Associate Professor Maree Petersen

Associate Professor Maree Petersen is a social work academic in the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Social Work. Maree's program of research centres on older people experiencing disadvantage. Underpinning her research is the recognition of the rights of older people to participate in healthy ageing, and as such be housed well with access to community aged care services. Her work incorporates a number of themes but the central aim is to use research to improve the delivery of health and welfare services in the context of elder abuse, housing, homelessness with particular emphasis on the intersection of the policy areas of housing, health and income security necessary for ensuring wellbeing as people as they age. A key focus is understanding how economic abuse across the life course results in housing precarity for women in later life. The results from her research have implications for how we think about older people without access to their rights, and living in poverty and at risk of homelessness with restricted access to community aged care and support.

Maree has taken on a leadership role with the National Older Women's Housing and Homelessness Working Group advocating for policy change and more effective strategies to enable older women to access affordable, safe, secure and appropriate housing. Maree engages in evaluation of housing and homelessness programs within the community sector, and reviews of retirement village legislation.

Maree's teaching draws on her research and practice experience to teach undergraduate courses that explain and critique welfare structures in Australia, and foundational practice courses in health and ageing. Maree supervises higher degree students in the fields of elder abuse, loneliness amongst older migrants, and vulnerable people experience of aged care reforms. She has supervised in areas of housing and homelessness.