Kay Cook

Kay Cook is a Professor and the Associate Dean of Research in the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research explores how new and developing social policies such as welfare-to-work, child support and child care policies, transform relationships between individuals, families and the state. Her work seeks to make the personal impact of these policies explicit in order to provide tangible evidence to policy makers to affect more humanistic reform.

Her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2017-2020) examined the personal, practical and institutional barriers to child support faced by women in Australia, the UK and USA. This project built on Professor Cook's gender critique of child support policymaking, data practices and implementation in order to strike a more equitable balance between women’s responsibility for managing child support payments and the social, administrative and political context in which this responsibility exists. More recently, her work has examined how economic abuse is perpetrated through banking, financial and government systems.

Professor Cook's research has contributed to numerous parliamentary inquiries and government processes. She is a member of the federal Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee that is legislatively required to provide advice on tackling disadvantage to government prior to each federal budget. She was an advisor on the development of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2010 General Social Survey, was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Family Studies from 2012 - 2018, a Co-Director of the International Network of Child Support Scholars, and is the current Secretary of The Australian Sociological Association.