Critical Research Association Melbourne

CRAM is an open network for people working across the various disciplines of critical studies today, based at the University of Melbourne. CRAM is dedicated to supporting collaboration between researchers in the humanities, economics, architecture and design, law, and the arts, and to fostering the strong collective interest in critical thought in Melbourne.

Our current activities include weekly reading groups and seminar series, supervising and mentoring graduate and early-career researchers, hosting interdisciplinary symposia, and undertaking collaborative research projects.

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung Peoples of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the unceded land on which the University stands, and pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging.

Convenors:

Justin Clemens (Arts)

Justin Clemens is an Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy, poetry, and contemporary Australian art and literature.

Email: jclemens@unimelb.edu.au

Joe Hughes (Arts)

Joe Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely on post-war French thought and the history of the novel.

Email: joseph.hughes@unimelb.edu.au

Jessica Marian (Arts)

Jessica Marian recently completed her PhD on the genre of review in post-war French philosophy and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Culture and Communication.

Email: jessica.marian@unimelb.edu.au

Elliot Patsoura (Arts)

Elliot Patsoura recently completed his PhD on the concept of recapitulation in German Idealism and psychoanalysis. He currently teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and has published research in Angelaki, New Literary History, and Parrhesia.

Email: epatsoura@unimelb.edu.au

Associates:

Danny Butt (VCA)

Dr Danny Butt is Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Practice and Graduate Research Convenor for Design and Production at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. His book Artistic Research in the Future Academy was published by Intellect/University of Chicago Press in 2017. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal for Artistic Research; is co-convenor of the Asia Pacific Artistic Research Network and works with the art collective Local Time.

Email: danny.butt@unimelb.edu.au

Lucy Benjamin (Melbourne School of Design)

Lucy Benjamin is a postdoctoral research fellow in architectural philosophy at the Melbourne School of Design. She has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of London. Her current research explores practices and conditions of repair broadly construed and she has previously written on feminist ethics and Hannah Arendt.

Email: l.benjamin1@unimelb.edu.au

Hélène Frichot (Melbourne School of Design)

Hélène Frichot is an architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, and Professor of Architecture and Philosophy in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is Guest Professor and the former Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, as well as Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, in the School of Architecture, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, where she was based between 2012-2019.

Email: helene.frichot@unimelb.edu.au

Joeri Mol (Business & Economics)

Joeri Mol is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies and Co-Director of the Cluster for the study of Organisation Society and Markets (COSM) at the University of Melbourne. He researches markets—both inside and outside organisation and is particularly interested in processes of financialisation and evaluation and how price and value are brought into an often-uneasy relationship.

Email: jmol@unimelb.edu.au

Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne Law School)

Sundhya Pahuja is the Director of the Laureate Research Program in Global Corporations and International Law, Director of Melbourne Law School's Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), and the Director of Studies for the master’s programs in International Law, and Law and Development. She is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. Sundhya’s research focuses on the history, theory, and practice of international law in historical context. She has a particular interest in international law and the relationship between global North and South countries

Email: s.pahuja@unimelb.edu.au

Elizabeth Presa (VCA)

Elizabeth Presa is an artist who teaches critical art theory and sculpture at the VCA, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music.  From 2003-2018 she was the Head of the VCA’s Centre for Ideas, an interdisciplinary centre focusing on the critical engagement between the visual and performing Arts and Philosophy. Elizabeth’s sculpture practice experiments with environmentally sustainable materials and processes including ancient casting and moulding and construction techniques.

Email: epresa@unimelb.edu.au

Lisa Radford (VCA)

Lisa Radford is an artist, writer and Lecturer in Art, Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her work explores the shared socio-political space between images, place and people. Conversation and collaboration form the fundamental basis of her processes and methodology as means for creating iterative and generative texts, exhibitions and seminars that span a range of media including painting, publishing, performance and installation.

Email: lradford@unimelb.edu.au

One of the defining features of the tradition of critical studies is its interdisciplinary scope: its themes, methods, and arguments transformed disciplines as wide-ranging as architecture, legal studies, literary history, commerce, musicology, neuroscience, art history, computer science, and Indigenous studies over the past forty years, as scholars in these fields reflected on their own conditions and practices. Critique itself however has no disciplinary home – most people working in the tradition are based in programs whose defining objects of reflection lie elsewhere.

With the rise of conspiracy theories as a political reality and mode of entertainment, with the reappearance of virulent nationalisms, with the failure of governments and other large institutions to respond to the immediacy of climate change, there have been wide and public calls for a new critical culture. What would a mode of critique adequate to these problems look like, and how might they best circulate inside and outside the academy? CRAM brings together researchers and practitioners from across the University to address these problems and aims to facilitate a substantive engagement with the very concept of critique, its legacy, its uses, and its future.

CRAM is associated with a variety of independent reading groups dedicated to intensive study of significant figures, texts and movements in the history of critical philosophy and theory including Auerbach, Badiou, Critical Race Theory, Deleuze, Freud, Hyppolite, Hegel, Lacan, Marx, and Spinoza. Further details here.