Devorah Wainer

Devorah’s interdisciplinary research is within the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Substantively her research focuses on human rights, refugee and asylum seeking issues.

Drawing on her significant practical experience with asylum seekers incarcerated in Australian and not-Australia detention centres, Devorah balances scholarly academic rigour with creative non-fiction narrative and poetry in her writing.

In 2012 Devorah received the coveted Chancellor’s List award for outstanding calibre doctoral scholarship for Beyond the Wire: Levinas vis-à-vis Villawood is a Study of Emmanuel Levinas’ Philosophy as an Ethical Foundation for Asylum-Seeker Policy.

Bringing over two decades of practitioner experience to her research Devorah refuses to objectify the silenced and invisibilised subjects. Her striving for congruency with the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, resulted in the award-winning research methodology that she developed.

Devorah is an honorary associate in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Previously, teaching ethics and communications to the Masters of economics and finance at the University of New South Wales and Directorship of the undergraduate change management program at UNSW, she also holds affiliate status at Macquarie University.

Devorah regularly travels to teach at leading universities on her substantive topics; the thinking of ethics philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the theoretical underpinning and use of Midrash Methodology.