Professor Susanne Schech

My research has focused on two main fields of study:

• Critical development studies (esp. development volunteering, culture and social change, gender and development, poverty reduction policy making)

• Social and cultural geographies of migration, ethnicity and race (esp. refugee and migrant settlement, constructions of racial and ethnic identities)

In critical development studies my work has focused on analysing the conceptual premises on which development policies and development scholarship are based. Empirically this work has centred on the role of ICTs in development, the participatory turn, gender and poverty reduction strategies. My current research project examines the impacts of international volunteering on host organisations and volunteers, as well as on constructions of development cooperation as partnership.

In social and cultural geography my research has examined how migrants and refugees reconstruct their identities in Australia within terrains and settlement contexts that are structured by race, class, gender, and underpinned by often implicit notions of modernity and development. Currently my attention is drawn to the ways in which the experiences and impacts of migration manifest differently in different places, and how sub-state regions shape these social transformations through migration.

External grants:

Resilient humanitarianism: the League of the Red Cross Societies, 1919-1991 (ARC DP190101171; 2019-2022 Co-CI)
Cosmopolitan development: the impacts of international volunteering (ARC LP120200085; 2012-2015, Lead CI)
From stranger to citizen: migration, modernisation and racialisation in the making of the new Australian (ARC DP0665782; 2006-07, Lead CI)