Associate Professor Jessica Gerrard

Associate Professor

Jessica Gerrard researches the changing formations, and lived experiences, of social inequalities in relation to education, activism, work and unemployment. She works across the disciplines of sociology, history and policy studies with an interest in critical methodologies and theories.

Across her work, Jessica is interested in theorising the changing formations of ‘the public’, including its multiple and exclusionary forms. In the context of the so-called populist moment, a current interest is the social and institutional production of knowledge, authority and expertise, and the relationship of this to social inequalities. She has written two monographs- Precarious Enterprise on the Margins: Work, Poverty and Homelessness in the City (2017, Palgrave, Macmillan) and Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change (2014, University of Manchester Press). She is currently Assistant Dean (Diversity & Inclusion) and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. She is also Associate Editor for Critical Studies in Education and Editor of the Local/Global Issues in Education Routledge book series.

Jessica holds two Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects. First, she is co-leading an investigation of the shifting practices of public schooling, school governance and parental citizenship in disadvantaged contexts (with Glenn Savage). Second, she is researching community activism and education policy reform across Australia in the 1970s and 1980s (with Helen Proctor and Sue Goodwin).

Previously, Jessica was a McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne (2012-2015)