Catherine Hastings

Research Fellow Dr Catherine Hastings’ interdisciplinary research concentrates on understanding issues of social justice and inequality alongside developing and evaluating policy and program responses for social change. Recent focus areas include legal needs assessment, the causes of homelessness for families and older women, and international student financial and housing precarity. Catherine’s current research, funded by a Macquarie University Research Fellowship, investigates how why and in what context types of legal needs develop for marginalised and disadvantaged populations in Australia. The philosophy of critical realism informs her research. Her work aims to extend how social science research and complexity-informed evaluation methodologies may operationalise critical realism to deliver more transformative findings.