Ashley is a Braithwaite Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) and Deputy Director of the Australian Research Centre for Health Equity (ARCHE). 

Her programme of research focuses on how actors, structures, and ideas operate across various public policy domains and private business practices to progress understanding of the ways in which shifts in the rules, norms, power dynamics, and resource flows that stratify society ultimately shape social and health inequities.

She has made significant contributions to knowledge of how economic instruments – international trade and investment agreements – shape the social and commercial determinants of health. More recently, her research programme has focused on how Australian investment policy and practice shapes food systems and socioeconomic inequities in wealth and diet-related health outcomes; alongside leading research on the social construction of privilege as the intervening mechanism by which policies and practices entrench inequity in social systems. 

Available Projects:

I am always eager to hear from potential Masters and PhD students who have an interest in working on projects in the following areas:

• studies of the production of structural inequities and the maldistirbution of socioeconomic advantage related to human health 
• studies of food systems governance related to investors and investments; as well as the growing agtech industry, including the role of finance in advancing agtech
• studies of investment policy and practice in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, particularly those with a focus on the governance of, and social outcomes of, impact investment and other social financing (e.g., social impact bonds)

• the production of social and health inequities
• privilege and the distribution of socioeconomic advantage
• food systems governance
• investment governance
• public policy