Homelessness ColLAB

Research to end homelessness for priority populations.

This is a responsive program of research and impact activities which aims to address the social harms intersecting as homelessness.

The Homelessness ColLAB brings together researchers (staff, research degree students), community and government sectors at state and national level. We centre on engagement with lived experience, frontline service providers and policymakers and are currently running research projects, research-led advocacy and public events across all our agenda areas. The Homelessness ColLAB leads the University of Tasmania's membership of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute which funds the National Housing Research Program, including additional supports for higher degree research students.

Our strategic research and impact agenda is focused on

Policy, systems and services

Informing the design of innovative social policy, systems and services.

Children and young people

Supporting a shift to early intervention for children and young people.

Women

Addressing gender-specific dimensions of homelessness for women and their children

Rough sleepers and people exiting institutional settings

Engaging in complex care service innovation.

Our objectives

  • To evolve as a ‘what works’ research hub for homelessness prevention and early intervention in Tasmania and beyond.
  • To respond to community knowledge needs and translate our research for policy change, service design, practice improvement and education.
  • To collaboratively mobilise research knowledge, lived experience and policy and practice expertise to keep people supported in place and at home.

How we work

  • We engage in research that contributes to system and service design, advocacy, public education, political campaigns and cross-sector collaboration.
  • We support professional pathway HDR candidates and create HDR projects for cross-sector knowledge exchange.
  • Our work is shaped by an intellectual toolkit which draws from the sociology of inequality, critical social policy, ethics and social welfare, place studies, vulnerability studies, post-structural feminism, critical social work and more.
  • We mobilise a methodological toolkit which draws from contemporary urban ethnography, qualitative methods which focus on lived experience and life story, creative and audio-visual methods, narrative analysis, discourse analysis and mixed, longitudinal and evaluation methods and more.
  • We specialise in trauma-informed research practice, including high-risk research governance for work with vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations which prioritises researcher and participant well-being.
Miriam Glennie and Catherine Robinson
Miriam and Catherine

Collaborate with us

If you have project or research ideas you would like to discuss or would like further information about the work we are currently doing, please get in touch with:

Research and community dialogue

New release

Handing out tents: The unmet needs of Tasmanians sleeping rough

The final report from the University of Tasmania Rough Sleepers Initiative has now been released.

Please get in touch with Catherine Robinson for further information.

View the Handing out tents report

Past events

Broken Home Exhibition

Dates: 18.10.2024 – 9.11.2024
Location: Moonah Arts Centre, 27 Albert Road, Moonah TAS 7009

Broken Home examines concepts of territory and identity in connection to domestic spaces. It explores the relationship between these spaces and the effect they have on our evolution of self. This body of work and the stories that it tells draw parallels between personal archaeology and the subjective way people create a “home”. Donna Bergshoeff is a photo-based artist with an inquiring interest into identity and it’s ever fluctuating role in our lives.

Learn more

Generations and Housing Symposium

The Australian Sociological Association

Date and time: Monday 25 November 2024, 8:45am - 5:30pm (AWST)
Location: Online or in-person (Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley Campus, Western Australia)

Watch now | Unaccompanied: Children homeless alone - 18 Sep 2024

Sandy Duncanson Social Justice Lecture 2024

An annual public lecture raising awareness of social justice issues amongst University of Tasmania students and staff, legal practitioners and other professionals, and across the wider Tasmanian community.

Unaccompanied: Children homeless alone

Associate Professor Catherine Robinson delivers the Sandy Duncanson Social Justice Lecture, which explores how we might eradicate homelessness for unaccompanied children in Tasmania and beyond.

Catherine Robinson, delivering the Sandy Duncanson Lecture 2024
Catherine Robinson, discussion at the Sandy Duncanson Lecture 2024

Catherine, delivering the Sandy Duncanson Social Justice Lecture and in dialogue with Acting Commissioner for Children and Young People Tasmania

Homelessness Week 2024 | Monday, 5 August - Sunday, 11 August

An annual event to raise awareness of the impact of homelessness and the solutions needed to end homelessness.

Watch now | Homelessness Week 2024 Mission Australia webinar
The unfair divide: Disadvantage faced by young people who are homeless

On Tuesday 6 August 2024, Catherine Robinson, Associate Professor in Communities and Social Justice, and lead of the Homelessness ColLAB, was part a discussion about Mission Australia's latest Youth Survey report, with Mission Australia's Marion Bennett, Executive of Practice, Evidence and Impact.

Also hear from Mission Australia service managers who work with young people experiencing homelessness, and from young people themselves.

This public event was a collaboration between the Homeless ColLAB and community partners Colony 47, City of Hobart and Youth ARC. Marking #YHMD2024, we brought couches into Elizabeth Street Mall in Hobart, drawing community and media attention to the hidden nature of unaccompanied child and youth homelessness, and joined calls for a National Child and Youth Homelessness Strategy.

Hosted by the Homelessness ColLAB, this workshop involved an in-conversation style discussion between Carmel Hobbs (Trauma-informed Practice Lab), Ash Barnes (Wicking Dementia Research and Education Centre) and Catherine Robinson (Homelessness ColLAB) about researcher vulnerability and the risks experienced by researchers in the design, conduct and dissemination of research on challenging social issues, such as homelessness, abuse, domestic violence and sexual harm. The workshop brought together the collective expertise from the panel and audience about practical strategies to keep ourselves and research participants safe when undertaking higher-risk research.

Hosted by the Homelessness ColLAB in partnership with Documentary Australia’s Impact Producer Program, Hobart Women’s Shelter and Shelter Tasmania this event involved a public screening of Under Cover and panel conversation on women’s homelessness with Director Sue Thomson, Janet Saunders (CEO, Hobart Women’s Shelter) and Pattie Chugg (CEO, Shelter Tasmania).

Held during Homelessness Week with the support of City of Hobart, this symposium launched new research on rough sleeping in Tasmania being undertaken through the Homelessness ColLAB. The event brought together Kimbra Parker (Manager Community Programs and Social Recovery Coordinator, City of Hobart), Ewan Higgs (Housing Services Program Manager, Hobart City Mission), Hanna Richardson (Safe Space Program Leader, Hobart City Mission), Robert Moreton (Managing Director, Moreton Group) and Don McCrae (CEO, JusTas) for initial conversations about gaps in current policy and service for rough sleepers in Tasmania, including the need for an extreme weather protocol and strengthened health and multi-agency care responses.

Research student community and capacity building

Vulnerability and Practical Justice Reading Group

This facilitated small group is committed to monthly reading and reflecting together. Our focus is on interdisciplinary feminist/post-structural problematisations of vulnerability and the ethical, political and practical roadblocks to social, policy and political change that we encounter in our research.

Open now to all HDR students across the College of Arts, Law and Education (CALE). If you are a CALE HDR student at any stage of your research journey, please get in touch with group coordinator Catherine Robinson to join (catherine.robinson@utas.edu.au).

Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)

Learn about AHURI research capacity building, including Postgraduate Scholarship Top-ups, Postgraduate Symposiums and Postdoctoral Fellowships.

The Australian Sociological Association (TASA)

Learn about TASA Postgraduate Members.

Current research

Please see staff profiles linked below for further project information and relevant publications.

Using a participatory research methodology, this AHURI-funded project explores the optimal administration arrangements for the delivery of efficient, effective housing policy within a federal system, taking account the surrounding economic, social and political context, now and into the future.

  • Alan Morris, Hal Pawson, Andrew Clarke, Cameron Parsell, Lynda Cheshire, Jan Idle, Catherine Robinson

This Australian Research Council Linkage Grant investigates the lived experience and impacts of waiting on applicants for social housing. For further information see Waithood: The experience of waiting for social housing.

This AHURI-funded project investigates the multiple ways in which precarity in the migration status of Temporary Visa Holders can translate into vulnerabilities in work, health, and housing.

This AHURI-funded, mixed-method project examines the prevalence and impacts of workplace trauma exposure in housing and homelessness services in Australia. It will develop a framework of key principles as well as concrete options to reduce and mitigate workplace trauma exposure in these sectors.

Do you need help or additional resources?

In Tasmania, key housing, homelessness, child safety and domestic violence services include:

Our community sector peaks provide further information and advice:

For teaching, learning and classroom resources for primary, secondary, tertiary and community settings: