Online Research Seminar Series - MAY

Join us for our first research seminar of 2025!

At this online research seminar we will hear from Dr Naomi Smith and Chelsea Wallis.

Friday 30 May

12:00pm AEST

Presentations

The 'wife' in Late Capitalism
This presentation analyses the newly salient category of ‘wife’ in late capitalism. I argue that renewed interest in ‘wife’ as an identity and role for women is indicative of a desire to ‘opt out’ from the grind and insecurity of late capitalism. Emerging from this is the largely implicit narrative that the position of ‘wife’, and the accompanying domestic life, is the ideal state for women, unbothered by the expectations and demands of the public sphere. This is most evident in discussions of emerging ‘trad wife’ practice and discourse, on and through popular accounts like Ballerina Farms and Nara Smith, which also generate their own microeconomies of parody and criticism.  This presentation also outlines the case for analysing ‘wife’ as a distinct category from that of ‘mother’. Understandably, these two categories are often treated as synonymous, but I argue that there is analytical value in separating them.

An Enriched Capabilities Approach to Domestic Abuse: Centring the Acutely Vulnerable Victim-Survivor

The epidemic of domestic abuse across Australia persists, endangering women and children on an unprecedented scale. In this paper, Wallis advances a novel human-rights based framework for conceptualising and responding to domestic abuse by bringing together three core strands of feminist jurisprudence: Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, relationality, and intersectionality. The resulting Enriched Capabilities model positions the victim-survivor at the very centre of law and policy considerations, attending carefully to the affective experience of navigating abuse, and the social services and justice systems which attend it. This compound framework is designed to foreground women’s own narrated accounts of their lived experiences of coercive control by capturing the capability deprivation to which they are subject, before expanding outwards to their relational environment and social positionality. In doing so, a more nuanced picture emerges of the diverse ways in which domestic abuse targets human rights, dignity and self-perception, and how these forces interact with pathological vulnerability and structural inequality. Wallis applies the framework to the case studies of First Nations women and Disabled women to demonstrate its value in foregrounding the acutely marginalised victim-survivor’s voice across distinct social contexts: weaving together three complementary strands of feminist theory produces a powerful portrait of abuse, complex trauma, and healing. The enriched capabilities analysis demonstrates that it is by understanding an individual’s lived experience, capabilities, and relationships – alongside those of the community in which they are embedded – that we can compel meaningful, culturally-responsive law and policy reform, alongside enduring cultural change

Speakers:

Dr Naomi Smith is a digital sociologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Primarily, her research has focused on the intersection of the internet and bodies (including anti-vaccination sentiment), how online communities influence the way we make sense of our bodies, and how we manage them. She also researches misinformation, conspiracy theories and wellness cultures.

Chelsea Wallis is completing a DPhil in Law at the University of Oxford on human rights responses to domestic abuse. Alongside law, she advocates for disability rights and neurodivergent inclusion in academic spaces. Chelsea's writing has appeared in Amicus Curiae, The Turl, Aeon, and Cultivate Feminism.