The suicide prevention sector recognises that including people with lived experience (personal experience of suicide) is important for better tailoring suicide prevention work through research, policy and program design, and delivery. Organisations within the suicide prevention specific sector, and mental health care generally, engage people with lived experience across a wide variety of roles and in a variety of ways. Engagement can be through formalised employment (part- and full-time or project-based) or informal engagement and can be paid or unpaid. The reality of what people with lived experience truly need in participating in suicide prevention is yet to be fully understood within the scientific literature.

This PhD research explores how people with lived experience of suicide participate in suicide prevention work in Australia and is conducted by a person with lived experience of suicide. The research is grounded in critical suicidology, considering the social and environmental contexts in which experiences are produced, as well as the internal lifeworld of the person whose experiences match the area of interest. Three bodies of work make up the research: (1) scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature, (2) descriptive phenomenological study, and (3) critical reflection study.

The scoping review identified the key areas that are underexplored within research and highlighted that there is much that is undocumented about how people with lived experience participate in suicide prevention work. The descriptive phenomenological study sought to fill these gaps through in-depth interviews with 18 people with lived experience (partners) who do suicide prevention work in Australia. The study identified five meaning units describing how people with lived experience undertake suicide prevention work in Australia: (1) action, (2) relationships, (3) qualification, (4) personal investment, and (5) boundaries. Spanning the meaning units are the themes of (1) lift and (2) load that illuminate the meaning units and describe how the work of partners is constrained or enabled. The study also identified that there is great variability in the context in which people with lived experience do their suicide prevention work, but also in the function and form of their work.

In keeping with the research philosophy and aims, my own experience as a person with lived experience, conducting suicide prevention research was critically appraised. My experience, both as a researcher and in my broader suicide prevention work, was mapped against the structure identified in this research. The impact of my insider status was also examined with key reflections on how people with lived experience can undertake research within their own community.

The research findings can be understood through the divisions of individual, interpersonal, and sector realms, with each segment offering different insights. Individually, the experience of partners relates to motivation from lived experience and the need to create change. This is driven by self-awareness and enabled by maintaining self through emotionally activating work. Interpersonally, lived experience related suicide prevention work is understood as deeply relational, with interactions with others not only providing lift through belonging, community, and relational resilience but also load through stigmatised beliefs and attitudes transformed into behaviour. Within the sector, structures constrain the work of people with lived experience through definitions of lived experience, gatekeeping access, payment structures, allocation of power and control, and a culture of risk aversion.

Recommendations are made to rethink the way lived experience is viewed within suicide prevention work, acknowledging the strengths of people with lived experience and the skills and knowledge they possess that contribute to effective suicide support.

This thesis explores how women participated in the Myanmar peace process (2011–2021) and the ways in which they influenced the high-level negotiations and outcomes of such negotiations. This thesis addresses this question by exploring women’s motivations for participating in the peace process, the roles they played in the peace process and the challenges they experienced, as well as the impact of their participation on the negotiations and outcomes. Using a Black feminist framework and the Myanmar peace process as a case study, this research analyses how women can use their marginal (“outsider-within”) positions in formal peace processes. The empirical fieldwork for this thesis entails in-depth interviews with 49 key informants and six focus group discussions with selected women’s groups conducted between September and December 2019 across ten locations in Myanmar. Examination of women’s experiences of, and perspectives on, the peace process allows for an exploration of the gender dynamics of the high-level peacemaking and wider political transitional processes in Myanmar between 2011 and January 2021. The findings of this study demonstrate women’s agency for shaping high-level peace negotiations. The theory of Black feminist thought (BFT) made it possible to capture the multiple marginal voices and experiences of the different women in Myanmar involved in the peace process and broader peacebuilding. The thesis uncovers how women in Myanmar, although marginalised from the high-level peace negotiations, draw on their outsider-within positions at and around the peace table to shape the negotiations and agreements. The thesis focuses on how women in Myanmar experienced the peace process and contributes to a nuanced scholarly understanding of the peace process in both the formal and informal spaces, thereby broadening the empirical and theoretical scopes of contemporary scholarship about Myanmar and contributing to women and peacebuilding more broadly.

Over the past fifteen years, feminist dystopias have enjoyed increasing popularity across both screen and literary texts. These dystopias often explore themes related to the control of women’s reproductive choices within the context of fictional, patriarchal societies. Within these societies, women are subjected to the ideology of biological essentialism which conceives of them purely as maternal bodies. This essentialism, I argue, connects the contemporary feminist dystopia to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, a period defined by biological essentialism that reduced women to maternal roles. This essentialism, however, is not unique to the early eugenics movement but remains present in societies across the world today.

Presenting the findings of a creative practice research project, this thesis contains two components exploring the creative and scholarly aspects of contemporary feminist dystopias that engage with and critique the eugenic reduction of women to maternal figures: an exegesis and my own feminist dystopia, a novel titled 435C32. Chapter excerpts from 435C32 will be presented after the literature review, which provides necessary historical and generic context to understanding the creative work. In turn, these chapter excerpts will provide necessary creative context for the main exegesis that follows, emphasising the synergy that exists between these two components of my research project.

My novel, 435C32, is a contemporary feminist dystopia set in a world that differs only slightly from our own, namely due to its social and political structures being formed around eugenic beliefs, policies and practices. 435C32 is narrated from the first-person perspective of C, a seventeen-year-old girl who has been imprisoned in a detention centre for the crime of carrying a child of mixed genetic classes – the product of sexual assault. Throughout the novel, multiple flashback chapters to C’s life prior to incarceration contribute to the work’s eugenic world-building. In addition, there are six “monologue” chapters (stories told to C from the first-person point-of-view of other characters) interspersed throughout the novel, revealing and exploring the impacts of eugenics on a range of different women.

As the first scholarly examination to bring the early eugenics movement into dialogue with the contemporary feminist dystopia, this creative practice project examines the ongoing relationship between eugenic ideology and gendered biological essentialism. I argue that the ideologies of the early eugenics movement are not historical but rather continue into our contemporaneity. The presence of eugenic themes within contemporary feminist dystopias indicates continued anxieties surrounding the restriction of women’s bodily autonomy, particularly as it pertains to reproductive freedom. The exegesis examines several feminist dystopias, across screen and literary texts, to explore the role of eugenics in their dystopian world-building. My close analysis of these case study texts is informed by scholarship across the fields of history, genre studies, literary studies and feminist media studies. Both the exegesis and the creative practice work engage with broader political, philosophical and bioethical debates within feminism, specifically surrounding issues of women’s rights and reproductive freedoms.

preservation of these ecosystems. Many studies have outlined the deleterious effects of Forests respond to climate variation in myriad ways, with important implications for the changing climates on the health and vigour of plant communities. Changing temperature regimes, increased drought stress, and altered landscape connectivity can impact plant-animal interactions, magnifying herbivory threats to already stressed forest ecosystems. The soil environment is an important factor in modulating ecosystem vulnerability to climate-related stress and dieback through its role in supporting plant functions, including growth, storage of sugars, nutrient uptake, and responses to environmental stressors. Although there is strong evidence that climate adaptation shapes plant functional responses to drought stress, little is known about the role of soil environment in differential plant responses to stress. Additionally, local adaptation to edaphic conditions may contribute to functional trait diversity across heterogeneous landscapes. A sound understanding of how local adaptation to soil conditions may influence responses to climate will inform targeted selection of provenances with considerations for adaptation or maladaptation to transplant sites, improving the long-term viability of revegetation plantings.

Many eucalypt species are well-adapted to tolerate and recover from drought, having evolved Eucalypts are important keystone species that dominate many ecosystems across Australia. in Australia’s variable weather conditions. However, increased periods of extreme drought have resulted in stand-level dieback across Australia. This compounds existing impacts of herbivory, as drought stress may result in decreased production of deterrent phytochemicals, which could exacerbate herbivore-mediated dieback. New England Dieback is a syndrome in which the ultimate cause of tree mortality is repeated defoliation by a variety of herbivores, particularly in human-modified landscapes. This syndrome occurs primarily in the New England Tablelands region of New South Wales, Australia, and the species most impacted over the past 70 years has been Eucalyptus nova-anglica (New England Peppermint).