Dr Patricia Morgan

Dr Patricia Morgan is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in qualitative phenomenological research (QPR). She combines 20 years of international experience in contract research, community and policy development with 13 years of academic research in her innovative scholarship. She works across the fields of Philosophy, Information Systems, Medical Research, the Arts and Social Sciences. She received an Australian Government scholarship to complete her PhD on pre-conceptual consciousness in education, which is the first of its kind in Australia. Since completing it in 2013 she has been a member of five research teams supported by ARC and Health Department funding, a post-doctoral scholar researching work life balance and Information Communication Technology (ICT), in a joint project with UNSW, the University of Canberra and ANU, and a Contemplative Practice Fellow at the prestigious Mind and Life Institute, USA.

Dr Morgan is currently an associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute. She has extensive experience of applying her expertise in QPR through her work in multidisciplinary research teams focused on social justice and human rights, and improving outcomes in education and health, specifically health outcomes for marginalised members of society. This began in a collaboration with the population health team, Christchurch School of Medicine, Christchurch, New Zealand, members of NZPC: Aotearoa, New Zealand Sex Worker's Collective, and sex workers researching the use of condoms by clients of sex workers. It continued in two collaborations with epidemiologists at the Kirby Institute, UNSW, Sydney. The first examined the importance of communication and relationality on recruitment and retention on the RCT ReINVEST pharmacological trial with violent offenders. The second explored the use of arts-based research with HIV positive women to enhance their wellbeing, address ongoing stigma, and develop effective health promotion campaigns. In this and all of her work Patricia seeks to provide holistic understandings of the phenomena under study by revealing the impacts of participants’ phenomenological experience on their motivations and actions. Currently she is researching the importance for violent offenders of their phenomenological or subjective experience of violence and the part it plays in their motivation to commit violent crime.