Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation
Faculty of Arts and Education
2009
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Funding Period: 2007 - 2008
Investigators: Dr D Kingsbury, Dr MP Leach
Summary: This project is of direct relevance to Australia through its bilateral and multilateral provision of police to assist in the maintenance of East Timor's law and order, through its training of and support for the East Timor Border Patrol Unit, and its training and support of the East Timor defence force, Falintil-FDTL. The project also goes to the core of Australia's concerns with regional state maintenance (or conversely, potential state failure), direct bilateral relations with both East Timor and Indonesia, and the triangular relationship between these three states.
Funding Period: 2007 - 2008
Investigator: A/Prof RN Bastin
Summary: The enhanced knowledge of Australia's neighbours, specifically two countries that have provided significant contributions to Australia's multicultural complexion, as well as an enhanced sense of the issues involved in managing ethnic tensions in a secular state will be the benefits of the study. Both sites have been the objects of previous social and cultural studies, but not compared together in terms of religious tolerance and state control. The research will also strengthen ties between scholars in Australia, India and Sri Lanka, while having application to issues of tolerance and mutual respect between communities in all three countries.
Funding Period: 2007 - 2010
Investigators: A/Prof F Mansouri, Prof SM Kenny, Prof DR Walker
Summary: This project will advance our understanding of the best practice approaches towards the management of intercultural relationships within multicultural communities. It will generate international benchmark data on the management of multicultural spaces and will lead to a range of practical policies for local city councils, NGOs and state governments. The findings will form a robust empirical basis for understanding the optimal way of formulating government-NGOs partnerships in the successful implementation of culturally responsive policies. The study will also result in the development of effective policy responses aimed at enhancing active citizenship, social cohesion and intercultural understanding.
Funding Period: 2006 - 2008
Investigators: A/Prof B He; Prof GM Stokes
Administering Institution: University of Tasmania
Summary: The result of this research will enhance Australian democracy-promotion activities overseas, foster Chinese learning from Australian deliberative democratic experiences, as well as benefiting Australian governmental agencies such as AusAID and Australian NGOs working in this field. The project will also strengthen cooperation between Australian researchers and their counteICGrts in China. The lessons learned from this Chinese experiment can be used to improve the quality of citizen participation and to develop more effective means of public participation and consultation in Australia. The project will contribute to the Australian government's dialogue approach to human rights issues in China since 1989.
Funding Period: 2006 - 2008
Investigators: Dr S Datta; Dr DJ Beynon
Summary: Australia is an emerging player in the field of heritage and conservation in the Asia-Pacific region. This project will greatly improve the ability of Australian cultural heritage institutions to address the preservation and conservation initiatives in the region. A successful Australian heritage export industry will foster improved diplomatic relations with Asia. It will provide momentum to a vital and expanding national industry, broadening the scope of Australian trade in cultural heritage and allied professional services and enhancing the nation's image in Asia. This corresponds with the key objectives of the Australian government's foreign affairs and trade portfolios.
Funding Period: 2006 - 2009
Investigators: Prof WS Logan, Dr CD Long, Dr F Qian (APD), Mr KJ Reeves
Summary: This project will contribute to theoretical and practical discourses relevant to Australia's cultural heritage industry. Its findings will have implications for the work of national and state industry bodies (Australian Heritage Council, Australian Dept of Environment and Heritage, Heritage Victoria) and professional organisations (Australia ICOMOS). The project findings may lead to concrete results such as the addition of new places to international, national and state heritage registers and their protection for the benefit of the community at large. The project will also provide Early Career Researcher training and enhance possibilities for future research collaboration with heritage and tourism industry partners.
Funding Period: 2005 - 2008
Investigators: Prof CM Bradford, A/Prof W Ommundsen
Summary: This project will generate new knowledge - theoretical, methodological and pedagogical - through its interdisciplinaryapproach, which brings critical and cultural theories to bear on Australian children's literature from 1990 to 2003, and specifically on how this literature represents and advocates cultural values and meanings concerning migration, citizenship, multiculturalism and community relations. It will result in the first major study of the production and reception of multicultural literature for Australian children, and will make an important contribution to pedagogy by informing the fields of primary, secondary and tertiary education through the concepts it develops and the teaching resources it produces.
Funding Period 2004 - 2006
Investigator: Dr S Srivastava
Summary: The intensification of urbanisation in South Asia calls for new ways of understanding the politics of identity, and social complexity. This project will explore ways in which urban spaces (such as places of worship, streetscapes, markets, festival grounds, procession routes, and 'neighbourhoods') are used by different groups as a fundamental principle of organising social relations, including transmission of culture and creation of identity. This interdisciplinary project argues that historicism - an exclusive temporal emphasis - can not capture the fundamental relationship between spaces and social processes that shapes contemporary cultural and social complexity in South Asia.
Funding Period: 2004 - 2006
Investigator: A/Prof B He
Administering Institution: University of Tasmania
Summary: This project is aimed to study how various participatory and deliberative institutions are pursued and promoted by peasants and residents in local governance in China. It is the first study that builds a bridge between Western theory of deliberative democracy and Chinese deliberative practice, adding to our knowledge of local participatory institutions in local China, contributing to a better design of, and improvement of, these institutions, and developing lessons and policy implications that will be broadly applicable not only to most parts of China, but also to other developing countries and beyond.
Funding Period: 2004 - 2007
Investigators: Dr LM McCredden, Dr FM Devlin-Glass, A/Prof BD Ashcroft
Summary: The dominant myth of Australian culture has stressed its modern, post-religious secularism. This project, focussing on Australian literature since 1940, challenges this most tenacious myth, current in the wider culture and in Australian literary scholarship. It will investigate how the contemporary sacred is transforming in the context of urgent recent claims to the sacred by indigenous peoples, migrants and women. This project will redefine and systematize what sacredness might mean in a supposedly secular Australian culture. It will produce a new model of the sacred in Australian literary history and make significant interventions in post-colonial debates.
Funding Period 2004 - 2007
Investigators Dr GJ Barton, A/Prof SM Kenny
Summary: This study aims to understand and monitor forms and applications of capacity-building in progressive Islamic/Muslim NGOs in Indonesia, over a four year period, in the context of profound social, economic and political change, in order to better understand how best to strengthen such groups and to assist them to become more effective. It will significantly increase our understanding of the complex cultural issues that influence these groups in their efforts to professionalise, build capacity and contribute to civil society. It will identify areas in which Western misunderstandings of Muslim culture and society have limited the effectiveness of capacity building programs.
Funding Period: 2003 - 2004
Investigators: A/Prof RT Howe, Prof GJ Davison, Prof WS Logan
Summary: As the economy of Melbourne's central and inner areas has been transformed over the last three
decades, conflicts over urban redevelopment have impacted significantly on governance, urban policies and inner city communities. By studying the new generation of activists attracted to Melbourne's working class suburbs in the 1960s, this project will push beyond gentrification interpretations of urban change to examine the motivations of activists and the process of forging participatory structures of governance and community partnerships. The project will assess the significance of this period of transition for managing urban development in the new millennium.
Funding Period: 2003 - 2005
Investigators: Dr DM Lowe, Prof DR Walker, Dr CW Waters
Summary: This project will be the first comprehensive study of Australia's involvement in the Colombo Plan for aid to South and Southeast Asia. It will examine this involvement as a central part of Australia's engagement with Asia in the post-war period. It will do so under three main headings: Australian foreign policy; cultural diplomacy; and the internationalisation of higher education. The project will be innovative in bridging the gap between histories of Australian foreign policy and cultural histories of Australian-Asian relations. It will provide an excellent foundation for on-going research into the consequent reconfiguring of our identity as an Asia-Pacific nation.
Funding Period: 2003 - 2005
Investigators: Dr D Kingsbury, Dr L McCulloch (APD)
Summary: Despite Suharto's fall, and limited reform process, the Indonesian military (TNI) remains deeply involved in Indonesian politics, at Cabinet level, and in state maintenance. The TNI also has substantial economic interests, about two-thirds of which is illegal. The TNI is therefore still central to Indonesia's political processes, and constitutes the major impediment to Indonesia's democratisation. This project will locate military reform within a broader Security Sector Reform agenda, assess the likelihood of further voluntary TNI reform and external reform drivers, and structural problems facing this process. It will analyse the TNI's reform process, and investigate options for bilateral reform assistance.
Funding Period: 2003 - 2005
Investigators: Dr W Ommundsen, Prof MF Meehan, Dr DW Mccooey
Summary: Literature is not simply a body of texts; it is a cultural technology, affected by changing patterns of production and consumption. Witness the 'cult of celebrity', the phenomenal recent growth of literary festivals, literary internet sites, reading groups, changing patterns of literary marketing, education, employment and leisure. Academic scholarship, largely text-based, fails to engage with these public and popular phenomena. Our project develops methods for describing and evaluating how these practices construct literary value and cultural identity, in ways that will bring academic literary analysis into a more informed, more creative engagement with public and popular culture in Australia.
Funding Period: 2003 - 2005
Investigators: Dr J Clemens, Dr RA Grigg, Prof H Krips
Summary: Psychoanalysis has always wanted to be a science. From Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan, disputes in psychoanalysis have typically hinged on the question of whether the knowledge produced by psychoanalysis deserves the appellation scientific. If so, in what way? If not, why not? What sort of psychoanalytic institution would be adequate to psychoanalysis' scientific claims? This interdisciplinary project is a historical, critical and constructive examination of psychoanalytic theory and practice, which re-examines key texts from the vantage point of the scientific question. Finally, the project will ask what psychoanalysis can contribute to the understanding of other scientific practices.
Funding Period: 2003 - 2005
Investigators: A/Prof CM Bradford, Dr R McCallum, Dr KM Mallan, A/Prof JA Stephens
Summary: Political and cultural instabilities and conflicts from 1990 to the present have profoundly affected children's literature. Works of fiction in particular have deployed utopian and dystopian tropes to project possible futures to their implied readers. The project uses the concept of 'transformative utopianism' to suggest that these tropes do important social, cultural and political work by challenging and reformulating ideas about power and identity, community, the body, spatio-temporal change, and ecology. In this way the project draws together multiple theoretical interpretations of texts to demonstrate the responsiveness of children's literature to broader ideological, social, theoretical and pedagogical contexts.
Funding Period: 2002 - 2004
Investigators: Dr Sanjay Srivastava, Prof JG Sinclair, Dr K Jain (APD)
Summary: Since the economic liberalisation beginning in the late 1980s and the introduction of direct broadcast satellite television in 1991, television in India has become a highly dynamic and selfreflexive agent for an increasingly 'globalised' sensibility. This study seeks to examine the process in which a commercial, mass-mediated public culture has been generated. By engaging in an innovative and systematic approach which will integrate direct studies of audiences, program production, modes of commercialization and the role of the state, the study will provide the basis for a definitive book on this key aspect of Indian media culture.
Funding Period: 2002 - 2005
Investigators: Dr Sue Kenny, Dr KM Brown, A/Prof JA Onyx, Prof TW Burke
Summary: Active citizenship is a key concept in debates around the nature of civil society and the changing forms of citizenship. To date, grounded studies of the concept have been few. The project's significance lies in its focus on developing indicators of active citizenship. This enables the empirical charting of active citizenship. The comparative aspect to the project will heighten our ability to understand these processes in Australia in relation to other countries.
Funding Period: 2002 - 2005
Investigators: Prof William Logan, Dr MR Askew, Dr MC Langfield, Dr J Sweet, Dr A Smith (APD), Mr CD Long (APD)
Summary: Economic globalisation is accompanied by cultural globalisation. Whether to accept or attempt to resist this impact on local cultures is a critical issue for communities and governments throughout the Asia-Pacific region. This project will identify and evaluate those activities of UNESCO and its associated bodies, ICOMOS, ICOM and ICCROM, that tend to impose a common stamp on cultures across the world, as well as the local resistance to those activities. Four fields covering tangible and intangible culture will be investigated: heritage places, museums, folklife and heritage education. Outcomes include improved heritage management; outputs include a book and refereed journal
articles.
