Rate My Professor Ashley Barnwell

Ashley Barnwell is an Associate Professor in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of New South Wales in 2014. Barnwell's research focuses on the sociological aspects of emotions, memory, and narrative, particularly family histories, intergenerational transmission of memory, family secrets, estrangement, inheritance of colonial legacies, and the intersection of personal and national stories. Her projects include Family Secrets, National Silences: Intergenerational Memory in Australia, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, and Inheriting the Family: Emotions, Identities and Things, supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant.

At the University of Melbourne, Barnwell has held positions as Ashworth Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and now Associate Professor in Sociology. She received a National Library of Australia Fellowship in 2019 and a Community Engagement Grant. Barnwell serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sociology with Signe Ravn and co-hosts the Narrative Now podcast on narrative methodologies. Her key publications encompass the co-edited book Research Methodologies for Auto/biography Studies (Routledge, 2019, with Kate Douglas), Reckoning with the Past: Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australia (2018, co-edited with Joseph Cummins), and articles including 'What is "publicly available data"? Exploring blurred public–private boundaries and ethical practices through a case study on Instagram' (2020, with Signe Ravn and Barbara Barbosa Neves), 'Family secrets and the slow violence of social stigma' (2019), 'Captured and captioned: Representing family life on Instagram' (2023), 'Durkheim as affect theorist' (2018), 'Hidden heirlooms: Keeping family secrets across generations' (2018), and 'Family Estrangement and the Unseen Work of Not Doing Family' (2023). She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh (2019) and the Australian National University.