Join us for our first research seminar of 2025!

At this online research seminar we will hear from Dr Adrienne Byrt and Chelsea Wallis.

Friday 30 May

12:00pm AEST

Presentations

Applying feminist design sociology to co-create better support for mothers of premature infants

In this presentation, Adrienne Byrt discusses the implications for participatory design projects when co-designers inadvertently reproduce oppressive patriarchal demands as part of their recommendations for improved experiences of postpartum care and hospitalisation of sick and premature infants. Drawing on findings from a co-design workshop with mothers who had experienced a premature birth, Byrt applied a feminist design sociology framework to analyse how the ideology of intensive mothering shaped the co-designers' practice recommendations. Turning to matricentric feminism to unpack the patriarchal demands placed on the co-designers within institutional, interactional, and individual domains, the analysis highlighted the benefits of sociological intervention through design projects to illuminate otherwise obfuscated ideological demands.

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 Adrienne Byrt is a design sociologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research centres the voices of marginalised service recipients across health, public services, and social policy. Adrienne has worked across diverse projects in family violence, financial abuse, the socio-legal impacts of donor-linking, and traumatic birth experiences. Dr Byrt seeks to transform policy and service delivery through sociological analysis, systems mapping, and creative interdisciplinary approaches using methods from co-design and feminist sociology.

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.