Maggie Kirkman
Maggie Kirkman has a PhD from La Trobe University and a BA (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Melbourne. She was an NHMRC Public Health Research Fellow at the Key Centre for Women’s Health in Society (at the University of Melbourne) where she is now a research fellow and lecturer. Her teaching is predominantly with postgraduate students but also includes an undergraduate subject, ‘Genes, health and society.’
Maggie is a member of the Australian Psychological Society and a registered psychologist in Victoria. She is accredited in Team Management Systems and Fundamental Interpersonal Relationship Orientation – Behaviour. Maggie recently completed a five-year term on the Human Ethics Advisory Group of the School of Population Health and is a Governor of ACCESS Australia’s Infertility Network. She contributed to the Victorian Law Reform Commission deliberations on legislation about assisted reproduction and adoption.
Maggie’s background includes experience as a kindergarten director and a teacher of hearing impaired pre-school children and of intellectually disabled children in Australia and England.
Her research has quantitative and qualitative components, drawing particularly on narrative theory and method. She enjoys interdisciplinary environments and is particularly interested in different ways of knowing the world and the contrasting epistemologies of traditional science and the phenomenology of experience. Maggie’s research frequently involves sensitive topics: psychosocial aspects of donor-assisted conception, unplanned pregnancy and abortion; children’s experience of homelessness. She also supervises post-graduate research.
Maggie’s most recent book, Sperm Wars: The rights and wrongs of reproduction (ABC Books 2005, edited with Heather Grace Jones), is about battles over reproductive territory, particularly meanings of fatherhood and the increasingly diverse ways of making families.
Maggie has worked with WHH in facilitating groups in transformational learning programs and in evaluating and providing feedback on written reflective essays. Her intelligence, wit and flair have proven very useful in dialogues about reflective practice with engineers and physical scientists who have hitherto adhered to the tenets of strict reductionism.