Dr Katharine Betts
- Tel: +61 3 9214 8201
- Email: kbetts@swin.edu.au
Biography
Associate Professor Katharine Betts is with the Sociology Discipline at Swinburne University of Technology. She has been doing research in population studies for more than thirty years, beginning with fertility and family planning and the politics of immigration policy. Her current work focuses on the role of national identity in helping groups cope with the collective action problems posed by population growth and environmental stress.
Her major work is an analysis of the politics of Australian immigration published in Ideology and Immigration (MUP, 1988) and in The Great Divide (Duffy and Snellgrove, 1999), as well as in a number of journal articles.
In 1993 she helped establish the quarterly demographic journal People and Place - she and Bob Birrell are the editors. She served on the National Council of the Australian Population Association from 1996 to 2000 and from 2002 to 2006.
Publications
Recent publications include:- 'The growth lobby and Australia's immigration policy', People and Place, vol. 14, no. 4, 2006, pp. 40–52, with Michael Gilding
- ‘Demographic and social research on the population and environment nexus in Australia: explaining the gap’, Population and Environment, vol. 26, no. 2, 2004, pp. 157–172
- ‘Attitudes to abortion in Australia: 1972 to 2003’, People and Place, vol. 12, no. 4, 2004, pp. 22–27.