For our second Gender Equity Community of Practice session in 2025, Karen Hayes from Charles Sturt University joined us to explore “Spatial Justice: Addressing the Geographical Determinants of Health”.

Karen is an experienced occupational therapist and academic, with over 20 years of practice dedicated to improving rural health and occupational therapy services both in Australia and internationally. Her work focuses on addressing the inequities between rural and urban healthcare access by partnering with rural communities through research, teaching, and advocacy. Karen brough her passion for building a strong and sustainable rural health workforce, along with her values of fairness, equality, and community empowerment to the group.

The session started off with a discussion around how rural and regional Australia is often framed as “too far, too sparse and too challenging” and asked participants to reflect on how being “too far away” impacts their community and work. Participants spoke to a lack of funding, resources and access to services, as well as increased travel and wait times.

This brought us to the concept of spatial justice which is about the fair and equitable distribution of opportunities, not necessarily resources, across and between spaces. Karen spoke to the idea that justice is space-based and that humans both respond to, and shape geography, often to meet preferences of the powerful. Spatial justice suggests rather than poor rural health outcomes being a result of the geography, geography has been shaped to result in poor health outcomes. By examining the forces that shape our geographies, we could potentially look at how we can reshape them to get the health outcomes that we want.

From here, we worked as a group to reflect on how space is “conceived”, “perceived” and “lived” in our region. We discussed how regional and rural places support cities through our resources that are mined or harvested, yet without reciprocal support from cities such as health, infrastructure, housing and tertiary education. We also explored the idea that regional/rural people are ‘resilient’. This perception of resilience can lead to assumptions that we can get by with less, while also making people feel better about giving us less.

This topic challenged the way we think about space and by the end of the session, participants gained a deeper understanding of how space is socially produced and that we do have the ability to change it.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, check out Karen’s article, Rural and remote health: The case for spatial justice.