Project Team

Associate Professor Katie Wright

Katie Wright is an Associate Professor in Sociology at La Trobe University. Katie’s research in the sociology and history of childhood, education and psychology encompasses studies of institutional child abuse inquiries, youth wellbeing, memory and nostalgia, educational reform and social change. She held an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA), which supported a comparative historical study of inquiries into child abuse and neglect in Australia, and holds an ARC Discovery Award with Johanna Sköld, 'Reclaiming Child Rights: Activism, Public Inquiries and Social Change', to develop an historical sociology of activism against institutional child abuse from the 1990s to the present. She has a particular interest in understanding the social, cultural and political effects of the spread and popularisation of psychological knowledges and therapeutic discourses, both in the past and in the present.

Professor Shurlee Swain

Shurlee Swain is a social historian whose work has informed several recent Australian inquiries into historic abuse. She is the historian chief investigator on the Find & Connect web resource and has also prepared commissioned reports for the current Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. She has published widely particularly at the intersection of welfare and history, including her recent co-edited collection with Professor Skӧld which focused specifically on historic abuse inquiries.

Professor Johanna Sköld

Johanna Sköld is an economic historian and childhood historian, and Professor of Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She is a former member of the Swedish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and Neglect in Institutions and Foster Homes operating (2006-2011). Sköld’s research interests include comparative studies of inquiries internationally, which have made her an expert on inquiries into historical child abuse. She is the founder and leader of the International Network on Studies of Inquiries into Child Abuse, Politics of Apology and Historical Representations of Children in Out-of home Care, assembling 80 scholars, care leavers, child welfare professionals from 15 countries. She holds an ARC Discovery Award with Katie Wright, 'Reclaiming Child Rights: Activism, Public Inquiries and Social Change', to develop an historical sociology of activism against institutional child abuse from the 1990s to the present.

Sari Braithwaite

Sari Braithwaite is a documentary filmmaker and Research Officer for The Age of Inquiry project. Her recent films are Paper Trails (2017) on the life of Anne Deveson, who was a journalist and a Commissioner on the 1970s Royal Commission on Human Relationships, [Censored] (2018), on censorship in the Australian film industry, and Because We Have Each Other (2022), on a working-class neurodiverse family.