Funded Research
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANTS 2006 <top>
DP0663788 Dr H Lewi; Prof K Darian-Smith; Prof PJ Goad; Dr JL Willis; A/Prof JF Murphy
Title: Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds: Designing Everyday Modernism for Australian Communities 1920-1970
Summary:
This cross-disciplinary project will construct an historical account of the interconnections between the network of governmental policies and initiatives promoting a healthy and educated citizenry, and the design and use of modern, municipal architecture in mid-century Australia. Detailed analysis of modern building types, from around the nation, including kindergartens, sporting facilities, swimming pools, child health clinics, libraries and community centres will constitute an original and important resource for historians, conservationists and architects. Historical findings will inform directions and lessons for future practice in the design, planning and conservation of community infrastructure.
Three year grant commencing in 2006: $268,000
DP0664448 Dr RT Taylor
Title: From Race to the Genome: the Tasmanian Aboriginal People in the Scientific Imagination
Summary:
This project addresses the nationally significant issue of contested Aboriginality in Tasmania. It offers a broader
understanding of complex scientific ideas and deeper insights into the 'History Wars' debate that goes to the heart
of shaping Australian national identity. It provides a comprehensive historical and legal context to the current national
definition of an Aboriginal, of direct relevance to the collection of national census data, the allocation of welfare
funding and the Government's current restructuring of ATSIC. It will place Tasmania and Australia within an international
context and make accessible new sources of Tasmanian culture and history to scholarly, indigenous and regional communities.
Three year grant commencing in 2006: $290,000
DP0663287 Dr SJ Wills
Title:Hostels, Hosts and Hospitality: A Social and Cultural History of Migrant Temporary Accommodation in Australia
Since the Second World War
Summary:
Because it promotes a deeper understanding of migrant experience, the social relations and outcomes that derive from that
experience, on-arrival settlement services, the role of the nation as 'host', and the complexity of national and immigrant
identities, this project strengthens Australia's social fabric and capacity to interpret and engage with its regional and
global environment. The experience of regional and global migration, often entailing processes of acute disjuncture, enjoins
both an urgent need for, and specific difficulties in, the creation of a coherent identity. This study contributes to an
understanding of anxieties about place and belonging and how we might interpret and engage such challenges today.
Three year grant commencing in 2006: $154,775
LP0669282 Prof K Darian-Smith; Prof WS Logan; Prof GP Seal
Title: Childhood, Tradition and Change: a national study of the historical and contemporary practices and significance of Australian children's playlore
Partner Organisation(s): National Library of Australia and Museum Victoria
Project Summary
A multidisciplinary research team will produce the first comprehensive national analysis of the continuity and variation of Australian children's playlore from the 1950s to the present. Fieldwork documentation at selected primary schools will be contrasted with previous playlore research to construct longitudinal cultural maps of children's play within their wider demographic and social contexts. The project makes a major contribution to international playlore and cultural heritage studies, and to Australian histories of childhood. In partnership with the National Library of Australia and Museum Victoria, outcomes include scholarly publications, a significant new archive of contemporary children's playlore, conferences, and exhibitions.
For more information, see the Childhood, Tradition and Change website.
Five year grant commencing in 2006 : $170,729
LP0669071 A/Prof JF Murphy; Dr GJ Marston (U Qld); Dr SM Murray (RMIT); Dr JJ Chalmers (RMIT); A/Prof M Peel (Monash); Prof BM Probert (Uni of Melb)
Title: 150 low income Australians: a group biography over time
Partner Organisation: Jobs Australia
Project Summary
This project will make a major contribution to welfare reform debates by illuminating how welfare-to-work policies are experienced. Its groundbreaking methodology consists of life-history interviews with 150 low-income Australians, combined with a longitudinal panel design. Participants - in receipt of income support or low wages - will be drawn from capital cities and regional centres. The project aims to illuminate how incentives and obstacles are perceived, to describe patterns of interdependency, and to understand people’s discourses and values about welfare and obligation. Outcomes will include journal articles and a book, policy advice to welfare agencies, as well as interventions into policy debates.
Four year grant beginning in 2006: $330,000
LP0669186 A/Prof JF Murphy
Title: The face of the poor: a history of poverty through the eyes of the St Vincent de Paul Society
Partner Organisation: St Vincent de Paul Society Victoria Inc.
Project Summary
This project aims to enrich our understanding of the history of poverty and disadvantage over the course of the 20th century, by conducting research in a unique collection of records held by the St Vincent de Paul Society in Victoria. The research will make a significant contribution to the underdeveloped study of the mixed economy of welfare in Australia. It draws on the innovative approach of using case file records to write social history, will include comparison between urban and rural experiences, and will contribute to better understanding how one Christian denomination imagined poverty and social exclusion.
Four year grant (APA[I]): 2006 : $73,950
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANTS 2005 <top>
LP0561704 Dr S Murray (RMIT University) and Associate Professor John Murphy
Title: Life after care: the life-histories of those who left institutional and other forms of out-of-home care, 1945-1989
Partner Organisation: MacKillop Family Services
Summary:
This project examines the impact of having been in out-of-home care for the subsequent
identities and life histories of successive generations of care leavers. While focused
on Catholic institutions in Victoria, it will provide more general insights into the role
of church-based children's homes and will be an opportunity for those who experienced
care to tell the story of their life after leaving care. The project has been developed
in the wake of the third of the trilogy of enquiries concerned with the institutionalisation
of Australian children and its aims are consistent with the recommendations of the recent
Senate Inquiry report.
Two year grant commencing in mid-2005: administered the Centre for Applied Social Research, by RMIT University.
LP0560359 Dr F Anderson; Dr GR
Trembath
Title: Witnesses to War: Australian War Correspondents from
the Boer to the Gulf War
APDI Dr GR Trembath
Partner Organisation(s) C.E.W. Bean Foundation, National Library of Australia
Summary:
This national project will be the first study to examine the
collective history of Australian journalists and photojournalists who
have covered major wars
and international conflicts from the Boer War to the “war
on terror”. It will be a timely and path breaking contribution to history,
offering a new understanding of
key issues including the journalists' experiences; the discourses that
defined Australian national identity;
truth and mythmaking; war correspondents' influence on public commemoration
and how they shaped attitudes to war, allies, enemies and race; how reporting
changed; and the role of political
and military censorship.
Three year grant commencing in 2005: $219,988.00
DP0557592 Dr H MacDonald
Title: Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy
APD Dr H MacDonald
Summary:
Recent scandals reveal that human remains are being illegally
harvested for body parts. This project will be the first major
comparative study to examine encounters between medical scientists,
artists and
the dead in Britain and Australia. It will challenge the ahistorical
nature of current investigations into these practices, providing
an analysis about the ethical use of human remains which explains
why
the law has not deterred such abuses. This contribution to cultural
history will offer a new understanding of how the dead have come
to be so readily turned into anatomical objects in hospitals, research
facilities, museums and art galleries.
Three year grant commencing in 2005: $252,000.00
DP0557524 Dr NH Nguyen
Title: Vietnamese Women: Voices and Narratives of the Diaspora
ARF Dr NH Nguyen
Summary:
Migration and multiculturalism are hotly debated issues in
Australia today. Engagement with Asia
being one of the 3 pillars of Australian national security,
it is all the more vital to conduct research on
how Asian migrants have successfully integrated into Australian
society. The Vietnamese overcame early difficulties to settle
successfully here. Women played a major part in this. Their
story is a tribute both
to
their determination to adapt to a new land and to Australia's
willingness to accept new arrivals. This
study will help address national and gender stereotypes, assist
in fostering positive community relations, provide a deeper
understanding of a significant refugee group, and contribute
to strengthening
Australia's social fabric.
Five year grant commencing in 2005:
$578,252.00
DP0556419 Prof JG Sinclair
Title: Globalisation and the media in Australia: an integrated
analysis of trends and impacts, with special reference
to the advertising industry
APF Prof JG Sinclair
Summary:
The overall national benefit will be to reveal how advertising
is tied in to the
manufacturing-marketing-media institutional complex in Australia, and how
that in turn links us
in to both economic and cultural processes of globalisation. A series of
public outputs will provide an
up-to-date and detailed account of how changes in advertising are affecting
transformations in the
media and related communication industries in Australia. They also will
show the relevance of
advertising to national identity in an era of cultural diversity, free
trade and global communications, and contribute to public policy questions
such
as advertising regulation and community standards.
Five year grant commencing in 2005: $858,000.00
DP0557888 Dr G Willett
Title: The Origins of Homosexual Politics in the British World:
A Transnational Study
Summary:
This project's findings will be of national and community benefit
in three ways. Addressing the origins
and early development of one of the most important social movements of modern
times, it will contribute
to the understanding of the ways in which social inequality has been so successfully
tackled in Australia
over the past fifty years. By attending to the international context of this
history it will expand knowledge
of the nature, extent and longevity of Australia's connections to global political
cultures. Finally, it will strengthen Australian scholarship's already well-established
claim to world-class research in gay and
lesbian and queer studies.
Three year grant commencing in 2005: $127,200.00
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANTS 2004 <top>
DP0451572 Dr CW Jordan
Title: The Field of Artistic Production in Colonial Australia:
People, Institutions, History
APD Dr CW Jordan
Summary:
This study of the development of Australian art in the nineteenth
century focuses on the citizens, infrastructure and institutions that
fostered the production
of the visual arts. It eschews a Sydney-Melbourne bias in favour of the 'regions' and
goes beyond 'professional' cultural elites to include amateurs,
women, activists and entrepreneurs who cajoled the public and government into
supporting a visual arts infrastructure. This study is of regional benefit
and will interest art and cultural historians and policy-makers in heritage
management, cultural policy and cultural tourism. The outcomes will include
a major book and a database of archival sources.
Four year grant commencing in 2004: $226,000.00
DP0451581 Dr S McQuire, Dr N Papastergiadis
Title: The Spatial Impact of Digital Technology on Contemporary
Art and New Art Institutions
Summary:
Our aim is to explore the impact of digital technology on the
production and display of contemporary art. Our focus is the
spatial formation of the art institution at a time of historic transition,
as object based
collections are joined by new forms of technological imagery.
We propose a distinct interdisciplinary methodology using spatial analysis
derived
from theories of contemporary art, new media theory and critical
social theory. The project's significance lies in developing insights into
the new parameters of cultural production and cultural exchange. This
will have strategic relevance for analysing the cultural impact of the
emergent information society.
Three year grant commencing in 2004: $350.000
Australian Research
Council Grants 2001 <top>
ARC SPIRT GRANT
Name: Lisanne Gibson
Title: Cultural policy and heritage
Summary:
This project will study the relations between programs which
commission and manage public art and instruments which manage
and protect cultural heritage. Investigation of Australian public
art policy will
make a substantial contribution to international discussion of
the development of cultural policies which facilitate economically
and culturally sustainable
programs. The policy analysis undertaken in this project will
make a major contribution to the ways in which policymakers,
academics and practitioners
think about the meaning of public art and heritage and its relationship
to the built environment, this will enhance our ability to develop
future sustainable policy.
This was a three year grant that commenced in 2000 at the University
of Queensland and began at the Australian Centre in 2001. Funds
administered by The Australian Centre: $106,002.00
Download the final report
ARC SPIRT Grant
Name: Dr Sara Wills
Title: Knowing their Place? A social and cultural history of
British migration in late twentieth- century Australia' (2001-2003)
Summary
In collaboration with Museum Victoria, this project will produce
a social history of British migrant's sense of place in postwar
Australia. It will explore understandings of leaving and being drawn back
to 'place' through the experience of migration, and will examine
how these understandings become part of life in a new place. Drawing upon
the resources of the Museum's Programs and Research Division and
Immigration Museum and utilising oral histories and a regional case study,
the resultant publications, presentations, exhibitions and oral history
archive will contribute to an understanding of the ways British migrants 'know
their place' in contemporary Australia.
Three year grant commencing in 2001: $171,859.00
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANTS 2000 <top>
Name: Dr Ros Bandt
Title: The Australian Sound Design Project
Summary
Sound design is a new interdisciplinary field in which Australia
has made pioneering contributions, but to date, little has been
documented. The project Australian Sound Design of Public Acoustic
Space is a research
project hosted by the Australian Centre at the University of
Melbourne and funded by a large grant from the ARC to enable
the development of
a nation-wide data base and website of designs, from both indoor
and outdoor sites help to communicate this national practice.
An emphasis on public
space focuses attention on place, raising issues of land ownership,
noise pollution and soundscape. This helps to clarify who is
designing public
acoustic space where public and private acoustic concerns interface.
The comprehensive database and cross-referenced website provides
a platform for further discourse and analytical study. Historical
and stylistic
trends
can then be observed. The language and practice of sound design
is being developed through ensuing discourse and the importance
of sound profiled
for interdisciplinary designers, curators, mueologists, acousticians,
communications engineers, architects, urban and regional planners,
environmentalists, and musicans.
A three year grant commencing
in 2000.
Name: Paul Jones
Title: Unsettled Arrival: Desertion from Merchant Ships at Australian
Ports, 1901 - 1975
Summary:
This research concerns the many tens of thousands of British
merchant seamen who deserted ship at Australian ports. A comprehensive
project database supplements wide-ranging exploration of the
importance of seamen to our migration history. The project will
also clarify hitherto
neglected aspects of the governance of Australian national boundaries.
The inherently international dimensions of the study have been
further developed through four months research as a Bicentennial
Fellow at the
Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King's College, London.
This two year grant commenced in 2000.
AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL GRANTS 1999 <top>
Name: Paul Carter
Title: Ephemeral Architectures
ARC Senior Research Fellowship
Summary:
This project aims to develop and apply a cross-disciplinary approach
to performance to the design and conservation of historically
important sites. It responds
to the complexities of identity formation and the heterogeneity of historical
memory in multicultural societies. Creating ephemeral structures - site
inscriptions that grow out of the performative practices of everyday life - it
intends to act as a circuit-breaker in the stand-off between the three discourses
of development, cultural tourism and heritage. The knowledge base thus developed
in Australia culminates in three urban interventions, in Penang, Singapore
and Kuching. The result is a comprehensive revisioning of colonial legacies
in a post-colonial environment.
This three year grant commenced in 1999.
Name: Kate Darian-Smith
Title: Show Time: social and cultural histories of
agricultural shows in Australia
Summary:
This project aims to produce the first comprehensive social
and cultural study of agricultural shows in Australia from colonial
period
to the present. It will draw upon textual, visual and oral
sources to examine, at different moments, the involvement of Australian
communities
as producers, exhibitors and consumers at shows; issues of
regional, gender, ethnic and social diversity; popular culture; exhibiting
practices; and
the place of the show in social memories. It will make an innovative
contribution to Australian cultural history, resulting in a book,
articles and presentations,
an oral history archive, and a conference.
This three year grant, was taken over five years: $71,000.00
|
top of page
![The University of Melbourne [logo]](/template-assets-custom/images/custom_logo_crest_comb2.gif){kind=logo}
