Journal of Applied Youth Studies - Meet the Editors-in-Chief: Natalie Hendry, Julia Cook, Benjamin Hanckel & Janina Suppers
Dr Natalie Hendry is a Senior Lecturer in Youth Wellbeing, at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne. Natalie is an interdisciplinary researcher, working across media studies, youth studies, sociology and education. Her work focuses on young people’s health, including critical mental health and social health, and how digital cultures shape young people’s lives, as well as how social media and digital technologies enable informal learning. Natalie has led applied education research projects, drawing on her experience in community, secondary and alternative education settings. She has a particular interest in research ethics and ethical approaches to ethnographic, creative and community-based research methodologies.
Julia Cook is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the sociology of youth, housing and money. Her most recent research addresses young adults’ pathways into home ownership, youth-focused charitable programs as infrastructures of care, and young adults’ use of ‘fintech’, with a focus on buy now pay later services and gambling apps. She is a founding member of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre, a chief investigator on the current phase of the long-running Life Patterns longitudinal research programme (2021–2025) and a 2022–2025 Australian Research Council DECRA fellow.
Dr Benjamin Hanckel is a sociologist at the Institute for Culture and Society and the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Benjamin’s research examines youth health and wellbeing, social inequalities in health, and social change. Most recently, his work has examined the design and use of digital technologies for wellbeing, as well as health intervention implementation, particularly in relation to the lived experiences of young people, including sexuality and gender diverse youth. His work also focuses on methodological development, including the use of innovative methods in research with young people. He has led research projects across Australia, East and South-East Asia, as well as the United Kingdom.
Dr Janina Suppers is a Lecturer for Social Sciences in Education at Te Kura Toi Tangata - School of Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research focuses on young people’s participation in new citizenship dimensions in rural communities and the potential of school-based citizenship education for developing young people’s citizenship. Janina has experience in conducting qualitative, mixed methods and participatory research and has previously worked as a citizenship education teacher in Germany and New Zealand.