Grandparents become custodial carers of their grandchildren for a variety of reasons, including love, fear of losing the children to the system, efforts to protect children while managing relationships with the adult child (parent), policy impetus, and even for the convenience of child protection systems. As obvious candidates for care provision, grandparents report feeling pressured to take on care, and yet many grandcarers are poorly supported and feel taken for granted. Drawing on a mixed method study of grandparent carers and service providers located in Western Australia, we argue that there are important issues of inequity and injustice associated with being a grandcarer, in particular due to systemic and discursive failures to recognize the complexity and challenges of care provision. Misrecognition and epistemic injustice result in further marginalization and disempowerment, compounding barriers to accessing services and supports, which in turn impact upon child and family wellbeing. The aim of this article is to analyse the complex circumstances described by grandcarers and service providers in interview and survey data, highlighting issues of inequity and injustice and therefore areas for improving policy and services to support grandfamilies.

Working from a trauma informed lens is increasingly recognized as a vital component of social work practice, as is learning from and incorporating lived experience into one's approach to practice. Further, the critical and feminist informed interrogation of dominant ideas around professional power and expertise within social work practice is necessary in learning and teaching about trauma. This conceptual article describes an integrated approach to teaching fourth year Australian social work students in the area of violence, abuse, and trauma. The intentionally immersive learning and teaching framework presents and incorporates praxis as involving educator lived experience, theoretical knowledge, and practice experience. The approach aims to create transformative and embodied learning opportunities which destabilize dominant constructions of social work identities, use of professional power and different practice approaches. While honoring the valuable contributions of trauma informed practice, we seek to push students beyond this model, prompting critical feminist analysis of the socio-political complexity of trauma experiences. We describe our work, ambitions, challenges, and learnings as feminist educators, sharing these ideas in order to provoke dialogue on possibilities for pedagogical innovation, within the context of power, expertise, social work education, and lived experience.

Through a psychosocial lens, informed by relational psychoanalysis, this article discusses the design, delivery, and impact of The Big Anxiety’s 2022 festival in Warwick, Queensland—an arts-based program that engages with lived experiences of trauma, distress, and suicide, and in this case with the devastating impact of youth suicide, disproportionately affecting First Nations communities. It describes the festival’s methods of creative engagement, examining how these create conditions for the transformation of trauma and for experiences of growth.

This chapter proposes a justice-oriented approach to valuing lived experience expertise and co-creative practice. It attunes to the broader politics of voice within the evidence of experience. We position listening, witnessing, and repair as central to this approach, and respond to arts and mental health festival The Big Anxiety’s aim to amplify voices of people with lived experience and create spaces for dialogue with those who have been silenced, or where silence is culturally encouraged. We reflect on the process of making and valuing lived experience and collaborative inquiry in evaluation, asking what happens when quiet forms of community connection are prioritised. Poppy discusses Holding Breath (2023–2025), a sound-based community project using voice-note exchanges co-created with other women and non-binary people who live with the debilitating impacts of Long COVID. Bec discusses her video installation Big Grief, Big Horror (2022), about what it is like to experience and live beyond a family murder-suicide, inviting multiple intimate publics to witness her story. While evaluation frameworks can be instrumentalised for institutional ends, we offer an approach that prioritises the value (and values) of slow attention, mutual witnessing, and creative reparation in the wake of structural harm, stigma and grief.

The normalisation and consequent invisibility of women's care work is well-studied and interrogated critically. However, a subset of women (older women in particular), have been left out of this critical engagement, and rendered even more invisible in an arrangement that benefits the state, society and the community. Custodial grandmothers, as kin carers, take on the responsibility of care for their grandchildren for a range of reasons and varied lengths of time, with or without the involvement of the state. In this article, we reflect on the various explorations and constructions of grandmother carers in the grandparent carer literature and argue for more purposeful and consistent engagement with the gendered nature of custodial grandmothering that advocates for appropriate recognition of this care. We acknowledge our complicity in not adequately addressing the topic of gender in our previous research and reflect on the implications of this neglect on a vulnerable population group. We argue that the gendered normalisation of care as women's work is inadvertently reflected and reinforced in much of the literature on custodial grandparenting. The absence of an intersectional gendered analysis of grandmothers’ caregiving happens through, and as a result of, the ubiquitous taken-for-granted care work performed by women in general and a focus on the grandchild's well-being. We propose that without purposeful feminist engagement with this intersectional disadvantage, injustices experienced by this group will continue to grow and amplify.