Research

The research project draws upon creative ethnography methodologies to explore how loneliness is experienced in Asian-Australian diasporic communities. The project will focus on the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese communities, and within the demographics of young people (aged 18-25). It will involve focus groups, interviews, story circles to record the way that young Asian-Australians experie­­­nce loneliness. The data will be drawn upon to create a documentary, an exhibition, and a full length monograph

The Climate Change Communication and Narratives Network (CCCNN) is inviting a proposal from a PhD candidate to examine the critical factors shaping climate change communication in this crucial decade for action. The science on climate change is settled, and it is now social and cultural factors that will determine how – and indeed whether – we deal with climate change with the action that is needed in this decade. The way we communicate on climate change in the broadest sense is now critical to addressing the climate crisis. A project proposal is invited that maps and analyses the assumptions, intentions, modes, strategies and tools of climate change communication in public contexts to enhance the actions and the structural and imaginative changes required to mitigate climate change. The project will also examine public opinion and concern in relation to climate change, and identify better communicative avenues and strategies for tipping public concern into action. A successful proposal will align closely with the aims of CCCNN, which has an outward facing imperative. Any proposal will therefore need to include a consideration of how the project might engender real-world action and effective change in seeking to understand how better to communicate climate change

DML 1: Digital Ethnography of Children with a Vision Impairment

This PhD project involves the development and application of an ethnographic probe to examine the journey children with a vision impairment undertake from first diagnosis through treatment. The project (led by Rosemary Woodcock) will provide insight into the lived experiences of visually impaired children that will inform educational media for research stakeholders such as Vision Australia. The research will be conducted within the context of an interdisciplinary research team and situated within the disciplines of the Deakin Motion Lab (DML) through its focus on advancing visual methodologies and gamified and playful approaches to engagement. The project will also build upon child-centred methodologies that can engage families remotely and is designed with COVID19 conditions in mind through its use of a digital methodology to allow connectedness. The probe at the heart of the research methodology involves a toybox and an app that are designed to engage young children and provide prompts for journaling and digital story telling.

DML 2: Making Motion Tangible

Positioned at the border of two worlds, this research project will consider ways for the physical and the virtual to combine via immersive multimodal haptics. Deakin Motion Lab is experimenting with novel interfaces to enrich human interactions between the digital and the physical through case studies in different application domains including training, education, and entertainment.

At DML, the candidate will have the opportunity to work with an advanced wearable capable of full body motion and biometric capture, and haptic control (Teslasuit) to forward experimental research design. They will collaborate with other DML researchers in developing capacities for: a telepresent immersive anti-gravity student experience on earth for the International Space Station Orbital University (led by Russell Kennedy); dancing between worlds via the Virtual Now project to increase the embodiment of dancers and connection with their real-world audience (led by Olivia Millard); and to revolutionise Occupational Health and Safety training in VR via force feedback with industry partner KANE (led by Stefan Greuter).

Also open to alternative cases, DML’s work is centred on active human bodies interacting with and through technology to contribute knowledge towards how haptic interfaces can provide benefit in the physical world, or how the digitality of objects and persons can be made tangible. The project aligns with DML’s vision of putting ideas into motion by engaging with new forms of technology, communication, expression, and performance to better understand and inform the design of interactive experiences.

This funded HDR research project will assist DML’s objective to build research capacity, increase collaboration, and produce quality research outputs. The emerging field of haptic feedback also provides opportunity to accelerate the impact of our work by generating practical industry projects and outcomes, stimulating public debate, and increasing DML’s international research engagements with leading academic institutions.

DML 3: Augmenting Greener Futures

The disconnection between people and natural landscapes is well documented and concerns us all given its impact on well-being and imagining sustainable futures. Moreover, emerging technologies, such as VR/AR, provide immersive and engaging experiences that can effectively reduce the disconnection between people and natural landscapes to positively impact on well-being. This is even more significant during the time of coronavirus isolation where such technologies can be deployed. The problem for solving in this project (led by Toija Cinque) is that students and the public don't often get opportunities to learn from scientists about what is happening in our ecosystems. There is an imperative to support people (across Australia and beyond) to learn alongside our scientists. Accessing such science can support the public to value biodiversity and work towards developing sustainable futures. This project seeks candidates keen to investigate the capacity for learning about local science from research scientists through digitally mediated technologies (VR/AR) to enhance and deepen student learning and radiate outward to engaged extended family and communities more broadly.

4.  Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network

This project will examine relationships between gender, sexuality and belonging through a study of how gender and sexual difference is archived and remembered. Focusing on relationships between the representation, documentation and interpretation of gender and sexual diversity within formal and informal contexts of archiving and memory work, this project will gather new data and develop new insights about how gender and sexual difference gets remembered. This project will engage with relevant stakeholders/beneficiaries (e.g. community archives, local councils and institutions like schools/universities) who have an investment in investigating new approaches to studying cultural histories of sexual and gender difference, and their relationships to belonging. Other potential outcomes include recommendations to stakeholder organisations on memory work in relation to sexual and gender difference. This research project will contribute to research regarding archives, memory, and cultural histories within the Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network.

5. Global Digital Publics Network (GDPN)

We are interested in PhD projects that push knowledge on how digital networks connect, transform, augment, and govern publics. One specific project (led by David Marshall) will investigate influencers who make digital identities and personas visible in ways that move across national, language, and cultural divides. The techniques employed by these influencers may provide intercultural pathways that reflect an extension of the GDPN’s research into the active curation of emotion in digital culture shaping experiences that have previously been identified within language and national/ethnic cultural groups; this work may also identify new forms of cultural politics including how state actors are entering this space. One specific project (led by Luke Heemsbergen) will consider how the socialisation of Augmented Reality (AR) creates novel forms of identity, surveillance, and publics. It may ask how industry, research, and users react, engage, and reconfigure AR media in novel practices afforded in context. It will apply a critical methodology to technical fields to produce new insights into AR as socio-technical media infrastructures, asking how we use AR and how AR uses us.

6. Literature and its Readers Network

Literature and its Readers focuses on the analysis of literary form and textuality, literary production, and reception studies. We are particularly interested in projects that focus on the following areas: children’s and young adult literature; Australian and New Zealand literature; diasporic literature; poetry and poetics; popular and genre fiction (especially fantasy, magical realism, romance and science fiction); fan culture; literatures of place and environment; narratives of extremism or activism; feminist and LGBTQIA+ literatures; literature and the body; literature and philosophy; Victorian literature; modernism; and literature and comedy. The research cluster is also interested in interdisciplinary approaches to literature that draws scholarship into fields such as print culture, book history, and the digital humanities. We are also interested in projects that include archival or quantitative research methods and projects that focus on intersectionality are particularly welcome. The project may be based at the Burwood, Waurn Ponds, or Warrnambool campus.

7. Religion, Society and Culture

Religion — beliefs and believers, institutions, social justice contributions, personal spirituality — plays a crucial role in areas of health, well-being, and safe and secure communities. While so-called secular Australia is in constant dialogue (and sometimes tension) with religion at the institutional level (child abuse, inter-faith disputes, the roles of women, other beliefs which seem to contradict the public policies of society), the contributions of religious leaders and believers are multiple. The Network is concerned with how such debates can be more fully acknowledged and considered, especially in relation to the growing recognition of Indigenous Australian spiritual beliefs, and in the increasing presence of Moslem, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist and other religious faiths. What does “Australia” have to say in the dialogue between faiths and between secular and religious worldviews? Proposals for a PhD project that would investigate the role played by religion either historically and/or in contemporary cultures are sought. It might be based in policy-making (potential supervisors are Ana Halafoff and Andrew Singleton), educational studies, ideological or theological approaches (Lyn McCredden, Ly Hon Tan). Supervisors in the Network for Religion, Society and Culture have a range of expertise in religious studies, with particular strengths in Buddhist studies (John Power, Ana Halafoff), Indigenous and postcolonial studies (Joanna Cruikshank, Lyn McCredden, Gillian Tan), fundamentalisms, religion and conspiracy theories (Geoff Boucher, Ana Halafoff, Andrew Singleton), evangelicalism, media and religion.

8.  Rural Communications Cluster

This project seeks a compelling proposal from a PhD candidate within the field of media and communications to examine factors shaping liveability and innovation in rural/regional and agricultural communities in a digitised world. The project may identify a key societal challenge or opportunity facing rural Australia in the COVID-19 era and examine how media and communication practices may shape or hinder transformative change within this space. Projects may examine, for example, perceptions and mediated representations of rural places and issues; changing digital media practices; local journalism; brand and advertising trends; the rise of misinformation and its impact on the agricultural sector; and/or stories of inspirational rural women. Projects with a potential interdisciplinary focus are encouraged.

9. Writing & Communication Cluster

‘Writing the Anthropocene’ is a proposed project for a funded HDR candidate that looks to the ways in which the reading, writing, decoding and inscribing of the Anthropocene can help us better understand and respond to the ways in which humans as a species have become agents of the planet’s future, even as individual humans express hopelessness with regard to reversing anthropogenic climate change. The project is predicated on the belief that in its formal, imaginative, and affective power, literature can not only respond to the Anthropocene, but it can also offer necessary models of sustainability and hope.