Rate My Professor Sharon Bessell

Sharon Bessell is Professor of Public Policy in the Policy and Governance Program at the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. She serves as Director of the Children’s Policy Centre and co-hosts Policy Forum Pod. She holds a BA with First Class Honours from the University of Tasmania and a PhD from Monash University. Internationally recognised for leadership in rights-based, child-centered research methodologies, Professor Bessell has published extensively on research with children. Her research specializations include social policy, social justice, and the human rights of children; gendered and generational dimensions of poverty using qualitative and innovative data to disrupt disadvantage, reveal structural barriers, and value local contexts; and childhoods over time and intergenerational relations. She teaches courses on social policy, poverty reduction, globalisation, global development, children’s human rights, and gender.

Professor Bessell has led major projects such as the More for Children framework for assessing multidimensional child poverty in Australia, funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation, involving rights-based research with children, families, and communities alongside policy analysis. In Indonesia, she leads Suara Anak—Children’s Voices, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant. Over 15 years, she developed the Individual Measure of Multidimensional Poverty (IMMP, formerly IDM), a unique gender-sensitive tool measuring poverty at the individual level, through an Australian Research Council Linkage project and the ANU IDM program (2016–2020), co-led with Associate Professor Janet Hunt and funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Her research spans Australia, Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines), the Pacific (Fiji), and Southern Africa, working with governments, NGOs, and international agencies. Key publications include Rethinking Child Poverty (2022, Journal of Human Development and Capabilities); Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity and Development (2002); The Individual Deprivation Measure: Measuring Poverty as if Gender and Inequality Matter (2015, Gender & Development); The Right to be Properly Researched: Research with Children in a Messy, Real World (2009, Children’s Geographies, 444 citations); and Participation in Decision-Making in Out-of-Home Care in Australia: What Do Young People Say? (2011, Children and Youth Services Review, 306 citations). Awards include ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Teaching Excellence Awards (2016, 2023), Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence (2019).