Strategic Research Centre

Memory, imagination and invention are three pre-conditions for sustaining communities and environments. The Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention (CMII) comprises a unique interdisciplinary group that addresses these interrelated concerns from both theoretical and applied perspectives. CMII’s primary aim is to promote the highest level of research excellence and become the foremost international centre in the field. To this end CMII will produce new knowledge about ancient and contemporary places and texts, cultural practices, and environmental and social change. The research will be distinctive in its combination of the methodologies of critique and creativity, as well as interdisciplinary methods.

The practice of critique will enable cultural images, texts, and artifacts to be analysed with reference to their contribution to sustainable communities. From the perspective of creativity, much of the research will be directed toward producing improvements in the social and environmental fabric. This latter research will be applied in real-world settings through partnerships with external agencies. Deploying innovative methods drawn from the disciplines of cultural heritage studies, museology, architecture, literary studies, creative arts and design, CMII will forge ground-breaking projects focusing on themes including spatiality, cross-cultural engagement, innovative technologies, and the operation of memory. The major objective here is to apply the insights of creative and humanities-based research to a range of socio-cultural and environmental problems.

Building on the expertise represented in its members, CMII responds to a growing recognition that scenarios for future sustainability based exclusively on instrumentalist, rational paradigms fail to produce community engagement. The core remit of CMII is to address this problem of global import through the application of creative and humanities based research techniques to the challenge of visioning the future differently. Visioning is traditionally used rhetorically to make sectarian interests palatable. The mission of CMII is to retrieve its far larger symbolic, poetic or creative meaning, which is to envisage methodically and rigorously a range of possible future situations.

Through its interdisciplinary projects CMII aims to broker research partnerships with agencies responsible for public domain governance at regional, state, national and international levels. The aim will be to explore scenarios for the management of change that fully incorporate the creative, critical and cultural resources of communities.

A Deakin University Strategic Research Centre