Professor Bob Boughton

Biography

I grew up in Sydney and completed an undergraduate honours degree in government at Sydney University in 1975. For the next twenty years, I worked as a development worker and adult educator in Aboriginal communities, returning to postgraduate academic study in the mid 1990s. I received my PhD in May 1998. I then held contract research positions with the CRC for Aboriginal Health, until January 2002, when I obtained my first permanent academic appointment, to UNE. In January 2009, I was promoted to Associate Professor. When I retired in 2020, I was appointed an Adjunct Professor, and I have continued in that role since then, supervising postgraduate students, mentoring junior staff, publishing academic articles and providing submissions and advice to government in my areas of expertise.

My research focuses on several inter-related areas: First Nations adult education, especially adult literacy education in communities; the theory and practice of mass literacy campaigns; the role of education as a determinant of health in First Nations communities; the history and theory of radical adult education (more often called ‘popular education’); and the development of adult education in Timor-Leste. Each is a cognate area within the broader field of adult education and development, which examines adult education’s role in the development of newly-independent countries of the South, and marginalised and disadvantaged communities of the North. In both my Timor-Leste and Aboriginal work, I have devoted significant time to local capacity-building, as part of fulfilling the ethical obligations of benefit-sharing when working with disadvantaged communities. This work also helps to maintain my direct links as an adult education academic to my professional field, providing many of the experiences on which I draw in my theoretical and research work.