Breaking the Silence: Cultural Pathways to Healing from Gender-Based Violence

In this lecture, Professor Denise Saint Arnault will present groundbreaking findings from the international MiStory research network, highlighting how cultural factors shape trauma recovery experiences. MiStory is a research collaborative working around the world to use safe and trauma-informed methods that illuminate the interactions among cultural context, the self, gender and trauma recovery. The MiStory research network have worked in international settings for 10 years developing research infrastructure, practices and protocols, and carrying out field trials. This lecture will emphasise the critical need for culturally adapted approaches in Australia and introduce the collaborative work being undertaken with Aboriginal and CALD communities.

Denise Saint Arnault, PhD, RN, FAAN, is a Professor of Nursing at the University of Michigan. She has studied how cultural factors interact to influence illness and help-seeking behavior for over 30 years, developing a middle-range theory and an ethnographic interview methodology that examines the help-seeking trajectory. Her work has been applied to research on mental and physical illness, homelessness, and trauma recovery. Her work in trauma recovery has focused on the barriers and resources to trauma help-seeking and healing, and how to understand recovery as a cultural experience. Her methods include grounded theory, Feminist Ethnography, and Mixed Methods.

Professor Saint Arnault is a 2025 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow. During her stay she will take part in a number of events with that aim to raise awareness of cultural factors in trauma recovery from gender-based violence for women and children, working with Associate Professor Jocelyn Jones (Kurongkurl Katitjin, ECU), Dr Chantal Orgeas in the UWA School of Population and Global Health and Associate Professor Susan Young in theUWA School of Allied Health, Social Work and Social Policy.