Dr Poppy de Souza (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher with a diverse portfolio career that leans across cultural, creative and critical research and practice. Poppy’s engaged scholarship is concerned with the ethics, aesthetics and politics of voice and listening—broadly defined—in conditions of inequality and injustice across a range of contexts with a focus on sites and practices of resistance, resilience, care and repair.  Her work is grounded in feminist, intersectional, and community-led approaches and social justice oriented critical praxis.

Poppy’s current research focuses on a range of projects and collaborations exploring political listening across thresholds of experience, often grounded in or working with lived experience expertise.  This includes:

• ~ "Holding Breath" a sound-based community project that explores creative possibilities for collective listening, care, and connection in the wake of pandemic grief (and beyond);
• ~ "ReStorying Connection with Forcibly Displaced Women", a series of creative, arts-based workshops exploring how cultural connections are realised, maintained, and transformed by women in contexts of forced migration and transition (developed with Dr Dr Lydia Gitau);
• ~ "Mapping Migratory Meals at the Ends of the World (MMMEOW!)", an arts-research collaboration that explores the intercultural, political, embodied and sensory dimensions of food, migration, and belonging in marginal and shifting geographies through shared meals, storytelling, and creative mapping (with Prof. Stephen Loo, A/Prof Marnie Badham (RMIT), and Dr Samid Suliman (Griffith);

Poppy is a co-Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project  Voice and Belonging: Pathways to inclusion for new migrant communities through media engagement (led by Griffith University, DP240103048) and currently Bridging Hope Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC).

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A significant gift from the Bridging Hope Charity Foundation (BHCF) has supported the first philanthropy funded Research Fellow position at the UNSW Big Anxiety Research Centre (BARC). This position will play a pivotal role in developing innovative tools and programs to help support those dealing with mental health issues while broadening the Centre’s reach into diverse communities across Australia and internationally. BARC will join BHCF’s International Art Therapy Alliance, leveraging on their extensive networks with cultural organisations within China, such as The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Bridging Hope Charity Foundation is committed to connecting mental health with the arts to make a culturally vibrant and healthy society.