Cameron Parsell

Cameron is an Australian Research Council Industry Fellow in partnership with Micah Projects.

Cameron’s research spans three linked areas of society. The first theme examines social problems. Cameron is interested in how social problems are framed, experienced, and contribute to the alienation of people affected and social dislocation. Cameron’s second theme of enquiry engages the myriad things society does about social problems. He is interested in the link between the framing and experience of social problems and the funded and practice solutions delivered. This includes both formal human services and voluntary and ground up community actions. The third theme of Cameron’s research seeks to uncover and extend empirical, theoretical, and ethical ideas for what a society that ends and prevents social problems would look like. This body of work is interested in not only how competing ideas for social cohesion can co-exist, but also how people holding competing ideas can come together to progress social cohesion through a diversity of disagreement.

In his first book, The Homeless Person in Contemporary Society, Cameron sought to highlight how the representation of people who are homeless as distinct informs a policy and practice agenda that he characterised as a poverty of ambition. Cameron's second book with Andrew Clarke and Francisco (Paco) Perales, Charity and Poverty in Advanced Welfare States, takes on the question how can we be just by soothing the consequences of poverty without addressing the causes of poverty.

Cameron's most recent book published by Polity Press, Homelessness, demonstrates that homelessness is a punishing, predictable, yet solvable social problem.https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=9781509554492