Franka Vaughan
Dr. Franka Vaughan’s research explores how histories of race, colonialism, and power continue to shape the possibilities available to people in the present, and what it means to build more equitable futures. Her work spans how racial power operates historically and today, and how people reproduce, contest, and transform it.
She is currently a VicHealth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, at the University of Melbourne, exploring co-designed, whole-of-system approaches to anti-racism. This research examines how institutions move beyond recognising racism as a social problem towards developing the capacity for transformative change. This work informs projects on racial literacy and anti-racism in higher education and community sport, focusing on how anti-racism is translated into organisational practices, cultures, relationships, and collective action.
Franka’s historical research emerges from her doctoral work on Liberia, Black settlement, and settler colonialism. She examines questions of freedom, sovereignty, belonging, and solidarity, exploring how Black political actors have pursued liberation, built institutions, and imagined alternative futures, while also grappling with the exclusions these projects produced. Building on this work, she is increasingly interested in how migrant and refugee communities understand their relationship to Indigenous sovereignty in settler-colonial societies, and the ethical and political responsibilities that emerge from these positions. Her recent monograph is Settler Colonialism in Liberia: Disavowal of the Marginalised and Contemporary Citizenship Debates in Post-War Liberia (Springer, 2026).
