PhDs and Parenting

Join us to discover how complex caring responsibilities shape and change the work of early career researchers.

PhD candidates have historically followed a similar trajectory: an undergraduate degree, followed by a masters, before arriving at early-career research in their mid 20s. This trajectory isn’t as common anymore. The pathways to a PhD are diverse, and candidates are increasingly contending with complex caring responsibilities.

Many of the exhibitors in the Matter of Methods exhibition became parents during the course of their PhD research. In this event, some of these exhibitors discuss how this seismic shift in their lives impacted their work. How did parental leave change the timelines for their research? Did parenthood change the way they thought about their work? Were they supported as parents, or are there changes that could be made to how we acknowledge the full lives of early-career researchers?

Come along to learn more about how everyday life changes how academic research is produced and how parenthood and caring responsibilities vitally re-shape the academy and design work.

Speakers:

Dr Karen Burns (Host) is an architectural historian and theorist, specialising in late twentieth-century global history and the British empire of the mid nineteenth-century. Her research focuses on women as architects, theorists, and users from the 1960s onwards and on nineteenth-century domesticity, design, and imperial histories.

Dr Guillermo Rojas Alfaro is an architect, researcher, and academic with fourteen years of experience leading design studios in Australia, Europe and South America. He is the curator of 'Methods of Matter | Matter of Methods', which explores the messy and unresolved processes that drive creative work.

Natalie Miles is a registered architect, design studio leader, and PhD candidate at the Melbourne School of Design under the supervision of A/Prof Ben Cleveland and Dr Philippa Chandler. Her PhD research titled 'Sharing to Learn: A socio-spatial study of shared infrastructure and connections between schools and communities' is connected with LEaRN’s ARC Linkage Project Building Connections: Schools as Community Hubs.

Dr Ripeka Walker is an architect specialising in the delivery of public buildings within justice, education and health sectors. In 2021, she commenced a Doctor of Philosophy to interrogate her complicity as an indigenous-settler practitioner while living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin Nation. Her resaerch considers the civic realm as a communication field. This knowledge is culturally grounded in the atea and its temporal activation.

Dr Wendy Walls is a landscape architect researcher, writer and lecturer at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on landscape design methods and practice under threat of climate change.