Rate My Professor Christina Fernandes

Dr. Christina Fernandes serves as a Senior Lecturer in the discipline of Social Work within the Curtin School of Allied Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She earned her Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Bachelor of Social Work with First Class Honours (BSW Hons) from the University of Western Australia, followed by a PhD from Curtin University. In her role, Fernandes coordinates and teaches in the Bachelor of Social Work program, focusing on creating inclusive, supportive learning environments for students. Her innovative teaching practices are highlighted in Curtin University's Assessment 2030 initiative, where she has contributed to projects promoting authentic and equitable assessment strategies, such as progressive supervision, reflexive essays, industry pitches, and pecha kucha presentations.

Fernandes' research interests encompass social work practice, mental health policy, peer support work, family caregiving, domestic and family violence, and the integration of lived experience in service delivery. Her publications address stigma reduction in mental health, boundary practices, policy gaps for custodial grandparents, and health professionals' responses to violence. Key works include 'Peer Work and Stigma Reduction in Australian Mental Health Policy: Tackling Sanism or Reinforcing the Status Quo?' (2025), 'Invisible Care: An Urgent Call for Gendered Recognition of Grandmother Care' (2025), 'How Health Professionals Identify and Respond to Perpetrators of Domestic and Family Violence in a Hospital Setting: A Scoping Review' (2024), 'Identifying the service and social policy needs, gaps, barriers and enablers for grandparent carers' (2024), 'Inclusion as Assimilation, Integration, or Co-optation? A Post-Structural Analysis of Inclusion as Produced Through Mental Health Research on Peer Support' (2023), and ''You Just Treat me like a Human Being': Using Lived Experience to (Re)imagine Boundary Practices in mental health settings' (2023). Additional publications cover custodial grandparents' access to services (2021), Aboriginal people's lived experiences of dislocation, poor health, and homelessness (2019), and social network analysis in social work inquiry (2015). She received the 2018 Curtin Guild Award for Excellence in Research Supervision and supervises higher degree by research students.