Daphne Habibis is an Associate Professor of sociology and Deputy Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change. Her career is concerned with understanding and addressing social inequality. Her current work is concerned with Indigenous issues and housing, especially Aboriginal housing. She has over 60 publications and is co-author of Social Inequality in Australia: Discourses, Realities and Futures as well as Australia's best-selling sociology text book.

Recent projects include examining Commonwealth and state governments efforts to improve housing in remote Indigenous communities and an ARC Linkage grant that asks Aboriginal people for their views on settler Australian people and culture. With Dr Hookway and Dr Vreugdenhil, she has also been developing a research agenda on kindness as an ethical emotion that extends beyond the interpersonal to institutional domains.

Career summary

Qualifications

Biography

Daphne completed her BSc and PhD degrees in sociology at the London School of Economics.   At the University of Tasmania she moved to a research intensive position in 2013 as Director of the Housing and Community Research Unit. This has involved developing the research profile and capacity of housing and urban research at the University. She is a highly active researcher in both applied and pure research in sociology and urban studies and has contributed to the School's top ranking for sociology in the 2015 last ARC round of Excellence in Research Australia. In the last three years she has attracted over $1M in category 1 grant funding, including leading two major projects. She is the leader of the Institute for the Study of Social Change's flagship project Building Sustainable Communities which addresses the challenge of developing and implementing policies and strategies that will sustain communities in places experiencing deindustrialisation.

Research Themes

The UTAS research theme of Creativity, Culture and Society is closely aligned with Daphne's research in its concern with how we can create flourishing communities and improve the well-being of the people within them. Her work centres on questions of how the state engagement with its citizens in ways that reduce social exclusion, and on how the corrosive impacts of individualism neo-liberalism can be resisted and reduced.

In the field of Indigenous studies, contemporary research has been largely policy driven. This provides essential knowledge about the economic and social conditions of Australian Aboriginal populations, but there is a need to progress these accounts by linking empirical analysis with social theory in ways that (a) demonstrate how these conditions are shaped by the intersection between Indigenous and Euro-Australian cultures (b) progress Indigenous social theory through the development of new concepts and paradigms that can be used to develop and modify existing policy interventions.  Drawing on critical race theory, and Honneth and Fraser's work on recognition, Daphne's research has contributed to both these spheres.

Daphne's co-authored monograh, Social Inequality in Australia challenges individualising explanations of disadvantage by combining statistical analysis with theoretical explanations of social exclusion, focusing especially on Aboriginal peoples. Secondary analysis of large datasets show how Aboriginal disadvantage is clustered across multiple determinants of health and well-being. This is theorized by combining Foucault’s concept of discourse with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence to explain how these structural and cultural variables impact on Aboriginal subjectivities by creating feelings of self-blame sand disempowerment, thereby reproducing Aboriginal disadvantage.

Memberships

Professional practice

• The Australian Sociological Association
• Australasian Housing Institute

Administrative expertise

Daphne has extensive experience in managing multi-disciplinary, mixed methods research teams, as well as  large research grants and ensures project deliverables are on budget and in time.  She has held senior administrative positions including Deputy Head and Head of Discipline (interim).  She is the co-ordinator of TASA's Indigenous Studies Thematic Group and convened the 2015 Australasian Housing Research Conference.

Teaching

Social Inequality, Social Policy, Indigenous Issues, Housing and Urban Studies

Research Invitations

• 2016 Roundtable on Indigenous housing and education, Australian Housing and Research Institute
• 2015 Identifying effective arrangements for tenancy management service delivery to remote Indigenous communities
  Presentation to Prime Minister and Cabinet, Housing Branch, Canberra
• 2015 Panel Facilitator: Restoring dignity: Aboriginal land tenure reform and home ownership, National Housing Conference
  28 October, Adelaide
• 2015 Humanities in the House, Tasmanian Parliamentary Dinner
  28 April, Tasmania
• 2015 Australasian Housing Research Institute
  23 March, Sydney
• 2015 Aboriginal Peak Organisations, NT
  6 March, Darwin
• 2015 Australasian Housing Research Conference
  Panel Member:  Conditionality in Indigenous Housing
  18-20 February, Hobart
• 2013 National Housing Conference
  30 October – 1 November Adelaide
• 2013 Aboriginal  Housing Reforms
  December, Canberra
• 2013 Homelessness Research Symposium
  Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs
  1 August, Canberra
• 2013 AHURI Indigenous Network
  Panel Member
  26 July 2013, Alice Springs