Madelaine is part of the Environment and Society Group and teaches on the Masters of Environmental Management and Bachelor of Environmental Humanities programs. Her work lies at the intersection of international political economy and global environmental policy, focussing on the concurrent social-ecological and political crises facing our society and the transformations required to address them. Specifically her research delves into the politics of water governance and the emergence of eco-social policies as a response to ecological and social crisis.  She is particularly interested in debates on primitive accumulation, financialization, social reproduction theory and labour, and what happens at the margins where different social systems and value systems interact. 

She is currently working on a project that explores the increasing articulation of water governance to circuits of finance capital as a policy response to the global water crisis. Her work on water has been published widely in a number of peer-reviewed journals including New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, Globalizations and Geoforum. Her 2023 book Water Struggles as Resistance to Neoliberal Capitalism: A Time of Reproductive Unrest (MUP) explores struggles over water resources in Australia and water services in the Republic of Ireland, arguing that each can be understood as a form of water grab facilitated by the state, that resulted in a period of 'reproductive unrest': class understood through social reproduction theory. It was shortlisted for the BISA IPEG book prize. Through her work with the Global Labour University she has also published on the topic of labour transformations and decent work, this includes her 2025 co-edited volume (with Marcel Van der Linden and Christoph Scherrer) that brought together of 50 contributions from leading labour scholars and activists. 

Madelaine has worked as a research consultant for the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Water and Sanitation (United Nations), the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on issues connected to water policy and labour rights. She is a founding member of Just Water Futures a network of scholars and activists providing evidence-based interventions into the question of water financing and governance. Since 2024, Madelaine has been on the board of the Critical Political Economy Research Network. 

Prior to joining UNSW, Madelaine was a senior postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University (Germany) in transnational social policy and worked on the Global Dynamics of Social Policy Project at Bremen University exploring International Organisations responses to Covid-19. She has also taught at Kassel University and at the Global Labour University. In 2022 she was awarded the ISIC Young Scholars Award for Politics, Philosophy and Economics and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Manchester and the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD from Kassel University, which was awarded the Jörg Huffschmid award for an outstanding PhD in political economy in Germany, and a Masters in Labour Policies and Globalisation from the Berlin School of Law and Economics/Kassel University.