both family violence and incarceration, as well as interviewing prison staff. The resulting recommendations included safe accommodation following release, specialised training for prison officers, and gender-responsive, systemically-focused and trauma-informed support programs for women in custody.
In February 2025, Corrections Victoria published a new guide to Family Violence Programs and Services. Reflecting the recommendations from the La Trobe University report, this new guide includes referral to survivor services such as women’s trauma counselling and culturally responsive support. Programs also include training for staff and individualised transition plans preparing women for a safe return to the community.
Leading Team: Andrea Carson
Led by La Trobe’s Prof. Andrea Carson, the Women for Media Report was the largest study ever undertaken in Australia regarding women’s journalism and the media representation of women. It showed that a persistent gender disparity remains, affecting both authorship and content. Male authors, for example, continue to dominate masthead opinion pieces and “hard news” subjects such as international relations. Men account for 78% of quoted sources on front pages.
The report was launched at the Women’s Leadership Institute of Australia in October 2024 and prompted over 100 media stories in follow-up coverage. It sent shockwaves across Australian media by confirming what had previously been suspected, but was now proven. “The data holds you to account,” acknowledges Justin Stevens (Director of News, ABC). Fiona Dear, Director of News and Current Affairs at Nine, is resolute: “We have to change it… We’ve got no choice.” Other responses from network leadership were unanimous that transparency and visibility are essential to changing the culture that has entrenched gender bias in the media.
Leading Team: Kayli Wild
Gender-based violence (GBV) affects the majority of women in Timor-Leste. Equipping health workers with the skills to recognise, respond to, and document the health impacts of violence is critical to ensuring survivors receive effective care and access to justice, even in the most remote areas.
Building on research with survivors of violence and evaluation of a pilot curriculum, an implementing partnership between La Trobe University and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was developed. A key milestone was the launch of a national training curriculum for nurses, midwives, doctors, health managers, and specialists at UNFPA-funded “Safe Spaces”, which provide GBV survivors with emergency accommodation and onward referrals. Follow-up evaluations confirm that this initiative has deepened providers’ knowledge and confidence in responding to GBV, with women describing staff as “caring with the heart.”
Another major achievement of the initiative is the integration of GBV data into the national health information system (HMIS), enabling the Ministry of Health to track incidence and response trends over time. To date, over 685 health providers across 9 municipalities have been trained using the tailored curriculum, job aids, videos, and support model developed through this collaboration, and more than 1,000 survivors received care in 2023 alone.
Leading Team: Piers Gooding
Digital mental health services, including telehealth, digital therapies, and sensor-based monitoring, have become increasingly prevalent post-pandemic. There is a pressing need for regulation to keep pace with practice. Research by La Trobe’s Dr Piers Gooding has contributed to the development of legal and ethical frameworks for digital mental healthcare, particularly the essential dimension of lived experience involvement.
In 2021, Gooding was invited to provide expert witness testimony to the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health. His research was cited over 60 times throughout the Final Report, influencing the recommendations regarding digital technology in mental healthcare. Internationally, Gooding co-authored a 2024 report on lived experience in digital mental healthcare for the Wellcome Trust, which is now required reading for applicants in Wellcome’s global mental health funding call (totalling £90 million in 2024). He co-authored the position statement on ethics and law for the eMental Health International Collaborative, the global peak body for best practice in digital mental health. Recent policy citations include UK parliamentary briefing notes on regulatory considerations around mental healthcare and AI.
Leading Team: Rebecca Flower and Ellen Richardson,
The Neurodiversity Employment Toolkit is a groundbreaking resource designed to help employers create neurodiversity-inclusive workplaces by providing practical guidance on recruiting, supporting, and retaining neurodivergent employees. Developed by La Trobe University in partnership with the Victorian Public Sector Commission (VPSC), the toolkit addresses a critical gap in resources for employers seeking to reduce workplace barriers for neurodivergent individuals.
Neurodivergent La Trobe researchers Dr Rebecca Flower and Ellen Richardson developed the toolkit in collaboration with a neurodiverse team at the VPSC. The toolkit was informed by peer-reviewed research and extensive consultation with people with lived and professional experience. It provides actionable advice, such as how to improve communication, adapt recruitment processes, and design inclusive work environments.
This initiative responds to the significant challenges neurodivergent people face in gaining and maintaining employment, and a need among employers for educational resources. Many barriers, such as unclear position descriptions or onboarding procedures, can be addressed through simple changes that benefit all employees.
Hosted publicly and freely on the VPSC website, the toolkit is designed to meet the needs of both employers seeking to build their capacity to support neurodivergent staff and employees advocating for workplace adjustments. By equipping organisations with clear, actionable steps, the toolkit has the potential to foster more inclusive work environments across the public sector and beyond.
The Neurodiversity Employment Toolkit was published in November 2024 on the Victorian Public Sector Commission website.
Leading Team: Lisa Denney, Allan Illingworth, Aidan Craney, Glenn Bond
The UNDP’s Vaka Pasifika project works to facilitate accountable governance and the management of finances for development in Pacific Island countries. However, accountable governance and effective financial management needs to be grounded in an understanding of local dynamics and relationships, within which personal and political identities are often inseparable. Dr Lisa Denney and La Trobe’s Centre for Human Security and Social Change are providing the UNDP with six country-based case studies analysing how accountability is understood in each context; the power dynamics at play; the rules that shape local practice; and the consequent opportunities and constraints. This is being followed with a synthesis report that draws out the key findings about the political economy constraints for accountability in the Pacific Island countries studied.
Six case studies (Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia) have been delivered to the UNDP, with a synthesis report being finalized in early 2025. Following this research, the UNDP has established “Fellowship Schemes” in three Pacific countries (Tuvalu, Solomon Islands and Tonga), bringing together influential actors identified by the research (in the case of Tuvalu and Solomon Islands) to progress their approaches to accountability. The CHSSC is accompanying these Fellowship Schemes with action research to document how they operate, what they achieve, and what this tells us about how to progress accountability in the Pacific. Marine Destrez, Public Financial Management Program Manager for UNDP Pacific, attests that: “Thanks to the detailed research and the ability of the La Trobe team… we’re able to utilize the information for our targeted in-country engagements and we’ve just deployed our team for missions across the region to follow-up on the data and mappings.”
Leading Team: Kirsty Forsdike
It is an uncomfortable fact that gender-based violence occurs in community sports settings. A study led by La Trobe’s Assoc. Prof. Kirsty Forsdike with support from Sport & Recreation Victoria and in collaboration with Sports Focus uncovered the pressing need to raise awareness about behaviours in a sports context that players find disrespectful, inappropriate or harmful – from gender stereotyping and homophobia or transphobia through to instances of assault or abuse.
Five videos showing examples and effects of gender-based violence were developed in collaboration with community sports organisations in regional Victoria, with an emphasis on creating settings and content relevant for local audiences. The campaign was launched in November 2024, and the videos along with accompanying posters have been distributed by partner Sports Focus. The findings of the study have also been used to inform government guidelines, and Sport & Recreation Victoria have committed a further $100K to roll out the campaign.
Leading Team: Clare Wright
Since the 19th century, the Eureka Stockade – a defining moment in the history of Australian democracy – has been represented as an exclusively male affair, contributing to a narrative that has traditionally written women out of participation in Australian public life. This perception was challenged by La Trobe’s Professor Clare Wright in her prize-winning book The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (2013). As a result, the past decade has seen growing recognition of women’s role in the Eureka rebellion, on the Victorian goldfields, and beyond. From the presentation of material in Ballarat’s Eureka Centre to quotation in Parliament, Wright’s counternarrative of a ‘heterosocial’ Eureka has gained national traction.
In a recent 2024 example, Ballarat-based poet Megan J. Riedl has created a one-woman show in dialogue with the work of Ellen Young, whose political verse was brought to light in Forgotten Rebels. “We tend to think of Eureka as a men’s rebellion”, Riedl comments, “but women like Ellen Young were present and using their own voices to question the status quo, and in doing so, breaking down censorship, and seeking agency for women.” Provoked by Wright’s scholarship, this shift in understanding has now become mainstream.