In May, the DIIU welcomed Dr Georgia van Toorn as a postdoctoral fellow within the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (ADMS).
Georgia (pictured above) is working alongside Professor Jackie Leach Scully on a project about the ways people with disability feel about, understand and experience automated decision-making in Australia. Automated decision-making encompasses a range of computer-based tools and processes that either assist or replace the judgement of human decision-makers. Georgia is interested in exploring automated decision-making in the context of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which is poised to implement a new automated independent assessment process by the end of 2021.
The ADMS Centre brings together national and international experts from the humanities and the social and technological sciences to investigate how automated decision-making technologies can be used ethically, inclusively and responsibly. It is hosted at RMIT University with nodes located at eight other Australian universities, and partners around the world.
The UNSW node, headed by Professor Deborah Lupton, is developing research on the health-related uses and implications of automated decision-making in Australia, with Georgia and Jackie exploring intersections of ADM and disability. UNSW node researchers will work with other members within the People program area of research, to investigate how publics and professionals imagine the future of automated decision-making and in the development of solutions to protect consumer rights while maximising the effectiveness and benefits of the technology.
Georgia is a political sociologist whose principal interests are in social policy and welfare research, and the political economy of disability and care work. Her research program comprises a series of projects that investigate the politics of social policy reform, the organisation and delivery of social care, and care work in publicly funded social services in which market-oriented principles, processes, vocabularies and mechanisms have been adopted, both in Australia and internationally. In 2019 Georgia was awarded her PhD from the University of Glasgow and the University of New South Wales. Her thesis examined the uptake and implementation of individualised, market-based models of disability service provision, drawing on qualitative fieldwork research undertaken in the UK and Australia. Her thesis has recently been published as a book, The New Political Economy of Disability: Transnational Networks and Individualised Funding in the Age of Neoliberalism.