Dr Lara McKenzie is a Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on Australia, particularly on gender, age, love, kinship, family, reproduction, and cultural change. Lara’s book, Age-dissimilar couples and romantic relationships: Ageless love? (2015), explores age-dissimilar couples in Australia. She has also undertaken research on inequality and cultural difference in education. Lara recently conducted a study on recent PhD graduates’ experiences of looking for stable academic work, and her writing here addresses the themes of gender, age, family, precarity, and audit practices. She is currently undertaking research for the project 'Coronavax: Preparing community and government'.

Age-dissimilar relationships; romantic love; autonomy; relatedness; individualism; Australian society; kinship; family; reproduction

Higher education; secondary education; neoliberalism; inequality; e-learning; early career academia; audit; precarity; internationalisation