Practising social justice: Community organisations, what matters and what counts

This thesis investigates the situated knowing-in-practice of locally-based community organisations, and studies how this practice knowledge is translated and contested in inter-organisational relations in the community services field of practices. Despite participation in government-led consultation processes, community organisations express frustration that the resulting policies and plans inadequately take account of the contributions from their practice knowledge. The funding of locally-based community organisations is gradually diminishing in real terms and in the competitive tendering environment, large nationally-based organisations often attract the new funding sources. The concern of locally-based community organisations is that the apparent lack of understanding of their distinctive practice knowing is threatening their capacity to improve the well-being of local people and their communities. In this study, I work with practitioners, service participants and management committee members to present an account of their knowing-in-practice, its character and conditions of efficacy; and then investigate what happens when this local practice knowledge is translated into results-based accountability (RBA) planning with diverse organisations and institutions. This thesis analyses three points of observation: knowing in a community of practitioners; knowing in a community organisation and knowing in the community services field of practices. In choosing these points of observation, the inquiry explores some of the relations and intra-actions from the single organisation to the institutional at a time when state government bureaucracy has mandated that community organisations implement RBA to articulate outcomes that can be measured by performance indicators. A feminist, performative, relational practice-based approach employs participatory action research to achieve an enabling research experience for the participants. It aims to intervene strategically to enhance recognition of the distinctive contributions of community organisations’ practice knowledge. This thesis reconfigures understandings of the roles, contributions and accountabilities of locally-based community organisations. Observations of situated practices together with the accounts of workers and service participants demonstrate how community organisations facilitate service participants’ struggles over social justice. A new topology for rethinking social justice as processual and practice-based is developed. It demonstrates how these struggles are a dynamic complex of iteratively-enfolded practices of respect and recognition, redistribution and distributive justice, representation and participation, belonging and inclusion. The focus on the practising of social justice in this thesis offers an alternative to the neo-liberal discourse that positions community organisations as sub-contractors accountable to government for delivering measurable outputs, outcomes and efficiencies in specified service provision contracts. The study shows how knowing-in-practice in locally-based community organisations contests the representational conception of knowledge inextricably entangled with accountability and performance measurement apparatus such as RBA. Further, it suggests that practitioner and service participant contributions are marginalised and diminished in RBA through the privileging of knowledge that takes an ‘expert’, quantifiable and calculative form. Thus crucially, harnessing local practice knowing requires re-imagining and enacting knowledge spaces that assemble and take seriously all relevant stakeholder perspectives, diverse knowledges and methods

Practices to improve collaboration by reconfiguring boundaries in transnational education

This paper investigates quality assurance as boundary-making practices that establish and re-establish boundaries of a transnational education (TNE) partnership between an Australian and a Malaysian higher education institution. Drawing on practice theory we offer a conception of boundaries as enacted, shifting and performed by the multiple actors involved in the partnership. We employ a relational, practice-based approach and a participatory action research methodology to investigate how quality assurance could be re-configured to enhance relationships and collaboration, and support on-going dialogue, co-developed curriculum and context–sensitive quality measures. This paper re-casts boundaries and borders as collective performances, offering an expanded conception of boundaries from the dualistic home-host, pre-given conceptions common in the TNE literature. Our case study demonstrates how participatory action learning (PAL) is useful for expanding and re-shaping the boundaries in TNE in ways that support the creation of transnational teaching teams and intercultural communities of practice. We show how stretching the boundaries from a dyadic relationship between quality assuror and subject coordinator to include sessional academics and enacting PAL projects using communal media generates the conditions of possibility for developing teaching teams that are transnational in practice as well as in name. The move towards joint responsibility for the development of curriculum, teaching and learning contributes to more equitable partnership approaches and creates possibilities for intercultural engagement between academics and students in different geographical and cultural contexts

The SEED Wellness Model: A Workplace Approach to Address Wellbeing Needs of Healthcare Staff During Crisis and Beyond

Workplace wellness has gained new meaning and significance in the healthcare workforce in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare workers across the world have carried the burden of responding to the public health crisis by having to work under new pressures and constantly changing environments, take on additional shifts, risk their own health and lives, and cope with the ongoing psychological and emotional strain. The purpose of this paper is to articulate a workplace wellness model applied across hospitals in the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District, a regional area in New South Wales, Australia. The description of the development, components, and lessons learned from the SEED Wellness Model illustrates one possible solution about how to provide better care for the staff thus not only preventing staff burnout and turnover, but also creating lasting organizational benefits. The detailed model description can assist in developing a larger and more rigorous evidence-base to improve staff wellness in healthcare settings, both within Australia and internationally

Organizing practices of reflection: a practice-based study

This article extends debates of how organizing practices of reflexivity and collective mindfulness are encouraged and sustained for learning, critique and change. We present, in a practice-based study, a fourfold framework of anticipatory, deliberative, organizing and critically reflexive practices. Our empirical study illustrates how these multiple forms of reflexive practice can support and co-shape one another so that knowing what to do next emerges in the midst of practice. Our analysis demonstrates the value of going beyond the optical metaphor of reflection to that of critical reflexivity and the metaphor of diffraction. This approach extends understandings of reflective practice in ways that foreground entanglement, co-production and the relational qualities of practice. Diffraction encourages managers and practitioners to not only reflect on what has been done but to also map the effects of their practices and interventions. This orientation assists them to notice the impact of their actions and better understand the complexities of organized reflection-in-action. </jats:p