Dr Patricia Morgan
PhD (Philosophy), University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, 2013.
Thesis: Learning Feelings: Foundations of Contemplative Education. APA Scholarship Recipient
Master of Arts (Theatre and Film), with Distinction, Victoria University, New Zealand, 2000.
Diploma of Arts (Theatre and Film), Victoria University, New Zealand, 1994.
Dr Patricia Morgan is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in qualitative phenomenological research (QPR). She combines 20 years of international experience in contract research, community and policy development with 13 years of academic research in her innovative scholarship. She works across the fields of Philosophy, Information Systems, Medical Research, the Arts and Social Sciences. She received an Australian Government scholarship to complete her PhD on pre-conceptual consciousness in education, which is the first of its kind in Australia. Since completing it in 2013 she has been a member of five research teams supported by ARC and Health Department funding, a post-doctoral scholar researching work life balance and Information Communication Technology (ICT), in a joint project with UNSW, the University of Canberra and ANU, and a Contemplative Practice Fellow at the prestigious Mind and Life Institute, USA.
Dr Morgan is currently an associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute. She has extensive experience of applying her expertise in QPR through her work in multidisciplinary research teams focused on social justice and human rights, and improving outcomes in education and health, specifically health outcomes for marginalised members of society. This began in a collaboration with the population health team, Christchurch School of Medicine, Christchurch, New Zealand, members of NZPC: Aotearoa, New Zealand Sex Worker's Collective, and sex workers researching the use of condoms by clients of sex workers. It continued in two collaborations with epidemiologists at the Kirby Institute, UNSW, Sydney. The first examined the importance of communication and relationality on recruitment and retention on the RCT ReINVEST pharmacological trial with violent offenders. The second explored the use of arts-based research with HIV positive women to enhance their wellbeing, address ongoing stigma, and develop effective health promotion campaigns. In this and all of her work Patricia seeks to provide holistic understandings of the phenomena under study by revealing the impacts of participants’ phenomenological experience on their motivations and actions. Currently she is researching the importance for violent offenders of their phenomenological or subjective experience of violence and the part it plays in their motivation to commit violent crime.
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
2022 Project 2, Phenomenology of Violence: Broadening understanding of violent offending by foregrounding first-person experience of violence, Centers of Research Excellence fund, Australian Government, National Health and Research Excellence, “Violence Perpetration: Profiling, Prediction and Prevention”.
2022 Massey University Research Fund (MURF), to conduct the Access to Intimacy research project, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand.
2022 Grant to conduct the Arts-based delivery of an Innovative Model of Aged Care: Systematizing and Disseminating the Eastern Bay Villages Model of Aging in Place project, funded by the New Zealand, Office for Seniors.
2021 Australian Human Rights Institute, UNSW, Associate Seed funding to support ongoing research into the Positively Women research project.
2020 Women’s Wellbeing Academy, UNSW, Grant to support ongoing research into the Positively Women Project, examining the use of meditation and art to increase wellbeing for women living with HIV.
2018 Travel Grant to attend the “Transformative Designs for Sustainability Symposium: Facilitating Mindshifts for Collective Action and Anthropocene Prosperity”, VolkswagenStifung, Hannover, Germany.
2017 Community Grant, Sydney City Council, to run a Mapjam and Community Workshops, Sharing Map Collective, Sydney
2015 Mind and Life Contemplative Fellow, The Mind and Life Institute, Massachusetts, USA.
2014 Macquarie University Research Development Grant (MQRDG) Scheme, 2015. Successful grant application, ‘The impact of meditation on attention and language in ageing adults with and without stroke: A behavioral and neurophysiological study’. With colleagues, G. McArthur, P. De Lissa, Y. Mahajan, P. Sedlmeier, V. Politi, N. Badcock, B. Biedermann.
2014 Grant to support the development of the Standing Still to Learn, Contemplative and Creative Approaches to Education: New Paradigms in Teaching and Learning Symposium, UNSW, 15th May 2014. Funded by the Student Success and Well-Being, Office of Teaching and Learning (OLT) Grant, CAPS and the School of Psychology, UNSW, Sydney, Australia.
Currently I am working on the Phenomenology of Violence: Broadening understanding of violent offending by foregrounding first-person experience of violence project, which is part of the CRE, "Violence Perpetration: Profiling, Prediction and Prevention." In this study we will investigate the subjective experience of perpetrating violent crime. By engaging this unexplored aspect of the motivation to commit crime we are responding to Priority 7.4 of the National Crime Prevention Framework (NCPF) (2012). We, like the authors of the NCPF, believe it is important to address significant gaps in the existing evidence base to inform innovative Australian crime prevention strategies.
Recent research projects include:
Researching Aging in Place in the, Arts-based delivery of an Innovative Model of Aged Care: Systematizing and Disseminating the Eastern Bay Villages Model of Aging in Place project, with the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. As the aim of this project was to identify the Virtual Eastern Bay Villages model of aging in place, and the Aging Well Together virtual exhibition and knowledge translation tool is one of two outputs with a project report available on request.
The Access to Intimacy project, which examined the benefits of training for sex workers working with older and differently-abled people and their caregivers with Touching Base Australia, NZPC: Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers Collective and Massey University, Auckland. This project sought to assess both the benefits of specialist training for older and differently-abled people, sex workers and caregivers of specialist training, and the reduction of stigma and discrimination for the first two cohorts. A project report can be accessed on request.
The Positively Women arts- and community-based research project with the Kirby Institute UNSW, women living with HIV, and HIV Community organizations and peak bodies, examined the efficacy of creative and contemplative practices for heighted self-awareness and agency, community development and the release of negative emotion with women living with HIV. The virtual exhibition Positively Women contains our research findings and has successfully been used as a knowledge translation tool.
I work in community and arts-based research, which means that I regularly work with communities, most recently this involved work with:
The Virtual Eastern Bay Villages an aging in place organization in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
A number of commuinity organizations and NGOs supporting people living with HIV, including Queensland Positive People, Positive Life SA, Femfatales, National Association of People with HIV Australia; Positive Organisation Western Australia; Living Positive Victoria; Positive Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Network; Positive Women Victoria; Northern Territory AIDS & Hepatitis Counci; and Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations.
NZPC: Aotearoa, New Zealand Sex Worker's Collective
Body Positive New Zealand.