QRN Forum - Qualitative research at the margins: case studies of innovative methods

The ANU Qualitative Research Network (QRN) proudly presents its second forum.

Forum Theme: Qualitative research at the margins: case studies of innovative methods

Our speakers:

Dr Naomi Priest (Centre for Social Research and Methods)

Dr Naomi Priest is a Fellow at the Centre for Social Research and Methods. Her broad research interest is to integrate social and epidemiologic methods to examine and address inequalities in health and development across populations and place. This includes social epidemiology and qualitative research to understand differences in health and development experienced by children and youth from Indigenous backgrounds and from ethnic minorities, and explanations for observed differences across intersecting identities and experiences such as gender, socioeconomic position, and disability. Much of this work focuses on patterns, mechanisms and prospective influence of adverse early life exposures and stressors, including discrimination, stigma and bias. Dr Naomi Priest received her PhD in population health at the University of Melbourne, conducting a qualitative participatory study exploring Aboriginal perspectives of urban child health and wellbeing. She then completed a NHMRC post-doctoral fellowship also at the University of Melbourne with training in social epidemiology. She was leader of the VicHealth funded Anti-Racism and Diversity program at the University of Melbourne from 2012-2015, and also a Senior Research Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation from 2014-15.  In 2014-15 she was a Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Dr Vanessa Newby (Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs)

Dr Vanessa Newby is a Research Fellow at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. Her research interests include international security, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, state building, modern occupation, the politics of religion and the international relations of the Middle East.  She can speak, read and write Modern Standard Arabic and Levantine Arabic at an advanced level and has regional expertise in the Middle East having spent most of the last five years living in Lebanon and Syria. Her PhD thesis was entitled ‘Walk the line: Examining the factors that enable peacekeepers to influence their local security environment’. She examined the micro-processes of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in South Lebanon and showed how the gap between the local and international legitimacy of the mission impacts its strategy and day-to-day operations. I used an ethnographic approach to research this topic and conducted interviews with local civilians, peacekeepers from three different contingents, journalists, Lebanese Army officers, local government officials and academic experts.

Dr Bonnie McConnell (School of Music)

Dr Bonnie McConnell is a lecturer at the School of Music. She has been involved in collaborative research and performance projects in The Gambia since 2006. Her primary research interests include music, gender and wellbeing, music and Islam, and music of Africa and the African diaspora. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Hays Program and the American Association of University Women. Before arriving at the ANU, Bonnie taught a range of courses on music cultures of the world and American popular music at the University of Washington, Seattle. Bon­nie has per­for­mance expe­ri­ence in the areas of Senegam­bian Mandinka music, the Dagarti gyil xylo­phone from Ghana, Wag­ogo music from Tan­za­nia, and Irish traditional music. She has also per­formed as key­boardist with a Gam­bian dance band ded­i­cated to health edu­ca­tion through per­for­mance. In addition to her work in The Gambia, she has con­ducted research on music in Sene­gal, Tan­za­nia, the United States, and Australia. Bonnie received her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington with a dissertation titled Singing the Unsayable: Female Performers and Global Health in The Gambia. 

Dr Samantha Crompvoets (Academic Unit for General Practice)

Dr Samantha Crompvoets BSc Hons (Melb Uni), PhD (ANU) received her doctorate from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) in 2003, completed her post doctoral fellowship at the ANU Rural Clinical School and was a Research fellow in the ANU Medical School until 2014. She is currently a visiting fellow at the Academic Unit for General Practice at ANU. Samantha is a qualitative researcher specializing in organisational ethnography, in depth interviewing and exploring online methods of qualitative data collection. Her work into female veteran health directly informed development of a wide range of policies within DVA to support female veterans and has been endorsed publicly at the highest levels, by the then Ministers for DVA and Defence.  Samantha is the founder and Director of Rapid Context, a consulting company that specialises in providing senior decision makers with strategic research and advice.  Dr Crompvoets is currently senior advisor to the Chief of Army, implementing a social research program across the organisation, and engaged by the Department of Defence to develop an evaluation framework for the next five years of culture reform.

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http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/qrn