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Thursday 31 May 2012

ABOUT THE AUTHOR



NICHOLE GEORGEOU [BCA, Dip. Ed., MA, PhD] is a Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian and Development Studies, Western Sydney University. Prior to 2016 she was a lecturer in International Development and Global Studies at Australian Catholic University in Sydney. During 2011-2014 she was a director of Palms Australia , an independent Australian Volunteer Sending Agency, and she is a member of the Interim Executive Committee of the Oceania chapter of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).

A graduate of the University of Wollongong, Nichole’s PhD thesis (2011) formed part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant between the University of Wollongong and Palms Australia. Prior to this, she completed a MA (Research) thesis on state-citizen relations in Japan and changing notions of volunteering. Nichole has lived and worked in Japan, and reads and speaks the Japanese language.

Her current research interests are in Security Sector Reform and its articulation with states and doctrines of Responsibility to Protect. Nichole is currently engaged in field work and research for a book, co-authored with University of Wollongong colleague Dr. Charles Hawksley, on Policing and the Responsibility to Protect in Oceania.

Before she came to academia, Nichole worked in a variety of jobs, including school teaching and arts management. She also spent a number of years in the field during the 1990s, variously working as an aid volunteer and aid organiser/manager in Japan and in Vietnam.

It has been said of Nichole’s scholarship that ‘it is her hands-on and frontline volunteer/aid experience that uniquely endows her work with perspective, nuance, depth and relevance’. In 2008, discussing the roots of Nichole’s scholarly work, Asian Currents (e-bulletin of the Asian Studies Association of Australia) explained:

Nichole’s interest in the relationship between government policy and models of volunteering was first piqued in Japan where she founded and ran a volunteer organisation which raised funds for women’s literacy and income generation projects in Northern Vietnam. Working alongside UNICEF Hanoi and the Vietnam Women’s Union, this experience raised many questions about ‘development’ both as a concept and industry, and in particular the role of volunteers in sustainable development projects. After experiencing first hand the shifts and changes in attitudes to volunteering as well as national policy after the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that hit the city of Kobe in Japan, the experience also inspired a curiosity about the way in which state-citizen relations impact on notions of volunteering.
                        

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