Rate My Professor Michele Jarldorn

Dr Michele Jarldorn is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work and Social Care, College of Education, Behavioural and Social Sciences, at Adelaide University. She serves as Program Director for the Bachelor of Social Work Program and teaches courses including SOWK 4006 Applied Social Research (Honours), SOWK 4010 Social Work Honours Research Project 1, and RESE 5009 Qualitative Research Methods in Humanities and Social Sciences. Jarldorn completed her PhD at Flinders University in 2018 with the thesis titled Radically rethinking imprisonment: A Photovoice exploration of life in and after prison in South Australia, which was awarded the Flinders University Vice-Chancellor's Prize for Thesis Excellence. She works as a lecturer and researcher in Social Work with a special interest in supporting students who are first in their family to attend university and international students.

Her research focuses on the experiences of women leaving prison, the connections between gendered violence, mental health, and substance use, and the experiences of first-in-family women studying social sciences at university. Additional research interests include co-design, technology-based solutions for health and mental wellbeing of formerly incarcerated women, escape rooms in social work education, honours programs in social work education, eco-social work, prison abolition, and feminist action research in mental health. Jarldorn volunteers with Seeds of Affinity: Pathways for Women, supporting criminalised women preparing to leave or leaving prison. She is co-editor of Tutorial ideas for educators on the run: innovative and engaging teaching activities (2025, Springer, with C. Hudson) and Feminist action research in mental health: a practical guide (2025, Palgrave Macmillan, with N. Moulding and K. Deuter). Key publications include 'Resisting the use of LLMs in social work: Celebrating human imagination' (2026, with P. Rowe, Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work), 'Subversive tech and paper prototyping: using radical co-design with formerly incarcerated women to create "LindaBot"' (2025, with S. Emery et al., CoDesign), 'What do young women want? Using a qualitative survey to explore the potential for feminist-informed mental health peer support' (2024, with N. Moulding and K. Deuter, Qualitative Social Work), 'Overcoming fear of conflict in group work: reflections from practice and teaching' (2024, with M. Brown, Social Work with Groups), 'Radically rethinking social work in the criminal (in)justice system in Australia' (2020, Affilia), and 'Photovoice handbook for social workers: Method, practicalities and possibilities for social change'.