ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a historical perspective to understanding women’s experiences of homelessness in Australia. It examines how experiences of poverty and engagement with the welfare system can exacerbate underlying vulnerabilities to mental health issues; and focuses on the wellbeing implications of medicalising poverty-related distress. The book considers how critical theoretical approaches to injustice can be usefully taken up to assist in the practice of torture prevention. It also examines how wider debates about social justice laid the foundations on which contemporary social work and social welfare stand. The book explores how partnership and close working with people with disabilities and the organisations that represent them can change research and heighten impact. It shows how chance and circumstance factors have implications not only for migrant young people but for notions of practical justice more generally.
