Professor Christine Morley

Biography

Christine Morley is Professor and Head of the Social Work and Human Services Disciplines within the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology (QUT).  She is also co-leader of the 'Access to Justice' program of research within the Centre for Justice, and Chair of the Faculty of Health Equity Committee at QUT, Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Professor Morley is a passionate advocate of critical social work and has published extensively on the application of critical theories to social work education and practice including more than 80 papers in national and international refereed journals, conference proceedings and in edited books as invited chapters. She is author of Practising Critical Reflection to Develop Emancipatory Change (Routledge 2014) and Engaging with Social Work: A Critical Introduction (with Phillip Ablett & Selma Macfarlane, 2014; 2nd Edition 2019, Cambridge), which is used as a foundational text in 17 universities around Australia.  Most recently, she was lead editor on The Routledge Handbook of Critical Pedagogies for Social Work (with Phillip Ablett, Carolyn Noble and Stephen Cowden, 2020), which involved working with 54 authors across 13 different countries to produce 43 chapters, all related to reactivating social work education as a catalyst for social change.

Professor Morley has extensive experience as a social work researcher, practitioner, supervisor and educator across a range of fields (including domestic and family violence, children and families, disability, sexual assault, grief and loss, poverty, homelessness and wealth inequality, and mental health). She is recognised as an international expert on critical reflection involving transformative approaches to research and evaluation that focus on the development and improvement of service delivery.

She enjoys working in partnerships with organisations who similarly seek to activate research to transform practice by generating practice-based evidence and solutions to inform new strategies that improve practice, policy and organisational culture in professional contexts characterised by rapid change, complexity and uncertainty. This usually involves addressing an issue or priority that has been identified by the organisation and working with them to develop strategies to ensure intended aims of service delivery match expected outcomes.

More recently, Professor Morley's work has focused the on impact of neoliberalism on social work education and practice with a particular interest in how critical pedagogy might equip practitioners to work critically in contemporary professional contexts to further a social justice agenda.