Dwayne Antojado is a Lecturer (Online Course Facilitator) in Sociology and Criminology at the University of South Australia. He completed his studies at Griffith University and the University of Melbourne.
Dwayne’s research unfold along two interconnected streams. First, he interrogates how lived experience with the criminal legal system, especially imprisonment, cultivates distinct yet often marginalised epistemic standpoints, giving shape to the emergent sub-field of 'lived experience criminology.' His contributions to lived experience scholarship engage questions on representation, co-optation, epistemic justice, and the inseperability between academic enquiry and activist praxis. Grounded in auto/ethnographic methods and informed by his own incarceration in Australia, his research also seeks to illuminate the affective, atmospheric, and sensorial textures of carceral and post-carceral spaces. He is co-editor, with Danica Darley (The University of Sheffield) and Matthew Maycock (Monash University), of 'Beyond Autoethnography: Lived Experience Criminology' (Routledge, 2025).
Second, Dwayne examines penal /custodial contexts, attending to the ways prisons are encountered by marginalised communities, like women, young people, and LGBTQIA+ communities. In partnership with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Australian Aid), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and local academic collaborators, he is presently evaluating the availability and efficacy of programme-based interventions for persons incarcerated for violent extremist offences. Concurrently, with support from the Australian National University's Philippines Institute, he is co-leading a companion study that traces and explicates how sentenced women in Philippine penal institutions endure and navigate the manifold 'pains of imprisonment.' In addition to his research in prisons, Dwayne also writes about 'justice-affected' spaces impacted by state violence, and the ways in which repair can not only be achieved through legal instruments and provisions but also through the affective and sensory dimensions of time and space.
At the University of South Australia, Dwayne teaches into the Bachelor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the Bachelor of Psychological Science and Sociology programmes. He has taught both undergraduate and postgraduate subjects across various universities in Australia.