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The Gary Bouma Memorial Workshop Program


At the start of 2021, TASA introduced a new initiative,  'The Australian Sociological Association’s Workshop Program', which was subsequently renamed the Gary Bouma Memorial Workshop Program. While we appreciate the pandemic may continue to thwart scheduled events, we will continue to support and promote sociology where we can.

About the Workshop Program

  • Presenting TASA outwardly – engaging with the community
  • Potential for feeding into policy
  • Connecting with the research community
  • Bringing experts in from the community

Successful workshops will advance research within sociology and showcase TASA as the face of sociological/interdisciplinary research in the region; engaging with issues of national concern; advancement of knowledge; support innovative ideas, and, the potential of feeding into policy and practice development.
  1. Funding of $5,000 (per workshop) available for up to 2 workshops per year.
  2. Applicants must:
  3. a. include a minimum of 2 Early Career Researchers and a maximum of 20 disciplinary experts.
    b. detail planned publication outcome(s) for workshop.
    c. submit a post workshop report to TASA that can be referenced on TASAweb.
    d. present workshop findings at TASA’s 2024 November event in Perth
  4. Applications will be reviewed and voted on by TASA executive.

Applications for the 2026 round will open in the first half of 2024. 

The selection process will occur at the November Executive meeting and an announcement will be made at TASA’s conference in November. Workshops will be held in the following year with the presentation and report expected in that same year. We will provide advice to applicants to seek additional funding either within their institution or another association with the potential of co-badging.


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2024 Gary Bouma Workshops
2024 Gary Bouma Workshops
Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate: Pushing for Playful, Healthy and Inclusive Cities
January 2024 and October 2024
University of Sydney
Organiser: Indigo Willing

Skateboarding emerged as a leisure practice and youth culture, then a subculture, and is now also an Olympic Sport. Even so, skate culture is often labeled as deviant, restricted in city spaces, and quarantined to skateparks which can further marginalise users and leave heavy footprints on the environment. These workshops invite sociologists, skaters, artists, architecture and urban studies experts, and others to co-design and share research on socially equitable, creative, and sustainable spaces to skate and encourage an exploration of how skateboarding promotes a re-thinking of public space and how to foster more playful, healthy and inclusive cities.

Skateboarding research is an emerging sociological field, present in publications such as Sociology, Leisure Studies, Young Nordic Journal, Cities and Health and in monographs published by Palgrave and Routledge for example. Skate conferences and events overseas have also grown in the past 5 years, such as in Sweden, the UK, the US, France and Aotearoa New Zealand. Australia however has lagged despite being in a strong position to lead new conversations as skateboarding. Now an Olympic sport, several Australians are predicted to win medals at Paris 2024, LA 2028, and the Brisbane 2032 Games. Australian girls are winning gold at the most prestigious and profitable ‘mega-event’ competitions in the world right now, and a young Australian man Keegan Palmer also won gold in skateboarding at the sport’s debut at Tokyo 2020. The ‘Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate’ project is co-led by a team that includes two early career researchers; Dr Indigo Willing as part of her fellowship at the University of Sydney in 2024 and ARC DECRA ‘ART, RISK, PLAY’ Project leader Dr Sanné Mestrom. The team also includes Associate Professor Lian Loke who curated the Electro Sk8, a mixed performance event incorporating skating, dancing and a light show. The new Skate, Create, Educate and Regenerate project aims to advance sociological and interdisciplinary work on skateboarding and the creative use of public space. The Pushing for Playfu, Healthy and Inclusive Cities Workshops as part of this project aims to bring together sociologists from TASA and experts from other disciplines and fields to advance knowledge on the culture of skateboarding and related practices such as rollerskating, parkour and cycling, and re-imagine the way public space, and urban play is perceived and planned. Key areas to be addressed include: • Breaking Stereotypes: Tackling outdated labeling and perceptions of skate culture (traditionally perceived to be deviant and only for men) by exploring ways to make skateboarding culture more socially inclusive, particularly in terms of marginalised participants (women, non-binary and Queer skaters and disabled skaters). • Re-Imaginging Cities: Addressing why a multi-use public realm is vital to urban sustainability and, therefore, why it is important to integrate skateable opportunities into the public realm so that skateboarders become a valued part of the cultural texture of urban life (alongside other outdoor urban players including cyclists, outdoor gym enthusiasts, roller bladers, parkour enthusiasts and children with their various urban play opportunities). • Community Engaged Public Art and Co-Design: Asking and exploring how to achieve a more multi-use skate-friendly public realm through participant-led design workshops and a full-scale, skateable built concrete prototype. (funding has been secured elsewhere) • Health and Social Benefits: Skateboarding is not just a popular leisure practice enjoyed by youth. It is also a positive source of physical activity for people of all ages and abilities. It is also more than a sport, such as being a subcultural scene able to foster social connections and benefits for marginalised individuals from various backgrounds. • Industry and Institutions Networking: While still having community and grassroots DIY (do it yourself) cultural elements, skateboarding is also a profitable business able to generate significant revenue from streetwear and shoe sales, to offering careers for skaters to be professional athletes, work in events management and areas such as skatepark building and design. Also, as emphasised throughout this application, skating is also an Olympic sport and sociologists can play a leading role in re-thinking its inclusion in ways that are more socially and environmentally aware. These workshops will promote dialogues across these stakeholders and sectors.


(Re)Imagining menopause beyond gender and sexuality norms

June and November 2024
Sydney, UNSW Paddington campus
Organiser: Kerryn Drysdale

Two hybrid roundtable workshops over one year will bring together experts in health sociology, gender and sexuality studies, arts-based design, sexual and reproductive health, women’s health, and LGBTQ+ health to explore the question: Can menopause be reimagined beyond gender and sexuality norms? The first event, ‘Reimagining Narratives’, will focus on diverse theoretical, empirical and embodied perspectives, while the second event, ‘Reimagining Responses’ will draw on services and supports needs in our current healthcare system; together, these workshops will inform the development of a localised, critical and inclusive sociology of menopause.

From the perspective of the sociology of medicine, menopause is a life stage that is subject to social norms and is conventionally researched within two framings: (i) a medical problem requiring pharmacological intervention; (ii) a disruptive condition that is managed through individual resilience; both of which perpetuate a pathological notion of menopause. While this research has focussed on the health and wellbeing of (white, abled) cisgender women, our imagining of menopause needs to be expanded to encompass the experiences of all people with ovaries, including some transgender men and non-binary people, and people of different abilities and ethnicities. These proposed events will build on an emerging collaborative research program at UNSW Sydney designed to address a significant gap in knowledge of non-normative experiences of menopause. Our interdisciplinary team combines expertise in creative arts and socially engaged design on menopause in cisgender women (Moline) with sociological research on health, gender and sexuality, including reproductive health experiences among marginalised communities (Drysdale and Newman). Our team aims to generate new insights into how significant and culturally complex experiences of menopause can be made more inclusive of those whose bodies, identities or life experiences do not fit gender and sexuality norms, including cisgenderism, compulsory heterosexuality, and the expectation to have children. The aims of the two roundtable workshops will be: 1. To create a dedicated space for menopause to be reimagined through a dialogue across diverse theoretical, empirical and embodied perspectives. 2. To explore these reimaginings in the context of service and support infrastructure in our current healthcare systems, and design future health interventions to meet these alternative experiences. 3. To map areas of shared interest so as to inform the development of a localised and inclusive sociology of menopause. The second workshop will add one additional aim: 4. To generate a practice framework that can guide arts-based research with gender and sexuality diverse people experiencing menopause. In the first roundtable workshop, invited speakers will offer provocations from different perspectives across health sociology, critical gender and sexuality studies, gynaecological research and other areas of ‘women’s’ health, creative arts practice and socially engaged design, and LGBTQ+ health policy, health promotion and advocacy. These collective reimaginings will then be used in the second roundtable workshop to invite considerations of how to think differently about service and support responses, and to move towards a socially-engaged design of health interventions to meet the needs of a more diversely imagined community of people experiencing menopause. Sociological participants will also be invited to offer relevant provocations to include in this dialogue through an open EOI. We will propose that contributions seek to expand on or respond to the following propositions: • Gender is something we all perform and affirm through our everyday activities, including cis people. • Gender is experienced as dynamic by all people, not just those whose gender differs from that assigned at birth. • Scripting to make sense of the rich variety of menopause experiences is a form of self-care, aligned with broader notion of gender affirmation, such as among gender diverse people. • Cultural scripts on menopause can be radically reimagined through alternative cultural and social representations. • Healthcare responses to an expansive reimagining of menopause are enhanced by sociological contributions that extend knowledge of, and intervene in, this largely cisgenderist and heterosexist domain of practice. Together, these two roundtables will provide a long overdue opportunity to advance interdisciplinary and intersectoral dialogue on an issue of growing interest.




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2022 Gary Bouma Workshops
2022 Gary Bouma Workshops

Alone in a crisis: Reflections on recent personal, financial, and health shifts

2nd November 2022
Virtual 1-day workshop
Organiser: Lara McKenzie

‘Alone in a crisis’ is a full-day, virtual workshop presenting researcher findings and practitioner experiences on single and solo living people’s personal, financial, and heath-related experiences of recent crises, government pandemic measures and lockdowns, and the implications of any resulting shifts. It will bring together postgraduate, early career researcher, and senior academic sociologists, anthropologists, and social scientists, as well as practitioners and policy experts from across the world. Workshop participants will discuss the realities, consequences, and future needs of people living alone in times of crisis.

The workshop will explore being ‘alone’ from a number of different perspectives. Participants might examine the short and long-term implications of lockdowns and other government health measures for people’s love lives, for instance, asking how dating, sex, singledom, and relationships have been reorganised (or not) across different national contexts. For example, in Australia, single people were largely restricted from forming in-person sexual and romantic relationships during lockdowns, while in Denmark citizens were encouraged to choose a ‘seksbuddy’ to visit. The workshop will also ask how people’s personal finances have been impacted, in light of widespread job losses, the rising cost of living, and financial downturns across the world. Also of interest is the impact of the pandemic on health, ageing, and care. Most of those living alone are older people, yet discussion of this group has generally centred on aged care facilities, which were hard hit by COVID-19. The lives of solo-living older people, and those who experienced the deaths of their partners, have received less attention.

The workshop will thus take a broad approach to being ‘alone’ in a crisis, aiming to draw together sociologists and other social scientists whose work does not normally coalesce. These scholars might work in a range of areas, researching relationships, singledom, finances, work, health, and ageing. National and international practitioners and policymakers will also be invited. Following the workshop in November, academic participants will be invited to contribute to a journal special issue.

Please email paper proposals to lara.mckenzie@uwa.edu.au by 5pm AEST on Friday 7 October 2022, including the following information:

• Paper title
• Name, email, and affiliation (if any)
• Paper abstract (250 words max)
• Are you are a postgraduate or early career researcher? Yes/No

For any questions please email Lara McKenzie at lara.mckenzie@uwa.edu.au.



Sydney Urban Food Systems Innovations - What works and why?
February-June 2022 TBD
Organiser: Sarina Kilham

This will be an interdisciplinary interactive participant centred workshop that will include contributions from government and practitioners outside of academia. The workshop will map emerging knowledge of urban food systems innovations, impact pathways and strategies to guide urban food system innovations. As an interactive participant-centred workshop aimed at data co-creation with participant, each participant will have an opportunity to unpack their own knowledge on urban food systems innovations as well as discuss and brainstorm with other participants through structured group work activities. The workshop will generate knowledge on understanding ‘what works’ and ‘why’ in urban food systems innovations in an Australian context; strengthen cross-sectorial urban food networking and inform urban LGA food policy development. As this workshop is linked to a broader social research project that is a collaboration between local government and a university, it is anticipated that the workshop will feed into both practitioner and academic outcomes. Notably, the workshop data co-creation activities are anticipated to become the guide for further key stakeholders interviews, online crowd-sourced dialogue and focus groups. 






The late Gary Bouma


Awards, Prizes & Funding