Dr Rose Butler

I welcome inquiries from prospective postgraduate students in relation to my research interests.

Youth and childhood

Family and relationships

Class and inequality

Migration and mobilities

Schooling and education

Critical rural studies

Member: ADI Executive Committee (2020-2022)

Member: The Australian Sociological Association (Youth; Migration, Ethnicity & Multiculturalism; Families & Relationships; Rural Issues)

Member: American Sociological Association (Inequality, Poverty & Mobility; Children & Youth; International Migration)

Member: International Sociological Association (Childhood; Youth; Migration)

Member: Consortium for Youth, Generations & Culture

Butler, R. and Vincent, E. How does class impact on Australians’ love lives? New research brings a complex issue into the open. The Conversation.

Butler, R. and Ho, C. Why do parents take such different approaches to their kids' education? The Conversation.

Muir, K., Powell, A. and Butler, R. A whacking stick is not enough to get young people into work. The Conversation.

I am currently leading two research projects:

• Young People’s Mobilities, Relationships and Place-Making in Rural Australia (ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award). This project investigates how young people from diverse ‘local’, migrant and humanitarian refugee backgrounds are negotiating belonging in a rural settler town of Victoria undergoing rapid transformation. The research centres historical and contemporary rural configurations of class, race, economy and identity. More information about this research is available here. This project builds on my doctoral research (published as the book Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods) which was based on sustained ethnographic research with children and parents in two school communities of the same locale. This work examined the moral and classed cultural resources on which children draw to make sense of economic insecurity and inequality in everyday life.

• Love across Class: Social Difference and Intimacy in Contemporary Australia (with Eve Vincent, Macquarie University). This research explores the role of class within intimate partnerships between people from different class backgrounds. It approaches romantic partnerships, forged across class differences, as an important yet little explored site for understanding how class and inequality work in contemporary Australia. Focusing on class at the intersection of economy and culture, the project attends to the role that deeply encultured class-based orientations play in the everyday experiences of such couples at the same time as it explores their entanglement with gender, race and sexuality. These shared inter-class intimacies offer fresh insights into frictions, desires, affinities, solidarities and amusement in relation to class. 

I have ongoing interests in inequality, class and migration in relation to Australian education. My previous research has examined impacts of gentrification, class and racialisation on equality between and within primary schools; whiteness and classed rural identities within schooling communities; young people's education biographies and trajectories in rural Australia; and transformations within the middle class via the lens of inner-city schooling. Along with Megan Watkins and Christina Ho, I co-edited the collection Asian Migration and Education Cultures in the Anglosphere.

I also work with organisations and governments on research which supports young people and families. This has included the Sunraysia Mallee Ethnic Communities Council, The Burdekin Association, Mission Australia, Juluwarlu Aboriginal Corporation, The Foundation for Young Australians, the Department of Education and Training, and the Department of Social Services, among others.