Project Team
Professor Kay Cook, Chief Investigator
Kay Cook is a Professor and the Associate Dean of Research in the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research explores how new and developing social policies such as welfare-to-work, child support and child care policies, transform relationships between individuals, families and the state. Her work seeks to make the personal impact of these policies explicit in order to provide tangible evidence to policy makers to affect more humanistic reform.
Professor Cook's research has contributed to numerous parliamentary inquiries and government processes. She is a member of the federal Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee that is legislatively required to provide advice on tackling disadvantage to government prior to each federal budget. She was an advisor on the development of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2010 General Social Survey, was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Studies from 2012 - 2018, a Co-Director of the International Network of Child Support Scholars, and is the current Secretary of The Australian Sociological Association.
Dr Rachael Burgin, Associate Investigator
Dr Rachael Burgin is a senior lecturer in criminal justice and criminology at Swinburne Law School and the CEO of Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy (RASARA). She was awarded her PhD in 2019 from Monash University for her thesis exploring the ways that affirmative sexual consent has been adopted into law and translated into legal practice in rape trials in Victoria. Her research interests include legal responses to rape and sexual assault, consent law reform, gendered violence, feminist jurisprudence and the prevention of violence against women. Her work is among the first to critique the shift towards "objective" standards of reasonableness in rape law.
Associate Professor Georgina Dimopoulos, Associate Investigator
Dr Georgina Dimopoulos is an Associate Professor of Law and a Research Associate of the Centre for Children and Young People at Southern Cross University. She is one of Australia’s leading socio-legal scholars on children’s rights and participation in family law. Dr Dimopoulos’ research aims to strengthen children’s meaningful, safe participation in decision-making processes. Her book, Decisional Privacy and the Rights of the Child (Routledge, 2022), presents a new model for enabling and listening to children. Dr Dimopoulos has successfully led research projects that implement ethical, innovative co-research methodologies with children and young people as lived experience experts, in collaboration with industry partners. Dr Dimopoulos was admitted to legal practice in Australia in 2010. She holds a PhD in Law, a Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications), from the University of Melbourne.
Dr Adrienne Byrt, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr Adrienne Byrt is a design sociologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research centres the voices of marginalised service recipients across health, public services, and social policy. Adrienne has worked across diverse projects in family violence, financial abuse, the socio-legal impacts of donor-linking, and traumatic birth experiences. Dr Byrt seeks to transform policy and service delivery through sociological analysis, systems mapping, and creative interdisciplinary approaches using methods from co-design and feminist sociology.