DrSharon Schneider

Dr Sharon du Plessis-Schneider is a social worker and academic with over twenty five years of experience spanning practice, teaching, and research. Her expertise spans rights-based and trauma informed social work in youth, migration, education and, currently, homelessness, housing and primary care systems. Her current research focuses on homelessness, housing and primary care service integration, including recent evaluation work in homelessness outreach and integrated primary care, examining implementation conditions that enable equitable access, continuity and dignity in care. She undertakes theory driven qualitative and mixed methods evaluation, including realist approaches to complex service systems. Honours supervision in 2024 and 2025 extends this rights-based systems focus to prison social work and disability workforce preparedness under Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Committed to advancing global perspectives in social work education, Sharon has led international collaborations, including partnerships with the Regional European University Network and Erasmus programs. Her contributions to curriculum development and student mobility initiatives have strengthened cross cultural learning and professional exchange in the discipline.

Sharon is a founding member of the Austrian Association for Social Work in Teaching and Research (OGSA), where she served on the board for eight years. During this time, she co organised and chaired research panels at annual conferences, fostering scholarly dialogue on social work, ethics, and human rights, and coordinated special interest work advancing ethical and rights-based approaches in social work education and practice.

Beyond academia, Sharon has demonstrated a sustained commitment to human rights advocacy. As Vice Chair of the Monitoring Commission on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Vorarlberg, Austria, she contributed to ensuring compliance with international human rights standards. Her leadership in social work practice is reflected in her founding and direction of the first school social work agency in Western Austria, which established frameworks for child and youth wellbeing, protection, and participation in collaboration with regional stakeholders.

Sharon’s work is informed by a commitment to human rights and social justice, and by the recognition that professional and personal histories determine how social problems are framed and addressed within specific institutional contexts. She makes this positionality explicit in her teaching, research and practice, using it to support critical, reflective learning environments and rights-based scholarship. She is developing an emerging peacebuilding research direction in social work and human rights.