Our people - Dr Lia Bryant
I
have been the Director of the Research Centre for Gender Studies since
February last year, but my association with UniSA began in 1996 as a
lecturer in the School of Social Work and Social Policy.
My key research interest has been the sociology of gender and work, and gender and rural places. I examined rural sociology and agricultural patterns of work with economic change occurring in rural communities and agriculture in my doctoral thesis.
My interest in the area was sparked during a two-year stint in the late ‘80s as a social researcher in the SA Department of Agriculture’s Rural Affairs Unit, where I became aware of the impact of drought and downturn in commodity prices for farmers and its social effects at the individual, family and commuity levels.
Since then, I have published widely about the experience of rural women and work in Australia. Some of this work was the result of a Hawke Fellowship for travel and research, awarded by the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre in 1999.
I have also played an active social policy development role in the area of women and work, largely as a member of the SA committee linked to the federal standing committee on agriculture and resource management.
But my research also focuses on gender and the relationships between constructions of gendered meanings about work, space and place.
While the eight competitive grant projects I’ve overseen as chief investigator have covered topics ranging from women in the wine industry and gender relations among young farming couples to research on rural youth and ageing, I have also initiated a number of international multidisplinary collaborations.
With Dr Mona Livholts at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Umea, Sweden, I have worked closely on memory, sexuality and social space. Late last year, I explored Indigenous women’s writing with Dr Dominique Jouve at the University of New Caledonia. And I am soon to commence work with Dr Susan Halford from the University of Southampton on information and communication technologies (specifically telemedicine), gender, rurality and health.
I am currently working on two books. Gender and Rurality, with Dr Barbara Pini from Queensland University of Technology, is a study of gender in rural spaces.
The other, Walking on the Grass: Women Writing Theses, is about work I feel passionate about, namely, mentoring PhD students and early career researchers. The book aims to explore and reflect the myriad of experiences and emotions that intersect and occur in everyday lives when writing a doctoral thesis.
Lia Bryant is the Director of the Research Centre for Gender Studies, a part of the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies.