2008 Healthy Development Adelaide Award

Professor Barbara Pocock was presented with the Healthy Development Adelaide Award at the 4th annual HDA Oration ‘Work+Life Balance? How Changing Patterns of Work affect Health and Wellbeing in Australia’.

Professor Barbara Pocock has been researching work, employment and industrial relations in Australia for twenty five years. She joined the University of South Australia in January 2006, after fourteen years with the University of Adelaide. Barbara was initially trained as an economist, completed her doctorate in gender studies, and has taught and researched labour studies and social science since the mid-1980s.

Her research has included work, industrial relations, trade unionism, pay and pay equity, vocational education, inequality in the labour market and was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (2003-2007) to study the intersections between work, family and community.

Barbara is Director of the Centre for Work+Life, University of South Australia, and co-convenes, with Dr Elizabeth Hill, the Work and Family Policy Roundtable. She is Deputy Chair of The Australia Institute, a member of the Festival of Ideas Committee in Adelaide, and has been President, Vice-President and Conference Convenor of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ).

In 2007, Barbara was the winner of the 'Society' category in The Bulletin's 'Smart 100 Australians'. Barbara is widely published. Her latest book, Living Low Paid is to be published in late 2008 (co-authored with Helen Masterman-Smith). Her previous books include Kids Count: Better early childhood education and care in Australia (2007), The Labour Market Ate my Babies: Work, Children and a Sustainable Future (2006), and The Work/Life Collision (2003).