Roberts, Winsome
Position: Coordinator, Bachelor of Social Work (Honours)
Phone: +61 3 8344 9422
Email: winsome@unimelb.edu.au
A graduate of University of Western Australia, with an honours degree majoring in social anthropology and post-graduate qualifications in social policy and social administration, Winsome started her career as a free lance researcher. She authored major reports for national government evaluations and enquiries before being appointed to full-time academic positions first at the University of Western Australia and then at the University of Melbourne, where she taught community planning, organizational development and social policy.
Joining the Victorian Public Service in 1983, she worked in the policy development division of the former Department of Community Services and later in the intergovernmental relations unit, Department of Premier and Cabinet.
Completing her doctorate (on the distribution of social capital) at the Centre for Public Policy in 1998, she then joined the Department of Political Science as a Research Fellow. Specialising in Australian politics, civil society, citizenship and democracy - that complemented her extensive experience and involvement in local community politics - she co-authored Australians and Globalisation (CUP 2001) and Australian Citizenship (MUP 2004).
Winsome took up her current lecturing position in 2005 and specialises in teaching critical social policy. Her research agenda focuses on political economy of social relations and examines the impacts of a deregulated political economy on personal lives. She is the co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (OUP 2007).
Researcher profile
Winsome's Find an Expert profile further details her achievements, including:
Research unit membership
Winsome is the coordinator of the School's Inequality, Social Justice and Social Policy Research Unit.
About the Unit
Inequality is increasing in Australia, as it is elsewhere in neoliberal regimes, and it has serious adverse social impacts.
Social work, because of its professional commitment to social justice, seeks to better understand processes generating social inequality as well as to influence public policy in ways that will limit or reverse this mal-distribution of resources.
Aims
This Unit was created in the School of Social Work (now the School of Nursing and Social Work) in December 2006 to:
- Support research into the underlying causes and consequences of inequality
- Seek funding to support scholarship on inequality
- Foster and support post-graduate study of inequality on local, national and international levels
- Establish linkages with other scholars and research institutions whose research agenda focuses on, or includes, social inequality
- Promote research findings through public lectures, engagement with the media and scholarly publications.