meet the SHE Speaks team
The project team build on their strengths as women, researchers, educators, and leaders in the fields of education, positive psychology, psychology, health, communications, and creative arts.
We are women from diverse backgrounds passionate about empowering other women.
Our team
PROJECT LEAD, POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY COACH
Professor Narelle Lemon
Dr Narelle Lemon is a Professor and VC Professorial Research Fellow Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Narelle is an interdisciplinary scholar, researcher and educator across the fields of arts, education, and positive psychology. Her research expertise is in fostering wellbeing literacy in the contexts of K-12 schools, initial teacher education, higher education, and community education. Her leadership in wellbeing education is focused on capacity building in wellbeing and self-care of proactive action across diverse areas of evidence-based wellbeing science in order to flourish. Narelle is a qualitative researcher with a strength in creative methods including poetry, mobile documentary making, visual narratives, and podcasting. She’s an active scholar on social media utilising this community for connections and wellbeing advocacy. Narelle is a successful podcaster with her podcast Teachers Supporting Teachers ranked in the top 25% of education podcasts.
TEAM MEMBER, PSYCHOLOGIST
Professor Julie Ann Pooley
Dr Julie Ann Pooley is a Professor of Psychology and the Associate Dean Psychology, Counselling and Criminology in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University. Julie Ann has over a decade’s experience in middle management and leadership positions. She has extensive experience in teaching in both the undergraduate and postgraduate psychology programs in Australia and internationally. She is a passionate tertiary educator that has won several University and National Teaching Awards. Julie Ann’s research spans areas of stress, resilience, and posttraumatic growth within the contexts of transition and disasters. Her involvement in Resilience research stems from her Phd research on Community Resilience in Disaster Communities and includes projects on women, adults, and children in many contexts. As a result, Julie Ann has supervised many research students at all levels, and has authored many books, chapters and articles. In addition, Julie Ann has been involved in and directed many research consultancies, projects and given workshops and presentations locally, nationally and internationally.
TEAM MEMBER, FILM MAKER
Professor Verena Thoma
Dr Verena Thomas is a Professor of Communication and Associate Dean Research at Edith Cowan University. With a background in documentary filmmaking, Verena’s work focuses on creative research approaches and communication for social change. She has led numerous award-winning research and production projects with donors, government and NGO partners in the areas of health communication, gender equality and education. Verena has mentored cohorts of researchers and practitioners in cross-cultural contexts in meaningfully applying participatory filmmaking, digital storytelling, and more broadly creative and co-design research methods. Verena facilitates these participatory research processes in collaboration with community groups and works with institutions and organisations that want to strategically integrate creative approaches into social change programs.
TEAM MEMBER
Dr Rikki James
Dr Rikki James is the Coordinator of Media Education in ECU’s School of Education; the First Year Coordinator of the Bachelor of Education Secondary program; and also coordinates the first core education unit, ‘Becoming a Teacher’ for first year Bachelor of Education Secondary students. She has extensive teaching experience both nationally and internationally and is passionate about the need for students to build critical media literacy skills as they are becoming more and more immersed in convergent media technologies. Rikki has just completed a Doctorate of Philosophy on the history of media education in Western Australian secondary schools.
TEAM MEMBER
Dr Cassandra Tytler
Dr Cassandra Tytler’s works across video, performance, and site-specific practice, and is a post doctoral research fellow under the supervision of Professor Narelle Lemon. Her art and scholarship explore the performance of the audio-visual and its encounter within place, to create a relational and aware politics of resistance to normalising narratives of exclusion. In making site-based creative research, she aims to pull people, other beings, and Place together to foster an intwining of relations to create extended forms of meaning-making. Through these art actions, new forms of experiential and embodied learning and understanding can take place. She works from a feminist, queer, and anti-colonialist position. She completed her practice-led PhD within the Faculty of Art (Theatre Performance) at Monash University in 2021. She has screened, exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. She is currently a Forrest Creative and Performance Research Fellow, living in Boorloo (Perth) and working at Edith Cowan University with the Centre for People, Place & Planet within the School of Education and Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Tytler has gained funding from organisations such as the Australia Council, The Ian Potter Cultural Trust, The City of Brimbank Council, Victoria and the City of Stirling, Western Australia. She has exhibited in galleries such as The Torrance Art Museum, L.A.; F.A.C.T. Liverpool; Gallery Titanik, Turku, Finland; Harold Golen Gallery, Miami; The Counihan Gallery; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; Metro Arts, Brisbane, Gallery25 Perth. Her films have screened in numerous festivals internationally. In 2020 she won The Noel Counihan Commemorative Award and secured funding from the Monash Academy of Performing Arts and in 2021 was shortlisted for the Footscray Art Prize.