President: Kim Humphery
Kim Humphery is Director of the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University. She has 30 years experience in academic teaching, research and research leadership and has studied and/or worked at a number of universities in Australia and the UK. She holds degrees from the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge in politics, social theory and history, and has a disciplinary affiliation to sociology. Over the past decade, Kim has held visiting research/professorial positions at the University of Manchester, King's College London and the University of Sussex.

Since the mid-1990s Kim has developed a national profile for her socio-cultural work in Indigenous health and cross-cultural research ethics. Internationally, however, she is best known for her work in the history, sociology and politics of consumption, and has published extensively in this field. Her latest research is on trans and gender diversity. Kim’s sole/co-authored books include: Shelf Life: Supermarkets & The Changing Cultures of Consumption (CUP, 1998 & 2011); Forgetting Compliance: Aboriginal Health & Medical Cultures (CDU, 2001); Excess: Anti-Consumerism in the West (Polity, 2010) and Art-based Social Enterprise, Young Creatives and the Forces of Marginalisation (Palgrave 2022).

Vice-President: Shaun Wilson
Shaun Wilson is currently Chair of the Sociology Discipline at Macquarie University.

Shaun's primary research investigates the distributional and ideological conflicts that are reshaping the politics of liberal welfare states.

His recent book Living Wages and the Welfare State with Policy/University of Bristol Press was published in 2021 here. The book takes a sociological perspective on minimum wages and living wage campaigns and shows how they challenge the architecture of the low-wage policy consensus in the liberal welfare states. Reviews of this book are here and here.

Shaun has worked with Prof Alan Morris of UTS, Prof Gaby Ramia of Sydney University, Dr Emma Mitchell of WSU (now Macquarie) and Dr Catherine Hastings (Macquarie) on a ARC Discovery Project on housing and work precarity of international students. Recent studies covers the impact of the COVID-19 recession on students; see, for example, here, here, and here. Shaun has also worked with Luke Ashton on new, more detailed profiles of housing and work precarity among international students.

Secretary: Kay Cook
Kay Cook is a Professor and Associate Dean Research in the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research centres the experiences of the subjects of social policies, to examine how the gendered and classed status quo is constructed and maintained by research, administrative and policy hierarchies and processes. She works with advocacy organisations to foreground the personal, practical and institutional barriers faced by women as they seek to combine work and care within patriarchal, neoliberal societies that individualise women’s experiences and render their experiences invisible to policymaking processes that foreground quantification and behavioural economic explanations. Professor Cook's work has focused most specifically on the unjust construction and treatment of single mothers in social policy and family law, particularly with respect to child support, welfare, family violence and financial abuse. Professor Cook has previously been Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Family Studies, Co-Director of the International Network of Child Support Scholars and an ARC Future Fellow.  

Treasurer: Adrienne Byrt
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. Her PhD research used creative methods to elucidate the problematic reproduction of gendered demands on mothers with infants in neonatal intensive care units. 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 theory.

Indigenous Portfolio Leader: Joann Schmider
Joann Schmider is a tropical rainforest Mamu woman who has lived in North West, north and south east Queensland, and Canberra, returning to FNQ traditional country in 2005. She is a small business manager providing governance and corporate support, strategic and operational planning, project management and stakeholder engagement services.

Joann has a Bachelor of Education, post grads in community development and Indigenous research, and Cert IVs in training, governance and leadership. She brings 30 years’ experience across social, cultural, economic and environment Indigenous related matters with community networks, organisations, government and academia.

Joann’s ongoing interests are culture and heritage, stronger public and industry recognition, and Indigenous opportunities in development. A particular interest relates to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’s leadership in cultural and natural resource management and legal entities.

Public Sociology: Sophie Hickey
As an applied sociologist and now independent scholar, Dr Sophie Hickey is keen to find ways for Australian sociology to be community-minded and accessible. Sophie has had a research career in community health, First Nations health and maternity care, racism and health service reform. She ran TASA's Applied sociology thematic group from 2020-2024, boosting engagement of sociologist from all sectors within TASA.
Sophie was the Public Sociology Portfolio Leader for the 2023-2024 term and she worked to launch TASA’s new Mentoring pilot program (Launched August 2024). Sophie also worked with previous portfolio holder A/Prof Roger Patulny to finalise the IPRESS study – an international survey of 700 sociologists on the status of public sociology today. They are working on implementing recommendations from that study such as peer support (hence mentoring program), increasing media engagement, national and international cooperation and advocacy for improved work conditions and job security for sociologists.

Postgraduate Portfolio Leader: Molly Saunders
As a PhD Candidate at the University of New South Wales, Molly's research examines gender inequality within the National Disability Insurance Scheme, using a capability-based understanding of human rights. Molly also works as a Research Associate at the Australian National University (ANU), supporting a co-designed project which explores young people with disabilities’ and young carers’ experiences of institutional listening.

With a professional background in legal and policy advocacy, Molly has made significant contributions to both academic, community and government initiatives since commencing her PhD. These include co-founding the ANU Disability Research Network, delivering the 2024 Alice Tay Lecture on Human Rights, co-lecturing Policy Advocacy (POGO8030) and recently joining Power to Persuade as a moderator. This year, Molly was also awarded funding to attend an Australian Political Studies Association workshop and a residential summer school hosted by the United Kingdom’s Centre for Care. Previously, Molly served as an Advisor to the ACT Corrective Services Disability Expert Reference Group and on the Board of Women with Disabilities ACT. As TASA’s Postgraduate Portfolio Leader, Molly welcomes the opportunity to use her organisational and community engagement skills to represent the interests of postgraduate members, and progress the association’s aims and values.
 

Equity and Inclusion: Cathy Martin
Dr Cathy Martin's research interests centre on race, migration, nationalism, social responsibility, and community engagement. Her PhD examined the use of metaphors in press discourses around immigration (1854-2018) and explored how race interacts with constructions of national belonging. Cathy is currently work at the McCusker Centre for Citizenship, coordinating and teaching their community-based, service-learning internship units as well as the associated units within the Minor in Active Citizenship. The focus of her work is educating students about social justice, structural disadvantage, and social need, with the aim of empowering them to make a positive difference within their communities and work towards a more equitable society.

Cathy is currently researching the intersections between social justice education, student teamwork, and social responsibility. She is also the lead for a participant co-designed and co-conducted project researching the drivers and benefits of environmental engagement for older citizen scientist volunteers. Inclusion and equity are at the core of both Cathy's research and teaching and are central to every aspect of her practice.