ABOUT MICHELLE
Dr Michelle Peterie is an Australian Research Council Senior DECRA Fellow and University of Sydney Robinson Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney. Michelle is an Editor-in-Chief of The Australian Journal of Social Issues, an executive member of the Australian Social Policy Association Management Committee, and a co-convener of The Australian Sociological Association's Families and Relationships thematic group. She co-leads the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies' research themes on ‘Work, Education and Welfare’ and ‘Migration, Im/mobility and Belonging’. Michelle has previously held research fellowships at The University of Queensland and The University of Wollongong.
Michelle’s research investigates the impacts of social policies and practices on individual and collective wellbeing. Taking a person-centred approach - and in close collaboration with research participants and third-sector stakeholders - her work seeks to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, families and communities. Michelle is particularly interested in lived experiences of un(der)employment, poverty and precarity, and in the reverberating impacts of immigration enforcement. Michelle is currently leading a number of research projects focused on children's experiences of parental incarceration (ARC DE23), the reverberating impacts of immigration detention (ARC LP23), and the complexities of care and loss across a range of empirical contexts.
Michelle’s research has been published in a range of Australian and international journals and books. She has been the recipient of both the biennial award for the best article in the Journal of Sociology (2017-2018) and the Mayer Journal Prize for the best article in the Australian Journal of Political Science (2022). Her books include Infrastructures of Informal Care: Inequality, Exploitation, Emancipation (Peterie et al., 2026); Immigration Detention and Social Harm: The Collateral Impacts of Migrant Incarceration (Peterie, 2024); Visiting Immigration Detention: Care and Cruelty in Australia’s Asylum Seeker Prisons (Peterie, 2022); Compulsory Income Management in Australia and New Zealand: More Harm than Good (Marston et al., 2022); and Emotions in Late Modernity (Patulny et al., 2019). Michelle has been invited to give expert evidence to the Australian Senate, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and the Crown Solicitor, and her work has received international media attention.
The purpose of this website is to provide information about Michelle’s recent and ongoing program of research. If you are interested in any of the studies mentioned here, please don’t hesitate to contact Michelle for information and/or to request copies of specific publications.
