Round 1 Research Funding for Working Groups:
- Hayley Boxall, “She Gives as Good as She Gets”: Understanding Misidentification as a Pathway to Aboriginal Women’s Criminalisation. Concluding December 2026.
This project investigates the misidentification of Aboriginal women as primary perpetrators of domestic, family, and sexual violence (DFSV) in the Central Australia. Despite the NT having the highest rates of DFSV in Australia, there is no place-based research examining the drivers and consequences of misidentification or how to prevent it. This project fills that gap through a community-led, transdisciplinary approach, combining criminology, gender studies, Indigenous studies, and public health to generate an evidence base to inform policing, legal, and service reforms. Led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including two Aboriginal early career researchers, the project is co-designed with Aboriginal-led organisations and centres First Nations women’s voices, using culturally safe methodologies such as yarning circles and peer-led interviews. The project will not only produce policy recommendations and training materials for frontline responders but also build capacity within Aboriginal organisations, ensuring that the research drives long-term advocacy and systemic change to better protect Aboriginal women from misidentification and its consequences.
- Mercy Masta, Indigenous Pathways to Peace: Gender, Masculinity and Peacebuilding in Melanesia. Concluding December 2026.
This project aims to uncover indigenous peace practices in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Solomon Islands through collaborative and transdisciplinary research involving elders, practitioners, and peace histories. By focusing on community-oriented Melanesian cultures, the research will address the often-overlooked group dynamics, masculinity norms, and cultural factors that drive conflict and violence. The findings will contribute to academic knowledge through published papers and inform the development of an undergraduate peacebuilding course, fostering a new generation of peacebuilders and enhancing violence prevention and peacebuilding efforts in the sub-region.
Round 2 Research Funding for Working Groups:
- Elfie Shiosaki, Reparative ways of thinking about First Nations women’s desires for gender justice. Concluding December 2027.
This Indigenous-led project addresses one of the most foundational and enduring gender justice issues for the Australian nation – reparations for colonisation – from the standpoint of First Nations women and girls. The strength of this project lies in its novel and highly innovative use of desire-based frameworks and Indigenous methods of storywork (through art) and yarning to redress the historic exclusion of First Nations women’s voices and stories from scholarship and practice of reparative justice. This project will reshape scholarly understandings of reparative justice by co-designing with First Nations women new practices of reparations which are embedded in Indigenous knowledge and perspectives.
- Maria Tanyag, Activist-Academic Alliances for Gender and Climate Justice. Concluding March 2027.
This project aims to examine and document the processes, challenges and enabling conditions for academic-activist partnerships for the advancement of gender justice, human rights and climate justice. Building on the intersectional frameworks and methodologies developed by Pacific movements co-led by DIVA for Equality, it will bring together diverse academic and activist perspectives and practices in concretely identifying areas of policy response, reform and influence. Key outcomes include the strengthening of the university as a space for alliance-building, and co-organising side events at Women Deliver and COP31 in 2026 to amplify the labour and voices of Pacific feminist and women-led movements.