Dr Meg Lee

Graduated in 2025

Project Description

Guided by the principles of community based participatory research and photovoice methodology, Meg’s project used images, shared experiences, and conversation circles to explore ‘wellbeing’, or ‘health and happiness’. Based on her work with groups of young people aged 15-25 from English Additional Language migrant backgrounds on Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung (Ballarat) and Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagulk Country (the Wimmera) in western Victoria, Meg’s research explored young people’s everyday experiences and understandings of wellbeing and the things that supported it. The study identifies key relational practices, strategies, and resources that supported young people’s possibilities for wellbeing in and across place, with particular attention to the temporal, embodied, and existential nature of young people’s experiences of being, and being well.

Meg’s work offers unique insights on migrant youth experiences of wellbeing in rural places, by bringing together three areas of scholarship which have largely developed separately, namely: spatial approaches to home and wellbeing, phenomenologies of whiteness and racialized embodiment, and rural settlement.  Meg’s thesis bring scritical attention to the powerful role of whiteness and racialisation in shaping youth experiences of place, embodiment, and possibility. Her research also develops an understanding of being well in rural places as a mobile way of being and conceptualises geographically mobile practices of life building as central to successful rural settlement (rather than geographic stasis).

Further, Meg’s research offers unique perspectives on some of the ethical-methodological considerations of working as a young researcher, working in rural and regional communities, and participatory processes with young people. Meg’s research is interdisciplinary and draws from a range of literature and approaches across rural health, human geography, sociology, youth studies, education, anthropology, philosophy and the creative arts.

Supervisors

Professor Cathy Vaughan, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health
Dr Zubaida Mohamed Shaburdin, Department of Rural Health
Associate Professor Debra McDougall, School of Social and Political Sciences