Hello from new editor – Phillipa Bellemore

Hello, my name is Phillipa Bellemore, and I am excited to join the RRO team as an editor. I am a sociologist and my special area of interest is refugee and asylum seeker issues, particularly mentoring and volunteer welcome programs.

Refugee mentoring

In 2019 I completed my PhD thesis called ‘Refugee Mentoring: The Comfort of Strangers’. The thesis explored three mentoring programs in different states in Australia. My research involved speaking with both mentors and mentees. I have a long-term interest in mentoring, and I continue to unpack the various meanings of the concept and reflect on its potential to both empower and depower mentees. I am particularly interested in Tronto’s concept of care and ‘caring with’ rather than ‘caring for’ and how this might be applicable to work with refugees and people seeking asylum. I was part of a team that established an academic refugee mentoring program for refugee and asylum seeker background students at Macquarie University called Making Connections.

Current research

I am working with a research team at University of NSW and Macquarie University exploring parents/carers who speak a language other than English and their post-school aspirations for their high school children.

Teaching interests

I teach qualitative research and other sociological units for two universities in Australia. I am member of the Refugee Education Special Interest Group (RESIG) https://refugee-education.org/ who engage in education and advocacy work in Australia.

Please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss anything further and especially if you’d like to write something for RRO. Look at our website and see the kinds of articles we publish. We are keen to promote articles from women, early career academics and under-represented groups. The email address to contact us is: refugeeresearchonline@gmail.com