| Contact Details |
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Ms Susan Foxman-Feldman |
| Biography |
Ms Susan Foxman-Feldman is an Honorary Fellow with the Centre for Health & Society.
She has undergraduate degrees in Film Theory, Anthropology and Sociology, and a MA in Psychosocial Politics. Susan holds a PhD from University of Sydney on the experiences of widowhood. An Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Health and Society, she was the inaugural director of the Alma Unit for Women and Ageing established in 1993. The Unit, Australia’s first multi-disciplinary research and teaching unit dedicated to promoting an understanding of the health and well-being of older women, was first established in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences through a private endowment to the University of Melbourne by Ms Fleur Spitzer. Susan is currently the Director of the Alma Unit for Research on Ageing: Gender and Health across the Life Span (AURA), which is located at the Faculty of Human Development, Victoria University. The Alma Unit for Women and Ageing is a sub-section of this unit.She is currently the convenor of the 2006 International Intergenerational conference to be held at Victoria University, Melbourne June 26-29 th 2006.
Susan is committed to working across disciplines and her current special research interests are health and well-being issues facing older women, and policy and teaching responses that will enhance the lives of both women and men as they age. She has had an eclectic background with twenty years of experience in direct service delivery, policy development and management of welfare, women’s health and information services. Susan has worked in the area of homelessness and family violence within the Victorian State Government and written numerous government and community reports on health and welfare issues. She continues to contribute to policy development as a member of several government and community-based committees concerned with the health and well-being of older people.
Susan has published numerous papers and presented her research with older women at national and international conferences. Her writing includes a first-time script writers’ grant from Film Victoria, and the co-editing of three books: a tertiary education text entitled Family Violence, Everybody’s Business, Somebody’s Life (1991), Something that Happens to other People: Stories of Women Growing Older (1996), and A Certain Age: Women Growing Older (1999). In 1997 Susan was awarded a Large ARC grant in collaboration with Deakin and Monash Universities to undertake a longitudinal study of older women’s self-representation through the use of narrative and video.
For the past six years Susan has been a partner in a sub-study of widowhood with the Australian Women’s Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, Newcastle University, and has published widely the results of this study. In addition, she has been working on a project funded by the Department of Human Services, Victoria and VicHealth that explores children’s attitudes to ageing and older people. This work has provided the basis for an additional study, funded by Human Services Victoria Positive Ageing and Office for Youth, to document intergenerational projects across Australia. Both of these studies have led to the development of the introduction and advancement of lifespan curriculum in Victorian primary schools and in university teacher education programs at both undergraduate and in-service training levels.