Sarah Maddison is an Australian author and Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne where she also co-directs the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. She is a former Director of GetUp! and the 2018-19 president of the Australian Political Studies Association. She has a PhD in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She was awarded the 2005 Jean Martin Award by The Australian Sociological Association for her PhD thesis, Collective identity and Australian Feminist Activism: conceptualising a third wave, which examined the role of young women in contemporary Australian women's movements. In 2009 she was joint winner of the Australian Political Science Association Henry Mayer Award for her book Black Politics: Inside the complexity of Aboriginal political culture. In 2009 she was also part of the Sydney Leadership Program run by Social Leadership Australia at The Benevolent Society. Maddison's research interests include Indigenous-settler relations, settler colonialism, reconciliation and conflict transformation, Indigenous politics, agonistic democracy, dialogue, and Australian social movements, including research on the Indigenous rights movement and the women’s movement. Maddison has also co-authored two editions of a textbook for students of Australian public policy. Maddison received a 2009 Churchill Fellowship to study models of Indigenous representation in the United States and Canada in 2010. She has been an ARC Discovery Project grant recipient for three completed projects, one considering new possibilities for Indigenous representation, and another considering the evolution of social movements through a study of the Australian women’s movement, which produced the edited collection The Women's Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet: Australia in transnational perspective. The third project 2014, undertaken with colleagues in Melbourne and Canada, explored non-Indigenous attitudes to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, through focus group research around the country. In 2010 Maddison was awarded an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to undertake a four-year, four-country comparative study of reconciliation and conflict transformation in Australia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and Guatemala. A book analysing the results from this research was published by Routledge in 2015.
Publications
Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge And Creative Tension in Social Movements, with Sean Scalmer. UNSW Press, 2005.
