Ben WadhamFlinders University · College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Ben Wadham
PhD Flinders University
Open Door: Understanding & Supporting Service Pers & their Families
Flinders Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing
About
93
Publications
15,976
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
302
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Ben is the Director of the Open Door: Understanding and Supporting Service Personnel and their Families research initiative in the College of Education, Psychology, and Social Work. Open Door is an Australasian research hub that brings together veterans, scholars, and practitioners together around key research, service provision, and policy initiatives. Ben is the co-Deputy Director of Orama Institute for Mental Mental Health and Wellbeing
Additional affiliations
January 2015 - June 2018
January 2013 - present
February 2003 - present
Education
January 2005 - January 2007
Publications
Publications (93)
Background:
Families play a critical role in supporting currently serving and transitioned veterans' wellbeing and help-seeking for mental health concerns; however, little is known about families' experiences.
Aims:
This study used Australian national survey linked-data (n = 1217) from families (Family Wellbeing Study-FWS) and veterans (Mental H...
This article aimed to explain the importance of Islamic educational psychology's role in child development. Psychological development in children varies. Some developments are excellent and appropriate, while others are not and have not been fulfilled. Psychological development in children that has been fulfilled includes emotional development and...
The objective of this phenomenological study was to describe families' experiences of supporting veterans and emergency service first responders (ESFRs) (known also as public safety personnel) to seek help for a mental health problem. In‐depth semi‐structured open‐ended interviews were undertaken with 25 family members of Australian veterans and ES...
In Australia, and throughout the world, it is evident that the mental health and wellbeing of young males aged 15–24, is not a priority. In Australia suicide is the leading cause of death in people aged 15–24 years and 75% are male (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Australian hospital statistics 2011–12, 2021). It is clear young males as...
This research investigates the importance of pedagogical-based multicultural education in social life, particularly in Islam. A multicultural study is not a new thing, but it has limited implementation. Based on the theory of H.A.R Tilaar about multicultural education, it has inherently existed since this Indonesian nation existed. The state philos...
Ben Wadham’s and Deborah Morris’s chapter Psychs, Suits and Mess Committees on Steroids: The Changing Terrain of Service Transition in Australia begins by asking the reader to consider what happens to one’s way of being in the world as they join the military. Contending that an analysis of how one transitions must be attendant to the whole military...
Loyalty between soldiers is idealized as an emotion that promotes cohesion and combat effectiveness. However, little empirical work has examined how military personnel understand, feel, and enact loyalty. We use a symbolic interactionalist informed frame to explore the lived experience of 24 retired Australian Defence Force members via in-depth sem...
Military scandals are disruptive episodes that can have long-lasting organizational consequences for military institutions. Recently, scholars who study military institutions have sought to understand this phenomenon and its significance. However, given their complexity and empirically opaque nature, military scandals are difficult to study, and a...
The news media is historically recognised for producing and reinforcing gendered norms and binaries. Correspondingly militaries are institutions where gender roles and expectations create contention. We conducted a content analysis of two Australian broadsheets; the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. We investigated how military women were r...
The objective of this study was to investigate how integrated content and language instruction, where English is used as the medium of instruction in teaching Mathematics and Science was viewed by the lecturers of the content subjects. The study also examined whether or not it had impacts on the lecturers classroom instructional practices. Cummins'...
This article examines the nature of sudden and sweeping organisational change when a public secondary school facing closure reframed the ideological components of schooling, finding
renewed hope and direction for the future. It also attempts to explain how organisational change can take place through university-led action research, activating schoo...
https://theconversation.com/hazing-and-sexual-violence-in-australian-universities-we-need-to-address-mens-cultures-92685
The professional doctorate is represented as meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century but is structured by a fundamental dialectic of the academic and the profession. Both of these ideals are under significant erasure and transformation and the professional doctorate tells a story of these changes. In functional terms the professional doc...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/11/the-fog-of-war-and-the-modern-soldier-violent-elitism-and-a-culture-of-secrecy
Violence in the military refers to hazing, bastardization, sexual assault and rape – violence by military personnel against other personnel. That violence has a long history and is entangled in military tradition, ritual and formal doctrine. Contemporary militaries face a key challenge posed by social change – organizational diversity. This chapter...
Free EPrint - http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/avetBHrFgDufnN576TZR/full
Western military institutions are reforming to enhance gender inclusion. This imperative is driven by the need to sustain a volunteer force in a society with rapidly changing values coupled with a recognition that sustainability and legitimacy requires diverse representatio...
The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has recently undergone the most comprehensive review of its organizational culture since federation. Western militaries across the USA, Canada and the UK are similarly engaged. Military misconduct, including rape, assault and the long traditions of hazing and bastardization, have been increasingly exposed, engagin...
This chapter reflects a doctoral candidate’s process of scientific thinking and acting, not merely a matter of completing the thesis, but as a pathway from scholarship and practice to researcher.
Militaries are institutions of violence. This chapter considers the dark side of military violence: violence within the military. While many criminological studies have attended to the violence and crime of, and within, environments of war, the study of the source of that violence, the military institution, has been neglected. This chapter draws up...
The inclusion of men and masculinities in gender and development policies and practices has emerged in the last decade as a critical component for achieving gender equality and women's empowerment. This article analyses the contemporary character and progress towards ‘men-streaming’ of gender and development, and argues that implicit in any action...
What are young Australians’ understandings of, and attitudes to, the military and military service? This article describes a pilot study of 320 young Australian university students’ attitudes to the military and military service during a time when Australia was engaged in the Afghanistan war. The main purpose of this study was to develop a survey i...
This is a reply to:Rech, Matthew. 2014. “Recruitment, counter-recruitment and critical military studies.” Global Discourse. 4 (2–3): 244–262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.909243.
The question of student engagement in schooling, or adherence to school values, is often conceived in terms of student transgression. Youth has, over time, become a problem to be solved - by parents, teachers and school administrators. This article outlines an engagement with lower socioeconomic status metropolitan schooling in South Australia, see...
More Jobs Where experts find jobs While many people are relieved Australia is concluding its operations in Afghanistan, the effects of our involvement have, in many ways, only just begun. Retired Major General John Cantwell, the author of the military trauma book Exit Wounds, and veterans groups argue
In April 2011 a group of young male Australian Defence Force Academy Cadets conspired to prey upon an unsuspecting female colleague. Their plan was to broadcast one of their mates having consensual sex with an unsuspecting female cadet colleague for their viewing pleasure and fratriarchal bonding. The incident generated a strong and heated public d...
Water is a principal medium of exchange within communities facing changing climate patterns and the ‘new dry’. For some parts of the globe water has been taken-for-granted, uncontested, yet for others highly variable, scarce and a measure of global and national inequalities. Australia as a large and diverse landmass is emblematic of those varied wa...
Roy Behrens, ed. Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook. Bobolink: Iowa, 2012, 376 pgs., $30.00
Camouflage is uncanny. Just as camouflage is designed to make the visible invisible, an examination of camouflage can reverse this process and lead to some quite unexpected revelations. In this case, such an examination reveals an unexpected history...
During the 1980s the question of colonial dispossession of Aboriginal Australians and the violent possession of White Australia came into stark relief. Aboriginal Reconciliation became the formal policy movement of the 1990s and represented not only the rift between Aboriginal and Settler Australians but also the divide between the conservative and...
Only one year ago the idea that green on blue attacks were systemic seemed preposterous, but today the idea is tenable. Insider attacks are clearly increasing. In the last year alone over fifty allied troops have lost their lives to supposed Afghani allies; only last Saturday two more US troops were killed. One in five, or 14 per cent, of combat de...
attacks against the allied troops by members of the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) and security services. Just this week, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan General John Allen, said he still doesn't know why NATO troops continue to die at the hands of the Afghan forces they mentor. He said it was something to do with asking Muslim agents to fig...
allegations of sexual and other abuse in defence to the public. It is, for the most part, an incisive and detailed account of military culture. A portfolio of accounts of abuse, systemic dysfunction, a culture of non-reporting, and a massive failure of duty of care. All bound in a cloak of secrecy. Band of brothers The young men responsible for the...
Defence Force Academy (ADFA) Skype Affair of 2011 drew nation-wide attention, and brought the culture of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) into serious question. Five male officer cadets' lecherous broadcast of one of their mate's sexual interactions with a female peer, without her knowledge, seriously disturbed civil mores. It raised the question...
Responding to staff concerns about anti-social behaviour among students (n ¼ 311,
50.5% boys, age range 13–16 years) at a low socio-economic Adelaide metropolitan
school, we investigated victimisation and bullying and associated patterns of thinking.
Two instruments were administered: the How I Think Questionnaire, which measures
self-serving cogni...
The Conversation spoke with military culture expert Ben Wadham about what motivated the Marines to desecrate the bodies and what effect the release of the images may have on the American effort to fight the Taliban insurgency. It is an artefact of military culture that soldiers at different times will engage in the desecration of the bodies of thos...
Guest edited and with an introduction by Janine Little, this collection of five scholarly articles deals with the Australian media's representation of women in coverage of some of the most controversial issues in contemporary society. The authors are from the disciplines of sociology, journalism and literary studies, with four from Deakin Universit...
The Australian Defence Force is consistently subject to media exposure of its cultural practices. Cases of abuse, violence, sexual discrimination and deviant practices are exposed several times a year. This paper considers an element of the media led public discourse on the ADF- the issue of culture. The enduring question that is asked in this publ...
The ADF has outlined a five-year transition plan. For supporters of the policy, the move is an historic one. Australia becomes one of only four nations globally, along with Canada, New Zealand and Denmark, that offers women the same employment opportunities as men within the Defence Forces. Women will now be able to serve in the artillery, as navy...
In this paper we review the colonisation of the Franklin Harbour district in South Australia from the 1850s, focusing on public education and social memory. In the late nineteenth century schooling was entirely in women’s hands. Women teachers, notably the McEwen sisters, were important contributors to the district educationally, socially and econo...
The provision of water supplies to Aboriginal people in South Australia, particularly to communities covered under the Commonwealth-State (South Australia) Bilateral Agreement 1 is considered world class in terms of the suitability of the technology to the remoteness of many of the communities and the harsh arid environment. This article explores t...
This paper explores the perceptions of drought by residents in outback South Australia and their associated responses to the drought. Behavioural Geography methodology is used with data drawn from interviews with pastoralists, business owners, and residents of small outback towns and Aboriginal communities. Although they were not resident in the re...
Water is an increasingly scarce resource and the decline in rainfall presupposes people and communities adapting to live in drier, and very different, social and environmental conditions. In rural and remote South Australia residents have always considered water a reflexive resource that requires them to consider their relationship to water and its...
Policy ideology in Aboriginal affairs is caught between left wing rights versus right wing responsibility arguments. Taking the radical centre position of mutual rights and responsibilities espoused by Pearson and applying it to the National Water Initiative, Eileen Willis, Meryl Pearce, Carmel McCarthy, Fiona Ryan and Ben Wadham demonstrate the wa...
This article reports on a study into the ideological beliefs of first year prospective teachers. Here ideologies are understood as expressions of specific 'world views' and certain collective interests. Data were drawn from tasks that attempted to get students to position themselves relative to and reflect upon questions and propositions related to...
In 2004, a ‘class photo’ of a group of Australian soldiers was published on the front page of Australian newspapers, agitating widespread public outrage. The photo showed a group of (white) soldiers, hooded in white laundry bags, standing over four Indigenous and dark-skinned soldiers. This photo prompted condemnation of the soldiers and the Austra...
The question of institutional bad behaviour, violence and abuse is apparent in contemporary Australia. In the past decade we have heard numerous stories of bastardisation and sexual harassment in the armed services filtering through the nation's media. This has culminated most recently in the torture of kittens by Australian soldiers in Townsville...
Two issues confront researchers concerned with the relationship between poverty and health. The first deals with the problem of an accurate measure of poverty. The second deals with revealing for policy makers the pathway between poverty and health status. This is an arena where research is still very much embryonic despite the strong evidence that...
In recent years the media in Australia has discovered men. Particularly, in the past five years or so, ‘men’s issues’ have become popular topics for television, newspapers and the ‘lifestyle magazine’. One of the key concerns of this new focus on men has been men’s health. Men’s health is presented in television specials, it is the stuff of tabloid...
The issue papers were developed as a resource to identify the main issues for men's health in South Australia. They are not research or policy papers, although in some cases they are supported by data and other information. These papers do not necessarily reflect the views of the South Australian Health Commission (SAHC) and they are not endorsed b...
This issues paper outlines the major considerations for looking at male suicide to provide a basis for making recommendations within the context of the South Australian Men's Health Policy to improve the health status of men.
Critical research into whiteness has articulated the fashion in which racial identity can become experienced and seen as 'normal' or 'just human'. The invisibility of whiteness is a marker of its naturalization and dominance. Similarly, studies of masculine identities as a site of cultural domination de-scribe the ability to represent the 'natural'...
This issue paper outlines the major health issues which affect homosexual men in South Australia. It is guided by the South Australian Men's Health Policy principles and Goals and Objectives.
Questions
Questions (3)
Is there work that looks at how students build relationships at home and then bring those relationships, or ways of doing relationships to schools, to teachers, classrooms and to other students. I am talking sociological research in the frame of Hall, Jefferson, Connell, Willis, Ogbu, Smyth - cultural studies. The research I am doing is around how students become marginalised at school, because of 'anti-social' (sic) practices. My interviews looked at relationships to authority at home and then around the issues they were having at school.
Phallocentric - a singular and totalised subjectivity
Civil military relations refers to the liberal democratic civilian control of the military. The separation of powers protects against the militarisation of politics or the politicisation of the military.
Projects
Projects (10)
Associate Professor Ben Wadham; Professor Sharon Lawn; Dr Margaret Hutchison; Associate Professor Udoy Saikia; Associate Professor Karl Hamner
This project aims to address veteran suicide by conducting an historical and cultural analysis of the ways government, the military and the community have understood, governed, and serviced veterans from 1914-present. This project will generate new knowledge, moving beyond orthodox medical and cultural assessments to explore wider historical, cultural and sociological relations of veteran suicide, including civil military relations, and the influence of the veteran sector and families and community. The project will develop an innovative survey that will form the foundation of a longitudinal social health and wellbeing dataset on veterans, and contribute to policy and service provision to reduce veteran suicide and improve their wellbeing.
$490,170.00
To understand the military contexts in which male veterans become exposed to suicidal ideation leading to attempted or completed suicide. The broader aim is t make connections between men's health and veteran health.