Board Members
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Jacques Boulet has studied, worked and lived in five continents, starting in his native Flemish Belgium - where he received his Social Work Undergraduate Degree in 1965. He worked for 3 years as a volunteer in a Community Development project in Congo and subsequently obtained a Post-Graduate Diploma in Community Development and Social Planning at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague (Netherlands). He taught in Social Work education programs in Germany throughout the seventies also being involved in several grassroots community projects and processes. From 1980 to 1985, he studied and worked at the University of Michigan (US), attaining a PhD (in Social Work and Sociology). He became Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor between 1985 and 1996 in two Australian universities (Melbourne University and RMIT), leaving academia in 1997 to start a local community learning centre, the Borderlands Cooperative, representing a mixture of community activism, learning and research/consultancy centre and ;incubation space for good ideas. With Borderlands, Jacques is involved in consulting, research and activist work and has worked in community health, local government policy development, community arts, volunteering support and a broad range of organizational development projects. He was involved in some way with the over 130 projects the cooperative completed since its inception till today. The accredited Graduate School, OASES, equally imagined and developed by Borderlands, operating from 2005-2016 and of which he was the Founding Head of School, offered a Master’s Degree in Sustainability and Social Change.
Marie Brennan has a background working in various sectors of education. She started as a Humanities teacher in Victorian Technical Schools, then worked in the Access Skills Project team in the Curriculum & Research branch of the Education Department, action researching with schools. She also worked with the parent and school council organisations and teacher unions promoting participatory local evaluation involving students as co-evaluators as part of a collaborative approach to School Improvement. She moved into the university sector in 1991, after studying for her PhD in Madison, Wisconsin (USA), taking up positions at Deakin, Central Queensland, Canberra, University of South Australia and finishing up at Victoria University (Melbourne), before she retired in early 2016. Since retiring, Marie has continued to write, research and contribute to community groups. She is particularly interested in becoming an ally with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and with other community groups around issues of sovereignty, environment, supporting young people, families and teachers in community-based research and activism. She lives in West Footscray, Boon Wurrung Country and pays her respects to Elders, past, present and emerging. .
Bob Pease currently lives on Wunundjeri land which is part of the Kulin nation. He is an is Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania and Honorary Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University in Victoria. Prior to retiring, he was Chair of Social Work at Deakin University and Professor of Social Work at the University of Tasmania. He has worked in social work education for over 40 years and has published in the areas of critical social work practice, critical studies of men and masculinities, profeminist practice with men, men’s violence against women, undoing privilege, patriarchy, and masculinism and disasters, among other topics. More recently, he has been writing on post-anthropocentric social work and posthumanism and the man question exploring the links between men’s violence against women and their involvement in anthropocentrism and environmental destruction. Throughout his time in the academy, he has
also been involved in profeminist politics with men. He co-founded Men Against Sexism in
Tasmania in the 1970s and Men Against Sexual Assault in Melbourne in the early 1990s and
has been actively engaged in campaigns against men’s violence against women. In 1994 he
co-designed a Patriarchy Awareness Workshop for Men to educate men about the problem of
patriarchy and its impact on the lives of women, non-binary people, children and men and has
continued to run these workshops encouraging men to explore their complicity in the
reproduction of patriarchy.