SHARON BESSELL

Sharon Bessell is a Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. She is the director of the Children’s Policy Centre and co-host of Policy Forum Pod, a weekly podcast that brings cutting edge research and thinking to inform debates on pressing policy challenges. In 2016 she was awarded the Australian National University Vice Chancellor’s Award for Public Policy and Outreach.  In 2019 she was named as one of the Australian Financial Review’s Women of Influence.

Sharon is internationally recognised as a leader in rights-based research methodologies and ethics. Her research interests revolve around issues of social justice and human rights, focusing on three broad areas: (i) poverty, especially child poverty and the gendered and generational dimensions of poverty; (ii) social policy, social justice and the human rights of children; and (iii) childhoods over time and intergenerational relations. She is currently leading the More for Children project, which aims to understand and respond to children’s experiences of poverty.

Sharon teaches courses on social policy, poverty reduction, globalisation, global development, children’s human rights, and gender. She received awards for teaching excellence from the Australian National University in 2016 and 2022.