ICS Seminar Series
UPCOMING
Older women advocating for more secure housing futures
Presenter: Therese Hall
Discussant: Rupa Ganguli
Chair: Nicole Campbell
Date & Time: November 5 2026 | 11:30am - 1:00pm
Room: EZ.G.22 Parramatta South Campus
Abstract
In her PhD thesis on the support-seeking experiences and practices of precariously housed older women, Therese Hall identifies the distinctive ways that older women are navigating their inadequate housing. Among the 36 women that Therese interviewed, some were becoming involved in advocacy and activism to address their later-life housing challenges. This seminar is focused on Therese’s findings on the advocacy and activism practices of precariously housed older women, which include sharing accommodation, advocating online and participating in protests and direct action.
Therese conducted her interviews in 2023 with older women who were couch surfing with friends or family, living in campervans or post-flood pods, or residing in unaffordable private rentals across the Northern Rivers of New South Wales and the Gold Coast of Queensland. Although some of her research participants turned to family and friends, or housing and homelessness services for help with accommodation, Therese found women exploring a range of advocacy and activism practices in response to their housing instability. Often nuanced, small-scale and everyday in nature, these practices enabled older women to ‘get by’ despite their housing hardships.
Prioritising a feminist ethics of care framework, Therese’s research focuses on the role of agency and decision-making as older women connect and experiment by banding together in an attempt to affect change. She asks whether older women’s advocacy practices are affecting their subjectivities, their tangible resources and their hopes for a better housing future. Although the support precariously housed older women are looking for is often not forthcoming, their efforts in seeking support reflect a transformative journey that starts from themselves in their care practices and experiences.
Biography
Therese Hall is a recent PhD graduate at ICS. Her thesis, entitled ‘Older women’s struggle for support when facing homelessness’ , was supervised by cultural geographer Dr Emma Power. Therese has since assisted in qualitative research focused on older people’s housing aspirations for an ARC-funded project with Curtin and Western Sydney universities. Therese undertook her Master of Research in Anthropology at Macquarie University, which looked at the experience of older women who inhabit the space between being suitably housed and homeless. Prior to that, Therese completed a Post-Graduate Diploma in Publishing and Editing at Macquarie. Therese has mostly worked in journalism and editing and has a Bachelor of Arts (Communication) from UTS.
If you have any accessibility requirements, please email Denise at: d.rezk@westernsydney.edu.au
Semester 2 Program
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ICS Seminar Series
UPCOMING
Roblox Capitalism: Platformisation and the Political Economy of Children’s Play
Presenter: Marcus Carter
Discussant: Brett Neilson
Chair: Catherine Hastings
Date & Time: 29 October 2026 | 11:30am - 1:00pm
Room: EZ.G.22 Parramatta South Campus
Abstract
Roblox is not merely a game but a sprawling digital infrastructure that hosts, monetises, and governs children's creative and social activity, with over 350 million monthly users and a user base where over half are under sixteen. This talk offers a critical analysis of Roblox as a paradigmatic case of what we term "Roblox Capitalism": a convergence of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017) and battle pass capitalism (Joseph, 2021) that uniquely targets and shapes children's digital play. I trace this dynamic across five interrelated sites: the illusion of ownership in Roblox's licensing model; the abstraction of currency and circulation through Robux; a governance regime that claims neutrality while embedding monetisation into the architecture of play; the gendered and status-driven economy of avatar customisation; and the promotional myth of the child millionaire developer, which naturalises unpaid labour and entrepreneurial risk as a feature of play itself. Drawing on platform governance analysis and prior interview research with children, I argue that Roblox's $35 billion valuation is not tied to what the company produces, but to the disaggregated and rebundled activity of millions of child users and developers — and that understanding this requires taking seriously both children's real agency and the structural conditions under which that agency operates.
Biography
Professor Marcus Carter is a researcher in human-computer interaction, focusing on games, virtual reality and emerging technologies. He holds an ARC Future Fellowship examining the monetisation of children in the digital games industry, with recent books including Game Studies: A Critical Introduction to the Field (Polity, 2025), Fantasies of Virtual Reality (MIT Press, 2024); and The Limits of Immersion: Disability and Virtual Reality (Bristol University Press, November 2026).
If you have any accessibility requirements, please email Denise at: d.rezk@westernsydney.edu.au
Semester 2 Program
To join our email list and receive updates on upcoming seminars, guest speakers, and institute news, please email Sally at s.byrnes@westernsydney.edu.au
(100%)
Download 2026 Semester 2 Program (PDF) (opens in a new window)
Past ICS Seminars
ICS Seminar 2026 Semester 1 Program (PDF) (opens in a new window) [[link]]
ICS Seminar 2025 Semester 2 Program (PDF) (opens in a new window) [[link]]
ICS Seminar 2024 Semester 1 Program (PDF) (Opens in a new window) [[link]]
ICS Seminar 2024 Semester 2 Program (PDF) (Opens in a new window) [[link]]
Access all our previous ICS Seminars.