FEATURED AUTHOR

Pavla Miller

Professor of Historical Sociology
RMIT

Pavla Miller is a Professor of Historical Sociology at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her publications include Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society, and Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900. She has also published on demographic explanations of low fertility, masters and servants’ legislation, time use, and conceptualizations of children’s work. She is currently helping to complete a history of pulmonary disease on South African gold mines.

Subjects: Education, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, History

Biography

Pavla Miller is Professor of Historical Sociology, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University; and Fellow, Future Social Services Institute, Melbourne, Australia. She has also worked at the University of Melbourne, South Australian Institute of Technology, and Flinders University. Pavla Miller is the author of Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900, Indiana University Press, 1998, and Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society, Wakefield Press, 1986. She contributed chapters to Loretta Baldassar and Donna Gabaccia (eds), Intimacy and Italian migration: Gender and domestic lives in a mobile world, Fordham University Press, 2011; John Merriman and Jay Winter (eds), Encyclopaedia of Europe 1789-1914, Macmillan Reference, 2006; and M. E. Wiesner-Hanks and T. Meade (eds), Blackwell Companion to Gender History, Blackwell, 2006.

Education

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Historical sociology; history of compulsory schooling; history of the family; gender and intersectionality studies; age, gender and household division of labour.

Books

Featured Title

Articles

“The age of entitlement has ended”: designing a disability insurance scheme

Published: Mar 14, 2017 by Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, vol. 33, no. 2, pp.95-113
Authors: Pavla Miller
Subjects: Sociology & Social Policy, Health and Social Care, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Social Work

The paper deals with the National Disability Insurance Scheme in Australia. It presents descriptions of the NDIS by its Chair, the politician who inspired him, and two feminist policy analysts from a carers’ organization. The dynamics of “managed” capitalist markets, gendered notions of abstract individuals and organisations, and the related difficulties in accounting for unpaid labour, it concludes, are constraining the transformative potential of the NDIS.

‘Social policy “generosity” at a time of fiscal austerity

Published: Feb 08, 2017 by Critical Social Policy, vol. 37, no. 1, February 2017
Authors: Pavla Miller and David Hayward
Subjects: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, Sociology & Social Policy, Health and Social Care

The paper looks at the policy context for the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia. It then considers two tensions which challenge the viability of the NDIS: increasing demand for care work alongside a shortage of care workers, and the market-driven reform of the Australian vocational education and training system.

Antipodean patrimonialism? Squattocracy, democracy and land rights in Australia

Published: Apr 01, 2015 by Political Power and Social Theory: Patrimonial Capitalism and Empire
Authors: Pavla Miller
Subjects: History, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Law, Gender & Intersectionality Studies

Can relations between ‘squatters’ and Aboriginal peoples with competing civil and property claims, be described as patrimonialism? The Australian colonies were among the pioneers of ‘universal’ male and later female franchise in the 19th century; Aborigines gained citizenship only in the late 1960s. While the squatter’s patrimonial rule over white settlers was short-lived, that over some groups of Aboriginal people persisted for more than a century.

Family time economies and democratic division of work

Published: Feb 03, 2015 by Journal of Family Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2014, pp. 128-147
Authors: Pavla Miller and Justin Bowd
Subjects: Sociology & Social Policy, Gender & Intersectionality Studies

This paper starts with families rather than individuals as units of time-use analysis. This model, and data from three successive Australian time-use surveys, are used to examine which variables help predict households that have more or less even – or ‘democratic’ – division of total productive, domestic and childcare activities between mothers, fathers, and teenage daughters and sons.

Do Australian teenagers work? Why we should care

Published: Nov 01, 2012 by Journal of Feminist Economics, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 1-24
Authors: Pavla Miller
Subjects: Economics, Finance, Business & Industry, History, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Work & Organizational Psychology, Gender & Intersectionality Studies

The paper addresses the lack of systematic attention to teenagers’ work in feminist economics. Drawing on historical sociology, it paper suggests why paid or unpaid work by children has been difficult to discuss, define and measure in contemporary industrialized countries, and compares debates on child workers and “economically inactive” housewives. It concludes that the interdependence of all family members should be considered in one analytical frame.

Useful and priceless children in contemporary welfare states

Published: May 01, 2005 by Social Politics, vol.12, no.1, pp.1-39
Authors: Pavla Miller
Subjects: Education, History, Adolescent Studies, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Gender & Intersectionality Studies

This paper is an exercise in thinking through inconsistencies, absences and unresolved issues regarding the usefulness or otherwise of children and young people. Some questions arising out of the contrary depictions of young people have relatively straightforward answers, available in existing time-use studies and examinations of welfare states and economic transfers. Others are more complex, and require attention to conceptual and historical approaches to age relations and notions of work.

Demography and gender regimes: the case of Italians and ethnic traditions

Published: Sep 01, 2004 by Journal of Population Research, vol.21, no.2, pp.199-222.
Authors: Pavla Miller
Subjects: History, Sociology & Social Policy, Gender & Intersectionality Studies

Using Italy and Italians as an example, the paper critiques some versions of demographers’ use of feminist social policy. it discusses empirical measurements of the domestic division of labour, depictions of Italian family traditions and theorisations of family dynamics more generally, and wider understandings of modernity and tradition, both on the canvas of grand theory and within ethnographies of Italian families.

Tradition, modernity and Italian babies

Published: Aug 05, 2002 by Histoire Sociale/ Social History, vol. 35, no. 69, pp. 195-233
Authors: Pavla Miller
Subjects: History, Sociology & Social Policy, Gender & Intersectionality Studies