Katie Wright is an Associate Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University.
Her work focuses on social change activism, historical child abuse inquiries, shifting conceptualisations of childhood, and the cultural shift towards openness and disclosure. She has a longstanding research interest in understanding the complex and contradictory effects of the spread of psychological expertise, both historically and in the present.
She is currently leading two projects investigating child rights activism, public inquiries into institutional abuse, and child safety. One is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) 2022-2025 and the other is funded by the National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse (2023-2025).
Between 2009 and 2019, Katie has held three consecutive and prestigious research fellowships: an ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2009–2012); a University of Melbourne Fellowship (2013–2014); and an ARC DECRA (2014–2019). In 2017 she was a Visiting Guest Scholar in the Department of Child Studies at Linköping University in Sweden.
Katie has wide-ranging teaching experience in both undergraduate and graduate courses and is currently supervising theses in the areas of Autistic representation, the effects of parental incarceration, self-advocacy groups in the domain of historical abuse and the history of ideas about transgression.
She is on the Editorial Board of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth and was previously an Associate Editorial Board member of the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association (BSA), Sociology. Katie is a member of the Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and the International Sociological Association (ISA). She established the La Trobe University HuSS Research Cluster, ‘Wellbeing: Critical Social Perspectives’, now ‘Cultures of Health and Wellbeing’, was the Research Lead for the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University.
Katie Wright 