Professor Belinda Carpenter from the Crime Justice Research Centre, QUT awarded ARC Discovery Grant

In the recent round of ARC Discovery grants announced in November 2014 by the Minister of Education, Dr Belinda Carpenter Director of the Crime and Justice Research Centre and Professor in the School of Justice, was awarded $157 597.00 to investigate the coronial determination of suicide as a category of death.  She was awarded this grant with Associate Professor Gordon Tait (Faculty of Education, QUT), Professor Diego De Leo (Director of AISRAP, Griffith University) and Professor Colin Tatz, (Adjunct, School of Political Science, ANU).   Building on her previous ARC Linkage grants on coronial decision making, awarded in 2004 and 2010, this recent grant investigates how statistical calculations of suicide are dependent upon their coronial determination and will be the first large-scale project to examine the coronial construction of the category of suicide.  The study will be premised upon the observation that after over 100 years of constant dissatisfaction with suicide data—concerns shared by Durkheim himself—the problem may lie with the notion of suicide itself.

In almost all previous research, ‘suicide’ is taken to be a self-evidently valid category of death, a vehicle for addressing other social and personal issues, not an object of study in its own right.  This research project does not share this presupposition. This central purpose of this project is to investigate to what extent, and in what ways, social understandings of suicide are dependent upon its Coronial determination.  In this instance, the notion of ‘Coronial determination’ is constituted by both how suicide is conceptualised within Coronial practice, and from there how a finding of suicide is actually adjudged.   The research is not only expected to result in more defensible national suicide data, it also aims to clarify the degree to which the recurrent ‘problem’ of suicide data may lie in the coronial construction of suicide itself. Expected benefits of the project include the clarification of the role of the coroners regarding suicide determination, and the more effective targeting of suicide prevention programs.