Research

Current Research Themes and Projects

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.

  • ARC Discovery Project (DP220103633), Journals in Theory: Practices of Academic Judgment’

    This project aims to examine the way key journals transformed the discipline of literary studies from 1946 to now. It expects to generate new knowledge of how editorial practices of academic judgement institutionalised and legitimated new modes of reading, thinking, and writing. Based on archival research on journals including Critical Inquiry, Tel Quel, and The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, the project’s outcomes will show how, in bringing together new intellectual passions, governance structures and imagined readerships, journals bestowed on critical its current working definition. Expected benefits include a better account of the relationship between conceptual innovation and institutional mechanisms for research integrity.

  • As with any relation there are different points of departure. And here that relation defines a locus of academic research.

    To start with philosophy: Philosophy continues to define itself in relation to poetry. At one extreme, the identification of philosophy with a form of scientificity occurs because of the elimination of any possible relation to the literary; the most emphatic form of which is poetry.  At the other, the presence of poetic language is taken as harbouring the truths of the philosophical project itself. As such, different points of engagement emerge.

    To start with poetry: Research on poetry demands philosophy. Here there are two domains. Firstly, the writing of poetry within any given historical context is involved in a complex forms of dialogue with prevailing philosophical and theological ideas. Secondly, beyond that which is delimited contextually, poetry calls on philosophy – a certain  version of the philosophical – in order that both its language and content can be configured as loci of interpretation.

    While there are other possible points of connection, the aim of the Philosophy Poetry Research Group is to provide a setting in which activates central to research on the philosophy/poetry relation can be undertaken.

  • This project aims to investigate the relationship between Nation States, Nuclear Colonisation, military histories through Art and Architecture in Australia and the South Pacific to critically examine the way memory is recorded, presented, and disseminated asking how Australian Society processes representations of history. Many Artists will contribute to the project as means for examining historical narratives that interrupt those held in official archives to reveal settler and First Nation experiences of the Military Industrial Complex in Australia and abroad. Of enormous national benefit, the project hopes to reveal the complex and diverse experiences of many groups highlighting through comparison, the way art generates a parallel archive of multiplicity. Outcomes will include major exhibitions in Australia and overseas, an ongoing and open archive and proposal for an ante-memorial including source documents.

  • Since 1980 the Australian humanities have been profoundly transformed by what has come to be known as Theory. The global Theory revolution initiated a wave of new methodological frameworks (deconstructive, feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, decolonial, environmental) that disrupted existing disciplinary formations and created dynamic new ones. Australian thinkers were not passive recipients of these changes but active, pioneering change-makers who shaped significant advances in Theory. While existing intellectual histories of the twentieth century have investigated the radical impacts of Theory in the United States and the United Kingdom, there has been no equivalent study on the Australian context. What has never before been adequately recognised is how important and distinctive Australian innovations have been to this worldwide theoretical revolution, through translation, criticism, editorial work, and institutional sponsorship. This project will be the first substantial study of the impact of Theory on the academic humanities in Australia, and of the importance of Australian thinkers to the development of Theory worldwide.

  • This research stream and seminar series explores the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s four discourses: the University, the Master, the Hysteric and the Analyst, in the academic’s identifications with the university as an institution in crisis (neoliberalism) and in a time of crisis (genocide, economic and climate catastrophe).  As an exploration of the repetitions, defences, and fantasies that underpin psychic investments, what can psychoanalysis teach us in this moment? What can it tell us about the academic’s attachments language, institutions and political praxis that are disintegrating? The seminar series will run as panel discussions which explore these pressing questions and tensions as they arise.

  • Global corporations pose a growing challenge to democracy. The goal of this research program is to generate a breakthrough in approaches to that challenge by investigating the extent to which international law may contribute to the problem, as well as offer the key to potential solutions. The aims of the project are to examine the role of international law in enabling global corporate power, to identify the ways in which international law and institutions can be reformed to limit that power, and to create the world-leading research program and infrastructure on which a more balanced relationship between states and global corporations can be based. This demands both research into the present, and an historical and theoretically informed approach which traces the relationship between companies, state and plural laws from the early modern period to the present day.

  • Critical theorists have long turned their attention to the question of management. They have investigated the form and function of training manuals, techniques of organising bodies, cultivating minds, guiding interactions, and navigating institutional spaces. We wish to turn this attention to the present, to the particularity and complexity of contemporary institutional forms. This research stream takes up this challenge through the examination of actual experiences of managing and of being managed. We question how management mediates between capital and control, how the rules of management are developed, mediated, and employed, and what the impact of these practices on critical thought is, can be, and needs to be.

    View our upcoming and past events for details of our regular Critical Management Studies Seminar.