Episode 1: Leah Ruppanner and Russell Goulbourne
Associate Professor Leah Ruppanner has been warning for years of a mounting ‘care crisis’ in Australia. Now, she argues, we are at serious risk of wiping out 50 years of gender progress in the workplace. In this conversation, Leah speaks to Dean of Arts, Professor Russell Goulbourne about how attitudes towards free childcare are beginning to shift across the political spectrum, why Australia’s best hope for economic recovery is for care work to be acknowledged, supported and valued, and why governments must finally learn that caregiving not just a women’s issue but “part of our experience of being a human”.
About Associate Professor Leah Ruppanner
Leah Ruppanner is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of The Policy Lab at the University of Melbourne. She is an expert in family, gender, public policy, cross-national research and quantitative methods. Her book, Motherlands: How States Push Mothers out of Employment is forthcoming with Temple University Press in 2020. This book provides an innovative framework for understanding how U.S. states vary in their childcare policies, gender empowerment and maternal employment. Associate Professor Ruppanner's current research focuses on barriers to maternal employment, female representation in government and gender inequality in the home. Her research is published in Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociological Methods and Research, European Sociological Review and Social Science Research. She also has expansive media coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Guardian and external grant success including the ARC DECRA and a current ARC Discovery on sleep.
About Professor Russell Goulbourne
Professor Russell Goulbourne is Dean, Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and a noted French literature scholar. He was previously Professor of French Literature at King’s College London, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities from 2014 to 2018. Prior to this, he taught for more than a decade at the University of Leeds, after education at Keble College, Oxford. Professor Goulbourne has published and taught extensively on major figures in French intellectual culture of the 17th and 18th centuries including Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. His research interests include the history of the book and textual editing, and reception of classical antiquity in early modern France.
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