Doctor Karin Mackay

Dr Karin Mackay is a researcher and lecturer in Creativity, Learning and Cultural Wellbeing for The School of Education, and an Alumna of the Institute of Cultural Studies (ICS) both at Western Sydney University. Karin has worked as a creative practitioner and educator for the last 20 years to address complex social and environmental problems using a cultural wellbeing approach. Karin has worked with a range of humanitarian and environmental organisations to design responsive educational policy and developmental programs for community agency and engagement. She uses creative arts methodologies as a powerful way to respond to the local effects of globalised disempowerment and displacement, with the aim of offering a hopeful way to live well on our planet. She has curated creative productions addressing social issues with women in domestic violence refuges, young parents, diverse women artists, homebirth groups, sustainability groups and most recently with  SydWest Multicultural Services refugee youth in Western Sydney Region. Karin was the lead researcher for the project Navigating Resettlement: Matched Mentoring and Creative Media Design for Refugee and Migrant Youth in Transition, Greater Western Sydney, which investigated how to best navigate refugee youth educational aspirations. Karin is currently working on documenting stories of migration in The Navigating Home Project, which aims to understand the meaning of ‘home’ to refugee and non-refugee youth to address issues of social cohesion. Karin has published and presented her work at International and National level with upcoming engagements at the 2018 International Metropolis Conference on migration, diversity and integration where she will present the "tri-model menu" of educational engagement for refugee youth and in 2019 at the Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Organisations theme border crossing narratives, learning from the refugee experience in Patras, Greece.

This information has been contributed by Doctor Mackay.