Rate My Professor Florencia Amigo

Maria Florencia Amigo is a social anthropologist serving as Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and obtained her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Sydney in 2005. Her doctoral dissertation, “Chasing Money: Children’s work in rural Lombok,” investigated the paid and unpaid labour of young children in a poor rural area of Indonesia. Amigo received the International Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the Australian government to support her doctoral studies in Australia.

In 2008, she was appointed a postdoctoral fellow at Macquarie University’s Children and Families Research Centre, leading the project “A double transition: migrant children starting school in Australia,” funded by the former Department of Education and Workplace Relations. In 2012, Amigo became Associate Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, teaching the experiential learning PACE unit “Internships in Social Research” and conducting research on higher education, employability, and work-integrated learning. Since 2017, she has served as Academic Director of PACE in the Faculty of Arts, advocating for university community engagement and offering experiential learning opportunities to students in collaboration with partner organisations. Her research interests include cross-cultural notions of childhood, children’s education, work, migration, and marriage in poor contexts, diasporas and volunteering for development in multicultural Australia, higher education, employability, and the future of work. Key publications comprise “Indigenous epistemologies of childhood in contexts of inequality: three case studies from the 'Global South'” (Childhood, 2022, with M. García Palacios, N. Enriz, A.C. Hecht), “The transformational possibilities of a peer education program to address child marriage in Nepal” (Development in Practice, 2022, with S. Gurung), “Volunteering for children or volunteering with children? A co-creation initiative to prepare student volunteers” (Global Studies of Childhood, 2022, with R. Bilous, F. Rawlings-Sanaei), “Changing roles and environments in experiential learning” (Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning, 2021, with J. Lloyd), and “Employability, community engagement, and global citizenship: the new face of universities” (2019). Amigo’s anthropological research leverages cultural understandings of childhood, youth, education, and work to inform policy and practice for community development and social inclusion.