Dr Kathomi Gatwiri

Objectives: Feeling and being safe is foundational to young people’s wellbeing and development. Yet in therapeutic residential care (TRC) there is limited evidence on the specific practices that foster safety. This study aimed to: (1) examine self-reported multidimensional safety among young people in TRC in New South Wales (NSW), Australia; (2) assess their experiences of “recognitional practices” (care, respect, valuing) and social capital practices (opportunities to build and sustain connections); and (3) test whether perceived recognition mediates associations between these practices and safety.
Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was administered to 140 young people aged 12–18 years (M = 15.34, SD = 1.60) living in TRC in NSW. Measures included multi-dimensional safety items, items for recognitional practices and social capital practices within care settings, and perceived recognition (extent to which young people reported giving and receiving care, respect, and being valued). Guided by the theory of practice architectures (TPA), recognition theory, and social capital theory, we conducted several analyses to identify dimensions of safety, group comparisons across gender and sexual orientation, and mediation analyses to examine whether perceived recognition explained associations between recognitional/social capital practices and safety.
Results: On average, young people reported feeling safe however, 25% indicated compromised physical and emotional safety. Significant disparities emerged by gender and sexuality: girls/women/ females and queer young people reported lower safety than their peers. Exploratory analysis supported a two-factor structure of safety: “safe to be” and “safe to express”. Mediation analyses indicated that higher levels of recognitional and social capital practices were associated with greater perceived recognition, which in turn predicted higher levels of both “safe to be” and “safe to express.” These findings suggest that recognitional and social capital practices contribute to safety primarily through strengthening young people’s felt recognition within their care environments.
Conclusion: Safety in TRC is multidimensional, encompassing both being and expressing. While average safety was moderate to high, a substantial minority experienced compromised safety, with inequities for girls/women/females and queer young people. Recognitional and social capital practices appear to enhance safety by cultivating perceived recognition - young people feeling cared for, respected, and valued, and having opportunities to connect to family, community and culture. Embedding practices that focus on recognition and connection may improve safety outcomes in TRC.
Recommendations for Policy and Practice:
Create policies which enable structured, sustainable pathways for young people to build social capital by forming and maintaining connections (peer networks, mentoring, family/kin reconnection, community participation, cultural activities), with resourcing and continuity across placements.
•Train and support staff to consistently enact recognitional practices (e.g., authentic listening, shared decision-making, culturally safe engagement). Make these practices explicit in policies, supervision, and quality assurance.
•Implement gender- and sexuality-affirming safety plans, staff capability building, and monitoring to address the lower safety reported by girls/women/females and queer young people.
•Routinely assess young people’s perceived recognition and use feedback loops to adapt practices and environments to enhance both “safe to be” and “safe to express.”

Objectives: Cultural disconnection remains a critical and preventable driver of harm for Aboriginal Australian children in out-of-home care (OOHC). While reforms increasingly emphasise cultural planning and frontline practice, less attention has been paid to the organisational and leadership conditions that shape children’s everyday experiences of identity, belonging and cultural continuity. This presentation aims to: (1) describe how Aboriginal young people in therapeutic residential care (TRC) define cultural connection and disconnection; (2) identify relational and organisational “enablers” and “constraints” to wellbeing; and (3) highlight leadership levers that can strengthen cultural connection in institutional care settings.
Method: Findings are drawn from three interconnected qualitative studies in New South Wales, Australia. Data were generated through yarning-based interviews with 16 Aboriginal young people aged 12–18 living in TRC, complemented by a broader sample of 38 young people reflecting on relational care, cultural needs and organisational environments. Yarning was used as a culturally grounded method prioritising relational safety, deep listening and participant agency. A trauma-informed pre/during/ post framework supported ethical engagement and researcher wellbeing. Data were analysed thematically to identify “enablers” and “constraints” to cultural connection within institutional settings.
Results: Young people described cultural connection as lived belonging: knowing who they are, being recognised in identity by adults, and maintaining access to family, community, Elders, Country and language. Cultural disconnection was experienced not as a personal deficit but as a system output— produced through frequent placement changes, staff turnover, limited Aboriginal mentors, and organisational cultures that constrained relationship-building or reduced “culture” to occasional events. Participants described identity uncertainty (“I don’t know what it means”), relational grief and confusion arising from disrupted cultural links and inconsistent messages from adults.
Enablers of wellbeing were consistently relational and practical: stable adults, predictable routines, interest-based supports (sport, art, Country-based activities), and genuine opportunities for choice and agency. Young people emphasised that “therapeutic care” often looked like small, repeated acts—adults showing up, listening and engaging cultural strengths without judgement. Constraints were systemic: rigid professional-boundary rules that limited warmth, time-pressured routines, insufficient cultural leadership, and organisational practices that unintentionally blocked connection, family involvement and cultural learning. Across accounts, rosters, staffing stability, supervision cultures, policy settings and power-sharing practices shaped whether cultural connection could occur in daily life.
Conclusions: Cultural connection in TRC is primarily produced—or prevented—by leadership architecture rather than individual goodwill. Decisions about stability, workforce development, cultural governance, community partnership, and flexibility in relational practice accumulate over time to create either culturally safe continuity or ongoing cultural harm. Treating culture as an everyday lived practice (not a compliance task) is essential to strengthening identity and belonging for Aboriginal young people in care.
Key takeaways:
- Embed culture in daily routines and relationships, not only plans and events.
- Treat stability and continuity of trusted relationships as prevention.
- Invest in Aboriginal cultural leadership, mentors, and community partnerships with authority.
- Align rosters, boundaries, and supervision to enable warmth, family contact, and cultural participation.

For most Afro-Black scholars, writing honestly, critically and authentically about Black and African experiences is a political act. Their resistance and what Tuck and Yang (2014) call a ‘refusal’ to be written for and about is an exercise in ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo 2009) or the expression of epistemic dignity. This disobedience is a form of reclaiming dignity that helps us to chart alternative paths that are de-linked from the colonial and white supremacist matrices of power that currently dominate Black anti-racism discussions and analyses. In this way, Afro-Black or Black-centred scholars are faced with the task of pushing the boundaries of knowledge in a direction that seeks to ‘re-position those who have been objects of research into questioners, critics, theorists, knowers, and communicators’ (S. J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017, 4).

While research has examined barriers and facilitators to child sexual abuse disclosure, less is known about how practitionersnavigate the complexities surrounding disclosure. This study explored how practitioners understand and navigate factors shap-ing child sexual abuse disclosure. Twenty-three practitioners participated in six group Yarns. Data were analysed using reflexivethematic analysis. Three interconnected themes were identified. First, practitioners understood disclosure as a relational processshaped by trauma-informed discourses that emphasised trust and children's agency. Second, organisational procedures, man-datory reporting, documentation practices and fragmented interagency responses were described as institutional arrangementsthat constrained these principles. Third, practitioners responded to these tensions through ethical mindfulness, engaging inongoing reflection and judgement to balance children's well-being and safety within institutional constraints. The findings con-tribute to understanding disclosure practice as a site of tension between child-centred ideals and institutional requirements.Practices responding to the disclosure of child sexual abuse are not only shaped by individual practitioners but also by broadercontextual and institutional arrangements. Strengthening child-centred and coordinated responses requires attention to thesystemic conditions that enable practitioners to support children's agency during disclosure.

Multiculturalism in Australia is predominantly framed as a benevolent process of "inclusion and diversification". It promises equity, participation, and belonging for racialized minorities, as well as a pathway to 'social cohesion'. Inclusion, as it is widely understood, implies equitable access to systems, spaces, and institutions. These enable social and economic mobility while safeguarding belonging and safety. However, for African Australians, "inclusion projects" often fail to protect against racial harm and can instead reproduce assimilationist expectations that demand compliance and a collapse into whiteness as the condition of acceptance. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, this article interrogates the limitations of inclusion as a framework for addressing the "challenges" of belonging. It proposes racial dignity as a more expansive concept that has remained largely unaddressed in Australian political and social dialogues on integration, social cohesion, and belonging. Against this backdrop, we read participants' resistance as politics of refusal. Here, refusing indignity and insisting on "living with dignity" directly challenge the hierarchical distribution of belonging. Refusal signals that belonging is not a reward to be "granted" by those in power, but a practice that can be cultivated, defended, and expanded by those who are marginalized, excluded or cast as unworthy of belonging. By reframing belonging as an outcome of dignity rather than inclusion, this article redirects the debate toward how dignity is re/claimed in sites where belonging is produced through indignifying processes.

Residential care in Australia serves a small but highly complex group of young people whose experiences of instability, trauma, and disconnection often limit their sense of being loved, respected, and valued. This article applies Honneth’s recognition theory to better understand these experiences and identify pathways for strengthening care. Drawing on interviews with thirty-eight young people in therapeutic residential care in New South Wales, it examines how everyday practices shape experiences across Honneth’s three dimensions of recognition: love, rights, and solidarity. Participants identified caring and consistent relationships, trust, genuine worker interest, opportunities to exercise agency, decision-making participation, and positive peer and community connections as central to feeling seen and valued. However, placement instability, restrictive rules, inconsistent decisions, and institutional constraints undermined recognition and reinforced stigma and isolation. Integrating participant accounts with Ha€kli and colleagues’ concept of ‘positive recognition’, the article reveals that recognition emerges through the interplay of relational practices and organizational environments. Findings demonstrate that recognition operates at both systemic and interpersonal levels. Strengthening relational practice, enabling participation, and opening up recognition-supportive contexts are essential for improving young people’s wellbeing, identity formation, and experiences of safety and belonging in residential care.

This paper utilizes the concept of "colonial master narratives" to examine how racial propaganda is mobilized in the Australian imaginary to "flatten" the stories of Blac/k people and how African Australians deploy counternarratives to reject these racialized projections. Specifically, we examine how master narratives, as a form of colonial propaganda, were challenged and subverted by participants' refusal to be spoken for and about through myths and falsehoods, presented as truisms about who black people are (or are not). In so doing, we analyse how African Australians encounter, negotiate, and actively refuse the colonial 'master' narratives that are institutionalized across Australian politics, policy settings, media representations, and everyday social hierarchies. Forty-two African Australians were recruited across Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, and New South Wales to share their experiences of belonging, Africanness, and racial dignity. The findings demonstrate that, despite ongoing stereotyping, profiling, and racial labelling, African Australians deploy practices of refusal through dignity-affirming counternarratives that actively seek to disrupt deficit-oriented framings of Blackness and Africanness. We argue that such counternarratives are necessary resistances to racial harm and are generative political acts that reimagine life in Australia as something that can be experienced agentically, beyond the racial myths and falsehoods instrumentalized by colonial logics. Counternarratives are, therefore, a way of "refusing indignity" and making space for stories of love, beauty, and joy.

This article theorises experiences of racial indignity among [Black] Africans in Australia by examining how racial misrecognition (disrespect, dismissal, inferiorisation, silencing and erasure) systematically undermines, erodes and compromises their dignity and personhood. Using a dignity-informed theoretical framework, the study explores how dignity is racialised, constructed, denied and contested within the Australian socio-political context. It critiques the dominance of 'race neutral' and 'colourblind' discourses that obscure the routine operations of racism, particularly anti-Black racism, and their role in positioning Black Africans within marginal and liminal social spaces. The article argues that Australian political and social institutions have yet to meaningfully confront their embedded histories of anti-Blackness, and proposes 'dignity' as an essential consideration of 'doing' antiracism practice. By centring Afrocentric theoretical and experiential perspectives, the study offers a conceptual vocabulary for articulating the cumulative emotional, psychological and psychic impacts of racial misrecognition, and highlights how racialisation and anti-Black racism shape everyday experiences of in/dignity.

In this paper, we propose a metaphor that conceptualises racism as a fog. In so doing, we articulate how the racial fog operates as a meaning-(re)making system that hides, obscures and minimises the violence of racism. We suggest that the fog produces a form of epistemic entrapment, where Bla(c)k people are forced to self betray, idolise and internalise dominant white norms, often at the cost of their own identity and wellbeing. We utilise the fog of whiteness as a metaphor and as a theoretical provocation to demostrate how whiteness as a power structure 'covers' itself whiteness by 'clouding' and gaslighting victims of racism through (1) obscuring their racial realities, (2) making them doubt their own racial realities, (3) invalidating or minimising their racial realities and (4) making it difficult to articulate or address the reality of the violence they face within the fog. The study took the form of an in-depth qualitative design, with 42 Black Africans across the five largest Australian states interviewed using an Afrocentric storytelling approach. To survive these racial spectacles, participants described the necessity of crafting adaptive 'masks' or performative identities that were utilised strategically to reduce racial harm and/ or scrutiny. Importantly, our analytical emphasis centred on how participants, despite the obscurity and threats of repercussion, were able to 'de-fog' by refusing, disobeying and resisting its claims of inferiorisation. For participants, 'coming out of the fog was akin to 'seeing the light', and a return to 'who they were/are' reclaiming.

African migrants constitute a significant proportion of the Australian population. While migration and resettlement offer opportunities, the associated stressors may adversely affect the mental health and well-being of African migrants. This study explored, for the first time, the prevalence of depression and psychological distress among African migrants in Australia and the relationship between coping mechanisms and mental health outcomes.
A web-based cross-sectional survey of adult African migrants in Australia was conducted between February and May 2022. Participants (N = 167) who did not have a refugee status who resided in Australia for at least 12 months were recruited through community groups. An e-link of the survey created in Qualtrics was posted on online platforms (WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) and distributed via emails of community members. The Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) assessed mental health outcomes and the Brief COPE assessed coping strategies. Descriptive and multivariate regression analyses were used to determine the association between demographic variables, language ability, and mental health outcomes.
Most respondents (45.2%) were between 35 and 44 years of age and were proficient in English. Approximately one in three individuals reported higher levels of either depression or psychological distress, while 30.9% reported higher levels of both mental health outcomes. Age-specific rates revealed higher levels of depression and psychological distress among younger participants (18-24 years, 62.5%) compared to older age groups (55-59 years, 22.2%; p < 0.05, for both). Coping strategies, such as self-blame, self-distraction, and behavioural disengagement, were significant predictors of depression. Similar findings were observed for psychological distress, with self-blame, behavioural disengagement, and religious coping identified as significant predictors. Notably, language ability did not significantly differ between groups with varying levels of depression or distress. However, the distressed group was significantly younger than the non-distressed group (X² (n = 131) = -2.13, p = 0.03), while the higher depression group tended to be younger than the minimal depression group (X² (n = 124) = -2.67, p = 0.08).
These findings highlight the importance of addressing mental health issues and promoting effective coping strategies among African migrants in Australia, particularly targeting young individuals.