Lucy Fiske

Lucy Fiske is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies. She previously held lectureships at the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University in Perth and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University.

Lucy comes to academia from a background of direct social work practice primarily with refugees and asylum seekers, and in the addictions field before this. Lucy’s practice experience continues to ground and shape her research and teaching, particularly in approaching issues of justice and rights from the perspective of people’s lived experiences and theorising from the bottom up.

Lucy is interested in a wide range of human rights related topics with a particular focus on refugees, asylum seekers and women’s rights. Theoretically, Lucy is interested in philosophical and social understandings of human rights and the implications of unresolved ontological tensions and paradoxes for implementation of human rights. This leads to questions of culture, production of knowledge and socio-political processes which marginalise divergent voices.

Her postdoctoral research focuses on the creation of informal (non-state based) protection for refugees in South East Asia, with a particular focus on Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. This project has grown out of a collaborative research project with Prof Linda Briskman (Swinburne) and Taka Gani (Jesuit Refugee Service Indonesia) exploring the lives of refugees in Indonesia, their relationships with the host communities and how they carve out lives in the absence of formal citizenship.

She is currently working with Assoc Prof Rita Shackel (Sydney Law School) and Action Aid on an Australian Aid funded project exploring women’s experiences of transitional justice following mass violence in Kenya, northern Uganda and the DRC. This research aims to create a platform for women affected by violence to be heard and to generate strategies for improving justice for women in post conflict societies.

Lucy’s previous research has focused primarily on Australia’s response to forced migration, attitudes that underpin national policy and discourse, racism and anti-racist education, immigration detention and refugee protest.