Mark Marveggio

I am a PhD Student in the School of Psychology, and my primary supervisor is Associate Professor Diana Dorstyn. I am co-supervised by Professor Deborah Turnbull (School of Psychology) and Dr Abi Thirumanickam (School of Allied Health Science and Practice).

The topic of my PhD research is broadly centred on Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), with a focus on service providers and service provision. This research will also investigate how the NDIS utilises an "insurance-based" approach in practice, and how that translates the development of participant capacity for undertaking activities, engaging in social and community settings, and participating economically. I am also interested in how the NDIS has changed the disability sector and landscape, such as how services are provided to support the development of capacity, how disability is researched in Australia (and potentially globally), and how mainstream services, local communities and governments, and society generally are shifting towards becoming more accessible for and more inclusive of people with disabilities, and begin recognising people, generally, as differently abled rather than disabled. The overarching aim of my research is to investigate and assess how the funding of supports corresponds to the implementation of best practice interventions that are in line with a participant's goals and in service to the development of their independence and capacity, whilst also ensuring that the NDIS remains sustainable for the long term.

In 2020, I undertook an Honours Degree in Psychological Science, where I was supervised by Dr. Peta Callaghan and Professor Martha Augoustinos. My Honours thesis explored the affective practices that reinforced and underlay the blackpill worldview of an online incel (involuntary celibate) community. Using Social Identity Theory to guide a Discourse Analysis approach, I investigated how emotion and affective practices were deployed in incel discussions, and how they were used to construct a negative ingroup social identity (as opposed to a positive social identity, as is typical of ingroup social identities), and how such practices and emotive content enabled members to maintain their identification with that negative social identity.