Associate Professor Howard-Wagner is a sociologist who is deeply attentive to legal and policy contexts as sites where inequality is produced and governed. She is currently Program Lead Social Policy, Participation, Inclusion in POLIS: Centre for Social Policy Research and former Research Director and Senior Fellow in the Centre for Indigenous Policy Research. She is former President of the Law and Society Association Australia and New Zealand and former co-Chief Editor of the Australian Journal of Social Issues (AJSI).

Her research examines how state systems structure and produce inequality through institutional design, with particular attention to racialised governance, accountability arrangements, and Indigenous–state relations. It focuses on how governance systems, including administrative classification, performance frameworks, and accountability regimes, shape the visibility, recognition, and treatment of populations across policy domains.

This program is grounded in comparative political and organisational sociology, social policy, socio-legal studies, and Indigenous studies, and is informed by empirical research across Australia, Canada, the United States, and Europe. It integrates theoretical development with applied policy analysis in Indigenous governance, urban inequality, and public sector reform. Across this work, she develops an analytical framework linking institutional design to differentiated accountability structures and policy outcomes in settler‑colonial and comparative contexts. It is applicable beyond Indigenous policy settings and demonstrates how institutional arrangements and policy regimes systematically organise lived experience and reproduce inequality across multiple domains of state–society relations.

This analytical framework has been developed since her PhD through over $5.25m in sustained Category 1 and 2 funding, including ARC‑funded research and an ANU Future Fellowship, and has been further extended through applied Category 2 research such as the NSW OCHRE Local Decision Making Evaluation and the APS Priority Reform Three Monitoring and Accountability Framework. Together, this research agenda establishes the conceptual foundations for analysing accountability structures and institutional logics in Indigenous policy systems. The theoretical and empirical contribution of this work across international cities is developed most fully in her sole‑authored monograph Indigenous Invisibility in the City (Routledge, Advances in Sociology Series, 2021), produced under her ANU Future Fellowship and widely cited across sociology, Indigenous studies, and social policy scholarship. 

A defining feature of her scholarship has been the translation of theoretical frameworks on racialised governance and institutional design into operational accountability architectures within Australian public policy systems. Rather than simply informing policy debates, her research provides the conceptual and evaluative structures through which governance systems are designed, implemented, and assessed in practice. This translation is most clearly demonstrated through two major applied research programs: the NSW OCHRE Local Decision Making (LDM) Evaluation (2019–2025) and the Australian Public Service Priority Reform Three Monitoring and Accountability Framework (2023–2024).

Research published in Q1 and Q2 international and national journals, such as the lead international sociological journal in her field Ethnic and Racial Studies Journal (2018, Q1, 2466 reads & 64 citations) and first article, the first issue for the year in lead international Indigenous policy journal, International Journal of Indigenous Policy (2019, Q1, 193 downloads and 18 citations). Her analysis of and observations concerning Australian Indigenous policy development have been taken up and cited in 800 national/international publications and by scholars in Canada, Finland, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, and the Netherlands (see Google Scholar).

PhD

Governing Inequality in public policy systems

Racialised governance

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy

overcoming urban Indigenous disadvantage

poverty governance

innovative Indigenous justice

urban Indigenous development, governance and self-determination

international urban Indigenous social movements

urban place-based Indigenous success

urban First Nations organisation-based success

urban and regional locality-based Indigenous service delivery, including service delivery enablement

Indigenous invisibility in the city

comparative international studies

whiteness, racism and race relations

state governmentality in the neoliberal age