 And thank you so much to everyone who's come along today. I see lots of familiar faces, good friends, good colleagues. Thank you so much for coming. And I did particularly want to thank my pretty amazing children, Madeline and Liam, who have come along today. Thank you for coming. Thank you for always being there. And thank you for putting up with the research that I'm about to talk about. Madeline and Liam have grown up with research all around them. So as many people in the room, clearly my academic colleagues would know, the process of applying for a promotion can be quite a gruelling one. And it can lead to questioning one's entire reason for being and certainly questioning one's self-worth. We start, or at least I started, comparing my H-index with the H-index of colleagues, wishing my H-index was bigger, gazing longingly at the H-index of others. And this all became quite soul-destroying. But the promotion process also, and I think more constructively, made me reflect on why it is that I do what I do, why I think research matters. And I think many of us have moments when we ask ourselves, why does research matter? So I think that's true of the researchers in the room. And it's probably more so true of those who don't do research. Why bother? Why do we do this? And for me, the answer is that I genuinely believe that research has the potential to make a difference. Even a small difference to the world that we live in. It has, I think, the potential to contribute even in a small way and as part of a far larger effort to making the world a better place. But what is a positive difference? What might make the world a better place and how does research fit in for that? And for me, it's really about social justice, about advancing the human rights of those whose rights are systematically diminished or denied. And so, once again, I'm really grateful to have the opportunity today to share with you some of my experiences that lead me to believe that research can make a difference. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about several projects that I've been involved with over the past 20 years of doing research. But I wanted to begin at the beginning and go back to think a little bit about the research that I did as part of my PhD. And my PhD research, as some people in the room, like Terry Halt, I remember a long time ago, was on the Politics of Child Labour in Indonesia. And I came to this research on child labour in Indonesia because of my concern about social justice of the rights of working children. And very early on in my PhD, and I'm dating myself now by showing you the date, 1994, when I came across an article in the American Prospect that was very powerful to me and was a powerful condemnation of the Indonesian government's complicity in the exploitation of children. This article in American Prospect seemed reliable. It was a reliable publication. And it was a well-regarded publication. It was also an article that came in the context of the Indonesian government at the time violating a range of workers' rights and quelling protests, particularly protest by workers. And often that quelling of protest was very violent. So I felt a sense of outrage as I read this article. And my research was fuelled by moral indignation. In part the moral indignation I read, I felt as I read this article. And I perhaps went into this more like a journalist or an activist than a researcher. And I thought that I would be able to further expose the obvious human rights abuses that were taking place within an authoritarian regime. Let me just very quickly share with you the article by Richard Rothstein at the time. So we talked about an Indonesian government law from 1949 that had prevented children from working. But it then went on to say that in the 1990s over two million or almost three million children were bonded to factories, mortgaged by their parents, by employers. But the American government was trying to do something to end this shocking exploitation through trade sanctions and was putting pressure on the Indonesian government. So powerful and shocking stuff. And off I went to Indonesia. The regulation in question that was condemned by the Rothstein article as allowing children to work was a ministerial relation from the Department of Labor from 1987. And it aimed to allow children to work but to provide protection for children who were required to work. It put a limit on the hours the children under the age of 14 could work and it required the consent of a parent or guardian. It prohibited children from working in particularly hazardous occupations, prohibited them from working at night. And it required the children to be paid minimum wage. So after reading the regulation I began to wonder was the situation in Indonesia as black and white as it seemed. Certainly this piece of regulation actually seemed quite thoughtful rather than condoning the exploitation of children. It was true that the regulation sat uneasily with international labour organisation conventions but not entirely so. And it could well be argued that it was a more realistic approach to protecting children and perhaps even protecting their rights than simply banning child labour outright. And so having simply read the legislation I started to become a little confused and uncertain and started to wonder what was behind some of the global stop child labour campaigns. My next step in the field work was to do some interviews with a range of government officials from Indonesia including people from the Ministry of Manpower. And they presented a very different perspective from the one that was in the American Prospect article. It was a perspective that emphasised Indonesia's sovereign right to introduce laws that reflected the context. And what began to emerge was the likelihood that both the government of Indonesia and more particularly global actors were using the issue of child labour to progress a range of issues that had little to do with the well-being of working children at least directly. The Indonesian government was focusing on deflecting any criticism of its human rights or labour rights record and defending a position of non-interference in domestic affairs. A range of global actors including some human rights organisations and activists were using the moral outrage created by the exploitation of children to put broader issues onto the agenda and those issues particularly related to the inclusion of a social clause that would protect workers' rights and labour standards in the emerging international trade regime. So remember this was the mid-1990s and it was at the time that the WTO was being established. So these issues around child labour were highly politicised. Now I did and still believe that a social clause in labour agreement in trade agreements I should say is an important part of protecting children's rights and protecting workers' rights but the way these debates were playing out had very little to do with children's rights had very little to do with the well-being of children and a particularly powerful interview that I conducted with one official from the Ministry of Regulation of Ministry of Manpower in Indonesia about the regulation gave me some insights into where that regulation had come from. The Ministry and I should say the Ministry of Manpower was not well regarded in Indonesia. It was a rather problematic ministry. It did little to protect workers or promote labour standards. But they had done some work, led by the person that I interviewed where they had done some research in central Java with working children or with their families and with the employers and this official explained how she was shocked to find how many children were working. She explained that some children started working as young as five years and that they worked with no protection and so she described how she and others had drafted the Ministry of Regulation to try to give them some protection and had also developed a non-formal education program so that working children could go to school. This is very different from the perspective that was being put forward in the American Prospect article and by others who were campaigning against child labour. Now I think that this particular person's faith that regulation would actually protect children in practice was probably unfounded. There was an enormous gap then, probably now between regulation and implementation but it was very clear that this regulation wasn't driven by any desire to exploit children. It was driven by a heartfelt desire on the part of some officials to protect them. So what became quite clear was that I felt as though I was stumbling into a moral shadow lands clutching onto my own set of moral values which were becoming increasingly tenuous and uncertain. I was finding it impossible to pin down what the truth was and what I wanted this research to do was reveal the truth of the situation and the good guys and the bad guys were not as clearly identifiable as I had imagined they would be so it all became rather messy. What became apparent at the same time and this was very early on in my field work was a powerful realisation that while I was talking to key stakeholders government officials, people from NGOs officials from international agencies there were a group of key stakeholders that I hadn't planned to talk with at all and they were working children. But they were everywhere in Jakarta in those days where I was doing my research you could see working children everywhere on the streets you can still see them in Indonesia and in many other countries. And so I decided that I should begin to consult with this other group of key stakeholders at the time my methodological approach was what we might say underdeveloped and I don't think we get away with this today in terms of the ethics requirements I started hanging out on street corners and talking to children and children told me some very interesting things about the context that they lived in the struggles that they had and that their parents had every day for survival for livelihood and they told me about their lives and as they did so it became very clear that much policy international, national and local failed children and those policy debates that raged in Indonesia and globally were far removed from the reality of children's lives. So just very briefly to share with you some of the things that children told me I began working with an NGO in Tangan with young women who worked in local factories and some of these young women worked in insecticide factories, they talked a lot about their health implications of their work they felt dizzy, they talked about low wages they talked about exploitation there is nothing romantic about their work but they also told me about how much they had disliked school the awful experiences that they often had in school that they felt that they didn't learn very much about their pride in being able to support their families and they spoke of the income they earned giving them some control over their lives including being able to delay marriage and having greater say over who they did marry so maybe this work wasn't quite so bad I talked to a group of young boys all of whom worked on the streets none of whom had family support and for a range of reasons could not go back to their families but the problem wasn't work work was a positive in their lives and work took various forms in the informal sector most of it legal, not all of it but they also spoke about the violence that they encountered on a daily basis from security forces and this was their major problem and the fact that their work was illegal made them more vulnerable to violence on the streets and more vulnerable to arrest or to be moved on I met with a woman who worked informally in local markets who worked long hours in the markets in work that was really back-breaking sitting in a marketplace and cutting vegetables for long hours is hard work and their children worked alongside them this little girl learned to trim vegetables from very, very young age but for her, child labour legislation and the kinds of debates that were going on at the time had little to do with her life nor would legislation around child labour help her currently or in her future there were a whole range of structural reasons relating to poverty that would make a difference to her life in the presence in the future but the debates about child labour were not amongst those factors that would make a difference I met with children who went to school but only because their older brothers and sisters worked at least some of the time and were able to contribute to the fees and these children and their parents talked about the fact that the local government school had increased fees to a point that they weren't able to access the school and having been in the community for a little while it became clear that the fees were raised in order to keep the children from the kampung out and the children went to a private school that also cost money but was of much lower quality and children who were in school and wanted to be there but talked about the bottom and the low quality of education about teachers who were poorly trained and struggled to do their best without resources and without support and so as debates raged about the worst forms of child labour I began to wonder why if we think about the world from a children's perspective no one was talking about the worst forms of education and how we think about good quality education if that's where we force children to spend much of their lives so I started to wonder about my search for truth and the slogan that rang in my ears about speaking truth to power something that I wanted to do as a researcher but whose truth would I speak who held power who decides what truth is conveyed and communicated so through the process of my PhD I discovered something that probably the room already knows but perhaps I was a slow learner the truth is actually complex the truth is rarely singular and where you stand in the world what your experiences are determine what the truth is to you and the truth is not always palatable I found it very uncomfortable to find myself in a position where I felt as though I was justifying at times child labour or at least arguing the children may have the right to work under some circumstances it was unpalatable but it was the closest thing to the truth that I found and some things are simply not true and the American Prospect article that had so driven me was actually not true and so that perhaps is particularly relevant today as we think about false news and we question what truth is and it was also clear to me the power plays out everywhere in very unexpected ways and those who have power tend to yield it whether it's conscious or not we all carry with us our ideologies our moral values our sense of what we want the world to be and if we're in a position to try to progress that agenda most of us do and I found myself at times doing that as a researcher and one of the things that I tried consciously to do then and ever since was to check myself and to ask is this my agenda that I'm communicating or is this what I'm finding out from the people that have so generously agreed to participate in my research and tell me their stories so who decides research I think may not be about determining truth it may not even be about providing evidence although that's very fashionable at the moment research may be about providing greater understanding and contributing to the body of evidence that we build and I would argue that research should not be about exercising power as researchers we have an obligation to really question the power we hold and how we use it but research can do some fairly important things build our knowledge and understanding reveal different truths and the reasons behind them and help us to make sense of complexity and the messiness of the real world and it can help us to identify how power plays out and to whose advantage and it can also help to influence power and to influence truth or truths and so by the end of my PhD research I was acutely conscious that I had probably failed to genuinely represent the richness that children had told me about their lives but I'm forever grateful to them for what they taught me during that process and I want to talk now just a little bit about some of the projects that I moved on to after my PhD research and I wanted to share with you a little bit about an Australian Research Council linkage project that I was involved in from about 2010 and for four or five years so it finished a couple of years ago this was a research project that I worked on with Professor Jan Mason a wonderful researcher from the University of Western Sydney a fantastic group of researchers Tahira, Jabeen Nwaneo and Hannah McGinnis who were all here at Crawford at the time who have now all got their PhDs and moved on and we partnered with the Benevolent Society and NAPCAN and we wanted to know in this research in the context of increasing Australian Government policy to strengthen communities for the benefit of children we wanted to know how those policies could be genuinely child responsive and child inclusive and so we did participatory research with 108 children across six communities in Eastern Australia and this time I thought much more carefully about the methodology I didn't hang out on street corners anymore not only because I may well have been arrested but because by then I'd learned much more about how to engage meaningly with children through research so let me just share with you a little bit about what the children said and why I think this matters one of the debates that the advisory committee for this project engaged in very early on was whether children would understand the concept of community there was a view that children may not understand what this complex thing called community meant and we were working with children between the age of 7 and 12 Jan and I argued although we questioned ourselves the children would be able to understand and to define community themselves and ask them what community was and finally we had agreement that that's how we would proceed and the definition that we came up with based on what children told us was the community is a social space within which people are personally connected and known to one another it's a social space where people provide friendship and support one another where there's a common goal respect and kindness are important to community and in times of crisis difficulty communities may need to be helped by what children referred to as helping professions police and ambulance doctors and nurses and that a community can be diverse so this was our adult definition of community based on what children told us or to put it more simply and more succinctly as one young boy said communities are sociable things so by the end of this research we had an incredible amount of data and we were struggling to put it together and then one girl in one of our sites said one day you know a community is a bit like a puzzle you need to have all the bits in place to make it work and this was our Eureka moment so we took her idea of the puzzle and we took all of the themes that had emerged from the research and we put together what we called the community jigsaw there are four dimensions to the community jigsaw the importance of relationships and the parts of relationships that are important to children physical places in which physical places are important to children and why the importance of safety and one of the really striking things in this research was the way in which children from all communities talked about their concerns about public drunken behaviour and that was regardless of the socioeconomic status of the community and the final dimension of the jigsaw was around public services and both private and public financial security so without going into great detail of this we developed the community jigsaw which had quite a resonance with policymakers particularly at the local level but what you might have noticed if you look at the community jigsaw is that it doesn't refer to school and this caused some angst and concern when we presented it particularly to people from departments of education and school was important to children but there was some ambiguity as to whether school was part of the community or not children would sometimes say well not really because our teachers go home at night they go to their communities but at other times children would talk about the importance of teachers to their communities they would have very complex and sometimes conflicting views on the place of school in their lives not unlike the way adults think about work is work part of our community well maybe and so when children talked about school what they essentially told us was that when all parts of that jigsaw were in place good relationships, friends, caring teachers people who listened to them when they felt safe when there was no bullying, when teachers were not yelling or threatening when the physical space of the playground was clean and the toilets were clean anyone remember the dirty toilets at school? still a problem and when there were resources when all of these things were in place school was a good experience and a positive part of children's communities when these things were not in place and in the communities in the lower socio-economic areas these things were often not in place then school wasn't positive we also heard from children in this research a lot about the way in which their lives have become focused on school despite the fact that they themselves weren't convinced that school was a part of their community and children talked about the way in which homework prevented them from engaging in their communities when we first presented this research one of the responses from some of the adults the generally policy makers, people from community organisations that we presented to questioned whether we could really trust children to have a view on homework because obviously they wouldn't like it but what children said was actually quite thoughtful so they talked about the fact that homework and these are primary school aged children that homework often prevented them from engaging more in their communities that they felt tired by their homework and it limited what they could do what became very clear was the time pressures on children and the extent to which their lives were institutionalised and structured you can see on the screen the schedule of one primary school girl it's a schedule that makes me tired just looking at it seven days a week from 7am to 6pm and sometimes beyond her life was scheduled she said on weekends I like to play with my mummy, daddy and my little brother but I only have Sundays and then I'm just so tired maybe when I'm a grown-up I'll have a bit more time to rest and play she was eight so some real questions emerging from this research around what scholarisation and structuring is doing to children's lives and I'm going to just skip on because I want to get to a couple of other pieces of research to talk about the other thing that became clear from this research was that while adult filmmakers were talking about school as a central part of children's community he said perhaps playgrounds and other child-focused things one of the policy issues that really mattered for children was around the labour market but no one was talking about the impact of labour market policy on children one of the most important things for children was time with their parents it was the resource that children valued most across all communities they described as being in most limited supply children talked about their parents particularly their fathers particularly in the working class communities being very tired when they got home and not wanting to play with them they talked about their mums having to juggle work and housework and not having time as one girl said why does my daddy's boss think his time with my daddy is more important than my time with my daddy and so if we really want to develop policies for children we need to think much more about children's experiences and to give priorities to children's issues and concerns and they're not always the issues that we associate with children labour market policy being one of them and I also wanted to just make the point that the experience for participants of being involved in research can also be powerful can also ideally create spaces where they can be more included in their societies the research on communities at the end of the research on communities one nine year old boy said these have been the best days of my life meaning the days that we've been doing the research I don't want it to end this wasn't because we were such fabulous researchers although we kind of like to think that was the case it was because we listened in a space where he could share his views and he had a lot to say on important issues but he also talked about the fact that no one ever listened and so there is scope for research to be to use that dreaded E word empowering in and of itself if we really think about it but empowering perhaps in quite limited ways at the end of the research Vincent went back to a world that didn't listen to him so research can be a positive experience itself and it can validate children's experiences and priorities children's views to the world and it can create a space where children are listened to and this was important for children and up here I've got a poster made by Giancarlo which says give kids a voice and I promised him that whenever I've referred to this research publicly I would share this poster and so I do please take the message away very briefly let me share with you some research again with young people slightly older children this time 13 to 18 in Fiji on what makes children quality education this was work with Save the Children Fiji with two wonderful researchers from Fiji, Iris Lo McKenzie and Lynette Patourly and what we did in this research was try to make a genuine action research the children who were involved the young people who were involved in the research decided on the topic how to make education a better experience and we had a whole range of methods they got very messy at times where they brainstormed what was good about education what they wanted to change and improve and they then presented their ideas a lot of the work that they had done had been in small groups they then presented their ideas to the other groups of young people involved and they decided that they wanted to go further they wanted to take these ideas out of the research context and asked us as facilitators to make that happen they developed what they referred to as their manifesto we were a little worried about the language it sounded rather revolutionary but they were absolutely insistent that it was a manifesto they produced their manifesto and they asked us if we would organise for some senior officials from key departments that made decisions that related to their manifesto to come and talk to them and we did and the officials came it was a mixed experience but the officials came and talked with the children and the young people got quite a lot of media coverage for the things that they were saying including about request that corporal punishment ended in all FGN schools and so through this research the young people were able to engage very proactively in policy debates about the way education should be and something rather remarkable happened at the end of this research that demonstrated to me that research can be about experience as well as findings and outcomes the young people came from all over FGN so those who came from afar came with their parents or guardians sometimes teachers we wanted to create a safe space for children to talk so we had to do something with the adults because having adults in the room often stops children from talking Madeline Lee will attest to that and so we asked the parents and the teachers if they would like to sit in groups themselves and to talk about their own childhoods to talk about what they wanted the childhoods of their children or the children in their care to be so they sat around, they chatted, they had coffee but as things over the days were there for three days unfolded they began to talk much more emotionally about their own childhoods and what they wanted and they then asked if they could do a presentation to the children or to the young people so at the end of the three days of the research workshop the parents and teachers produced these posters that they had made for the young people that captured their hopes and their dreams for the young people in their lives and where they talked directly to the young people about their love their care for them and how they wanted them to have good lives and good futures it was incredibly powerful the researchers were all in tears but I often find myself in tears doing research and the children, the young people really appreciated this engagement this remarkable side effect that came out of the experience of research and very finally I want to just talk a little bit about a large project that I'm involved with at the moment, the individual deprivation measure the IDM is a gender sensitive measure of multi-dimensional poverty it uses surveys to create large scale databases again surveys this is not what I'm normally involved in this kind of quantitative research with where we survey lots of people but let me tell you a little bit about the origins of the IDM and how I got involved and why I think this is so important and why this represents an example of research that can make a difference so the origins of the individual deprivation measure are in a linkage project led by the ANU and it's now part of a program that is generously funded by DFAT and it's generously funded and supported by DFAT not only in terms of the financial contribution but in terms of the incredible support and the strategic partnership that we have with DFAT we're doing this at the ANU in partnership with the International Women's Development Agency the IDM is sensitive to gender it measures poverty at an individual level it's multi-dimensional it has 15 dimensions it's able to illuminate the compounding effects of multiple deprivations it moves beyond binary poor, not poor divides to reveal the nuance of how policy plays out in people's lives and because it requires us to collect our own data it's not limited by existing data the IDM provides a score that can be compared across countries or regions as I said it has 15 dimensions and a range of indicators that sit below those dimensions are associated with questions that we ask survey respondents but what I think is remarkable about the IDM and what makes it so important in groundbreaking is that it is based not on the data sets that we already have not on what experts think we need to measure but on participatory research with just over 1100 people who have experience of living in poverty men and women across 18 communities in six countries and we began that work back in 2009 and it was from that participatory work that we built the individual deprivation measure and in the work that we've done since we've aimed to stay true to the concepts that people shared with us to the things that people said needed to be measured in order to genuinely understand poverty and to respond to it and I think this really matters that matters because the IDM potentially gives us a means of bridging a gap between what are often externally imposed measures of poverty that may have a little meaning for the poor but are driven by expert view and the very localized, highly nuanced assessments of poverty that take place and tell us a great deal about one context but can't be easily generalized by the IDM but as I said what I think is most important and most powerful about it is that it is grounded in the experiences and priorities of those who have experience of living in poverty and as a consequence it measures things that are just slightly different not just school enrollment or attendance but whether people have basic numeracy and literacy whether they can function in their societies it assesses employment but not just whether people are employed but ours worked in conditions but also if that work takes place in conditions that are humiliating whether people have to compromise on their respect and self-worth in order to earn the money to survive we assess healthcare and we assess access to healthcare but also the quality of that healthcare and whether people are treated with respect the people who were involved in the participatory research told us that they didn't access healthcare not only because of the money but also because they were shamed and stigmatized by some healthcare providers so the IDM is groundbreaking in many ways that I've already explained it's multi-dimensionality it's intersectionality but mostly because it is built on and designed to illuminate the priorities and experiences of people who live in poverty it's a measure of poverty that aims not only to determine the extent of poverty but to provide insights into how poverty shapes, constrains and often destroys the lives of people and to assess the ways that matter to them so I would finish by saying that I think research can be a pathway to more inclusive societies not necessarily by providing truth or even evidence but by unmasking interests and ideologies and I found that in my PhD research it can help by asking what values, policy debates and decisions are based on and it can illuminate alternate values by challenging taken for granted assumptions particularly about what is best for less powerful groups and for example we can open the doorway to better policy that better supports people research can help us to make sense of what is a very complex and a messy real world and it can create spaces where the lives used and standpoints of the most marginalised can be made visible and can be validated not only through the research findings although that's obviously crucially important but also through the process of research itself and so I'm obviously going to answer the question can research be a pathway to more inclusive societies in the affirmative and I hope that I've convinced you to agree research does not always achieve these good things but it has the potential to do so and that possibility the possibility of contributing to societies that are more inclusive and more just makes the angst the frustration, the grant chasing the endless rewriting of ethical protocols worthwhile and I'm very grateful that I somehow fell into research and that I fell into research not journalism or activism which is where I thought I would land and that I've been able to do the kind of research that I do for research for me has become not a job or even a career but a deep commitment and a way of life and hopefully something that does in some small way make some small positive difference and I thank you for letting me share these reflections with you