Dominic O'Sullivan

Associate Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University

Dominic worked at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand before coming to Charles Sturt in 2008.

Dominic did his PhD in political science at Waikato which was published as Faith, Politics and Reconciliation: Catholicism and the Politics of Indigeneity (Huia Publishers and the Australian Theological Forum) in 2005. Also, in 2005, he was co-editor with Cynthia Piper, of an academic history of the Catholic Diocese of Hamilton, New Zealand Turanga Ngatahi: Standing Together: The Catholic Diocese of Hamilton 1840-2005 (Dunmore Publishing).

In 2007 Dominic published Beyond Biculturalism: the politics of an indigenous minority (Huia Publishers), which is a theoretical exposition of underlying themes in Maori public policy. In 2010, Scaling-up Education Reform: addressing the politics of disparity ( NZCER Press), was written with Russell Bishop and Mere Berryman to propose a model for sustainaible and replicable school reform.

Dominic's fourth book Indigenous health: power, politics and citizenship was published by Australian Scholarly Publishing in 2015. The book examines contemporary Indigenous Australian health policy as a site of contest over the nature of Indigenous citizenship and 'belonging' to the modern state. The book uses Western and Indigenous political theories to examine politics and public policy as determinants of health and to show the ways in which policy failure is partially explained by dysfunctional political relationships, policy inertia and the political system itself. The book considers the claims that Indigenous people can reasonably make on the public health system and examines what these claims mean for contemporary Australian conceptions of citizenship, democracy, and human rights.

A recording of a public lecture to launch the book, at Charles Sturt University, on 18 August 2015, can be found at
https://ecessprod.csu.edu.au:8443/ess/echo/presentation/95ba3ea6-201e-4e69-a378-5eac430bf0f6

In 2017 Policy Press published Dominic's fifth authored book Indigeneity: a politics of potential - Australia, Fiji and New Zealand​. The book assesses the ways in which indigenous and liberal political theories interact to consider the practical policy implications of the indigenous right to self-determination.