Professor Alison Mackinnon 

Welcome to the home page of Alison Mackinnon AM. Alison Mackinnon was appointed Professor of History and Gender Studies in 1997. She was the Foundation Director of the Hawke Research Institute (see link below) from 1997 to December 2005. She has retired from that position but will remain an Emeritus Professor within the University. Previously she was Director of the Institute for Social Research (1994–1999) and Director, University Research Development (1996–1998). She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the convener of the SA branch of the Academy. On January 26th 2009 she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).

From August to November 2000 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU and she returned to the HRC as a Visiting Fellow in August and September 2006. She was a Research Fellow at the Research School for Social Sciences, ANU, Canberra, in 1993-94, where she coordinated the gender strand of the 'Reshaping Australian Institutions project: towards and beyond 2001'. She is an Associate of the Research School of Social Sciences, affiliated with the Australian Centre for Population Research.She is a past president of the Australian New Zealand History of Education Society.

In November 2000 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Umeå, Sweden. From February to July 2002 she was the Kerstin Hesselgren Guest Professorship at the Centre for Population Studies at the University of Umeå, Sweden, an appointment of the Swedish Research Council.She is currently an Advisory Board Member of the Ageing and Life Conditions project at the Centre for Population Studies at Umea University.

In March 2004 she visited the University of Victoria, British Columbia, to lecture in the Lansdowne Lecture Series Program. She is a member of the History Trust of South Australia board and the board of the International Federation for Research in Women's History, and was President of the History Council of South Australia from 2005-2008.In 2005 she was invited to deliver the six Clare Burton Memorial Lectures, a lecture series established to commemorate the work of Clare Burton, a specialist in gender equity and organizational change.In March 2006 she was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor.

The Hawke Research Institute

International Federation for Research in Women's History

Selected publications

Women, Love and Learning: The Double Bind (2010)

Love and Freedom (1997)

Hope: The Everyday and Imaginary Life of Young People on the Margins (2010)

The Hawke Legacy: Towards a Sustainable Society (2009)

Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia (2007)

Gender and the Restructured University (2001)

Gender and Institutions: Welfare, Work and Citizenship (1998)

Education into the 21st Century (1998)

The New Women: Adelaide's Early Women Graduates (1986)

• Women's lives in contemporary and historical perspectives
• Changing gender relations in historical and contemporary perspectives
• Globalization and its gendered impacts of work and family formation - and on patterns of academic work and identity
• Gender and higher education in Australia and throughout the world
• Women in the professions, their challenges and identities.

President, History Council of South Australia.(from 2004 to 2008)

Board member - History Trust of South Australia

Member, Australian Historical Association, from 1995

Executive Member, Network for Research in Women's History, from 1992

Member, International Consortium for Feminist Research and Policy, from 1992

Member, Australian Women's Studies Association, from 1991

Fellow, Corporate Citizenship Unit, Deakin University

Board member, International Federation for Research in the History of Women.

Member, Australian Population Association

Member of Editorial Board: Australian Feminist Studies

Member of Editorial Board: History of Education Review; Australian Feminist Studies.

Past President, Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society.

PhD (Adelaide), PhD honoris causa (Umea) MEd (Adelaide), DipEd (Melbourne) BA (Melbourne)

• Women's social history; history of women's higher education; higher education and family formation; feminist and interdisciplinary perspectives on demography; feminist theory; changing relations between the sexes; academic women and restructuring, ageing in historical perspective. The changing cultures of work and responsibility in globalising societies The politics and demography of population change, population ageing

'Was there a Victorian Demographic Transition?' in Martin Hewitt (ed) The Victorian World, Routledge, 2012.

Women, Love and Learning: the double bind, Peter Lang, Bern, August 2010

‘Road maps or global positioning systems? Young people’s lives in the twenty-first century’ in Tom Stehlik and Jan Patterson (eds) Changing the Paradigm: Education as the key to a socially inclusive future, Post Pressed, 2011.

Hope: the everyday and imaginary life of young people on the margins, Wakefield Press, 2010 ( with Simon Robb, Patrick O'Leary and Peter Bishop)

The Hawke Legacy: towards a sustainable society (ed with Barbara Comber and Gerry Bloustien) Wakefield Press, Adelaide 2009

‘Towards Gender Equality: two steps forward, one step back’ in Barbara Comber, Gerry Bloustien and Alison Mackinnon (eds) The Hawke Legacy, 2009, Wakefield Press.

Harvey Graff, Alison Mackinnon, Bengt Sandin, Ian Winchester (eds) Understanding Literacy in its historical contexts: socio-cultural history and the legacy of Egil Johansson, Nordic Academic Press (Lund) 2009

‘Swedish women school teachers and the fertility transition’ in H Graff, A Mackinnon, B Sandin, I Winchester (eds) Understanding Literacy in its historical contexts: socio-cultural history and the legacy of Egil Johansson, 2009, Nordic Academic Press (Lund).

‘Part-time Schooling’ in Kitty te Riele (ed) Making School Different: alternative approaches to educating young people, 2009 Sage, Los Angeles, London (with Marie Brennan, Eleanor Ramsay and Katherine Hodgetts) pp. 116-125

Hope: the Utopian Imagination of Young People on the Margins (with Viv Szekeres, Catherine Manning and Simon Robb) 2008 Museum catalogue, Adelaide, University of South Australia and the Migration Museum.

'Demographic Transition' in William A Darity (ed) 2007 The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd edition, Macmillan Reference USA

Fresh Water: new perspectives on water in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2007 (edited with Emily Potter, Stephen McKenzie and Jennifer McKay).

'River memory: narratives of generation, hope and amnesia' in Potter, Mackinnon, McKenzie and McKay (eds), Fresh Water, 2007, pp. 73-89.

...'But I'm so embarrassed, I said, if it's another baby!': schooling, girls and declining fertility in South Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, in Angelique Janssens (ed) Gendering the Fertility Decline in the Western World, 2007, Peter Lang, pp. 205-235.( with C Batson and J Petersen-Gray.)

'Fantasizing the Family: women, families and the quest for an individual self', Women's History Review, Vol. 15, No. 4, September 2006, pp 663-675

'Giving myself a toni, write thesis tonight':negotiating higher education in the 1950s' in Elizabeth Smyth and Paula Bourne (eds) Women Teaching, Women Learning: Historical perspectives, Toronto, Inanna Publications and Education Inc. 2006

'A study corner in the kitchen': Australian graduate women negotiate family, work and nation in the 1950s and early 1960s’, Australian Historical Studies (127 April 2006) 63-80.(with Penny Gregory)

‘Girls, Schools and Society: a generation of change’, Australian Feminist Studies (special issue on feminism and the changing state), vol. 21, no.50 July 2006, pp. 275-288.

'Education’ in Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, Spongberg, M, Caine, B, Curthoys, A (eds). Palgrave Macmillen: Hampshire, pp. 130-140. 2005

2005 Mackinnon, A and Elizabeth Bullen ‘Out on the Borderlands: time, generation and agency in women’s lives’, Theory and Research in Education, Vol. 3 (1) 2005).

2004 Mackinnon, A. ‘Knowledge beyond reason: highly educated women at the turn of the twentieth century and the continuing quest for commensurability’, Australian Cultural History, No. 23, special issue: Futures Exchange

2004 Is biology destiny? Published (invited) comment on editorial, Climacteric: the Journal of the International Menopause Society, 2004; 7, pp.331-332.

2003 Bounded choices: how much ‘choice’ is there in decision making for ageing populations? (with Rob Ranzijn and Eddie Le Sueur) Applied Population and Policy, 1(1) 55-65.

'Louisa Macdonald: scholar and pioneering feminist educator', in The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, (eds) Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, Siân Reynolds, Co-ordinating editor: Rose Pipes.2005

Ann Brooks and Alison Mackinnon (eds) Gender and the Restructured University, Open University Press, August 2001

Recent reports: Population, gender and reproductive choice: the motherhood questions, report for Department of Family and Community Services (with Lois Bryson) March 2000.

2000 'Bringing the unclothed immigrant into the world': population policy and gender in twentieth century Australia, Journal of Population Research, vol 17, no 2; 1999,

'Computing: overview' in D Spender and C Kramarae (eds), 2000, Routledge international encyclopedia of women: global women's issues and knowledge, Routledge, New York.

'Demography' in D Spender and C Kramarae (eds), 2000 as above.

1997, Love and Freedom, Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. See link above.

1998, Education into the 21st Century, Dangerous Terrain for Women (edited with Inga Elgqvist-Saltzman and Alison Prentice) Falmer Press, London.

With Kerri Allen, 1998, 'Allowed and expected to be educated and intelligent': the education of Quaker girls in nineteenth century England', History of Education (UK) Vol. 27, No 4 pp. 391-402.

1998, Gender and Institutions (edited with Moira Gatens), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

1998, 'Educated doubt: women, religion and the challenge of higher education', Women's History Review, No 7, Vol 2.

1999, 'Shaking the foundations: On the (im)possibility of writing a history of women in higher education', History of Education Review, Vol 28, No 1.

1998, Joint editor (with Margaret Allen and Sandra Holton) international journals - 'Women, Religion and Citizenship: Intersections of Gender and Belief' - special issue of Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 13, and 'Between Rationality and Revelation: Women, Faith and Public Roles in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries', special issue of Women's History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2.

'Redesigning the population: narratives of race and sex', in Gender and Institutions: Welfare Work and Citizenship, edited with Moira Gatens, Cambridge University Press, 1998

1997, 'My dearest friend: courtship and conjugality in late nineteenth century Quaker families', The Journal of the Friends Historical Society, Volume 58, Number 1, pp. 44-58.

'Gender relations in Australia', in G Davison,S McIntyre and J Hirst, Oxford Companion to Australian History, Melbourne, Oxford University Press,1998

(with Debra King)'Who Cares? Community perceptions in the Marketing of Corporate Citizenship', Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Vol. 1, no. 3.

I am able to provide media comment in the following areas of expertise:

Discipline: Women's Studies/History

• Education
• Gender studies
• History
• Women's studies
• Changing relations between sexes
• Birth rates
• Women's education
• Women's history
• Demographic change
• Population policy
• Feminism