Members of the History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective
Collective Members
Dr Israel Holas Allimant
Israel Holas is a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research explores issues of identity in Chilean and Latin American literature and popular culture, with a recent emphasis on rock music. Israel interrogates these from an interdisciplinary perspective that is heavily influenced by decolonial thought and Latin American philosophy.
Dr Arnoud Arps
Around is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Arnoud’s research focuses on the position of media and popular culture (with a special interest in film and literature) within the fields of media studies, cultural memory studies, and postcolonial studies with the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia.
Dr Ashley Barnwell
Ashley is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology based in the School of Social and Political Studies at the University of Melbourne. Ashley is interested in sociological aspects of emotions, memory, and narrative, and the role of life writing, archives, and literature in sociological research. She recently held an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship (2020-2023) and is continuing with the project ‘Family Secrets, National Silences: Intergenerational Memory in Settler Colonial Australia’. This project investigates the inherited family secrets, stories, and memories that inform Australians’ understandings of colonial history.
Dr Bronwyn Beech Jones
Bronwyn is a historian of gender and colonialism in Indonesia and the Malay world. Her primary research interests are feminist and decolonial methods of reading, everyday life, education, activism, print culture, and customary knowledges. Bronwyn completed her PhD in 2024 with a dissertation examining women and girls’ life stories and networks of craft education in early-twentieth century Sumatra through periodicals.
Dr Annisa R. Beta
Annisa is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellow and Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research is broadly concerned with youth, new media, and political subjectivity in Southeast Asia.
A/Prof Shameem Black
Shameem is based in the School of Culture History and Language at ANU. She uses critical and creative approaches to analyse globalisation, culture, and gender in twenty-first-century fiction and popular culture in English, with particular attention to India, South Asian diasporas, and the cultural work of English in Asia.
Prof Marieke Bloembergen
Marieke is Professor of Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at the Institute for History and the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.
Dr Sadiah Boonstra
Sadiah is a Historian and Curator with a broad cultural practice. Her research and professional interests focus on the entanglement and legacies of cultural history, heritage and the performing arts of colonial and contemporary Indonesia.
Dr Tania Cañas
Cañas, an artist and researcher, is part of Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, a long-term project to document the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and prevent future violence. Her postdoctoral research which she is undertaking as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Western University in Ontario (Canada) will examine the memory of Salvadorans in Canada and Australia through creative practice, participatory methods and community-led approaches. Among her key research questions: How might initiatives between Salvadorans in Canada and Australia support sustained collaboration and deeper understanding of displacement? How can creative and community-based research approaches develop better understandings of the war-time memories that survive in the diaspora? How do we assemble, share and honor these memories? The research project is described as a “unique opportunity to foster collaboration among transnational displaced Salvadoran communities” in Australia and Canada.
Dr Matthew Champion
Matthew’s is a Senior Lecturer based in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on how time was made, perceived, and experienced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
Prof Deirdre Coleman
Deirdre is a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor based in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines the links between natural history, slavery, and empire, as well as 18th and 19th century literature and cultural history; abolitionism, women's writing, travel, colonialism (West Africa, West Indies, Botany Bay), the development of racial ideology, and the gothic.
Dr Wulan Dirgantoro
Wulan is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art based in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Wulan’s research interests are gender and feminism, and trauma and memory in Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art, with a special focus on Indonesia and Timor-Leste.
Dr Julia Doornbos
Julia’s research examines everyday places and experiences of in- and exclusion; senses of belonging; memory work; postcolonialism; diaspora and forced migration. She is also interested in ethics, reflexivity, positionality and participatory/decolonising approaches within qualitative research.
Simon Farley
Simon Farley is an Assistant Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne. Their work investigates the intersection of science, settler colonialism and human-animal interactions in Australia. Their research has been published in the Journal of Australian Studies and Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A history of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne (Melbourne University Publishing, 2024).
Dr Erin Fitz-Henry
Erin is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology based in SSPS at the University of Melbourne. Erin works primarily on transnational social movements, with a particular interest in movements for the 'rights' of nature in Ecuador, the United States, and Australia.
Prof Chris Healy
Chris is a Professor of Screen and Cultural Studies based in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Chris’s primary interest is Remembering Aboriginality. He has been researching and publishing on the relationships between historical and cultural studies for more than two decades.
Dr Rachel Hughes
Rachel is an Associate Professor in Human Geography, based at the University of Melbourne. Rachel is a human geographer with wide-ranging interests in the geographies of law, geopolitics, public memory and visual and material cultures. Her research has largely focused on issues of memory, justice and geopolitics in reference to late-twentieth century Cambodia.
Dr Julia Hurst
Julia is Lecturer in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History based in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and her research explores fundamental questions of Aboriginal identity in 21st century Australia
Brigitta Isabella
Brigatta's research trajectory revolves around the transnational traffic of artists, objects, and ideas that reshape the critical narratives of global and decolonial art histories. She is a part of KUNCI Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta and serves as the co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Visual Arts in Indonesia Art Institute, Yogyakarta.
Dr James Keating
James is a historian of gender and feminism in 19th and 20th century Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. He has written and published extensively on a range of research interests centring on women’s suffrage movements, transnational feminist organising and its limits, feminist historiography, memory and material culture, and the limits of democracy in settler colonial societies.
Dr Odette Kelada
Odette is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, based in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Odette has a PhD in literature researching the lives of Australian women writers, and her writing focuses on marginalised voices, gender, and racial literacy.
A/Prof Rosanne Kennedy
Rosanne is an Associate Professor in Literary Studies and Gender Sexuality & Culture at ANU. Rosanne’s research interests cover trauma, memory and witnessing in Australia and transnational contexts; Holocaust studies; Stolen Generations; life-writing studies; feminist theory; cultural theory; literary theory; 19th and 20th century novel; women writers; law and literature; gender and modernity.
Dr Lia Kent
Lia is a Senior Fellow/Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance in the College of Asia and the Pacific at ANU. Lia's research is interested in the myriad ways in which individuals and communities make sense of legacies of state violence and protracted conflict. She is especially interested in how vernacular practices of social repair intersect with states' regulatory and governance practices and global peacebuilding discourses.
Astrid Kerchman
Astrid is a research assistant, lecturer, and coordinator in the Gender Studies programme at Utrecht University. Astrid is the former project coordinator of MOED Museum of Equality and Difference.
Dr Mati Keynes
Mati is a non-Indigenous scholar working on unceded and sovereign Wurundjeri land. Their research investigates the ways that education contributes to justice, peace, and social transformation by repairing historical injustices and legacies of violence.
Prof Zoe Laidlaw
Zoe is a Professor in History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Zoe’s primary expertise lies in the nineteenth-century history of the British Empire, and her work encompasses imperial networks and governance; humanitarianism; settler colonialism and Indigenous-settler relations; slavery, its abolition and legacies (including especially in Australia); the imperial state; commissions of inquiry; the creation of imperial knowledge; and collective biography.
Dr. Grace Leksana
Grace is an Assistant Professor in Indonesian History at Utrecht University with a strong focus on interdisciplinary research around memory with an interest also in anthropology. Grace received a doctoral degree from KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.
Dr Ravando Lie
Dr Ravando Lie is a historian of Indonesia who focuses on researching the ethnic Chinese community, a historically marginalised group in Indonesia. He is currently undertaking a postdoctoral fellow at Monash University History Program.
Dr. Lynda Ng
Lynda is a Lecturer in English Literary Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Lynda’s research encompasses Australian literature (with particular emphasis on Aboriginal literature), Chinese literature (especially diasporic literature) and postcolonial literatures (including migrant fiction). She is also interested in the intersection of economics and literature, with a focus on neoliberalism.
Dr. Larissa Schulte Nordholt
Larissa is a postdoc at Wageningen University & Research, currently working on a commissioned book about the colonial history of the Agricultural University and College. Her research focuses on the history of colonial, postcolonial and decolonial knowledge production, use and exchange. She is particularly interested in the history of environmental knowledges.
Prof Kat McFerran
Kat is a Professor of Creative Arts Therapies in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the affordances of music for health and wellbeing, particularly the ways that young people use music. She is interested in a range of ideas from musical pleasure to ruminating with music and has investigated these phenomena from many angles using diverse methods.
Dr Andonis Piperoglou
Andonis is a specialist in migration and ethnic history based in School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and has published extensively on Greek Australian history. He works on historical connections between colonialism, racism, and migration, as well as human movements between the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
Amirahvelda Priyono
Amirahvelda is an independent art researcher focusing on photography, politics and war in Southeast Asia. For the Indonesian context, she is interested in advocating the history of art schools in Indonesia for further art education development, resisting living memory, and understanding history with an intergenerational approach.
Prof. Susie Protschky
Susie is a Professor of Global Political History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Susie’s expertise is in modern Dutch colonialism, Indonesian history, and the history of photography. Her research ranges across visual cultures of war and violence, environment and natural disaster, gender, race and citizenship.
Dr CQ Quinan
CQ is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. CQ’s expertise lies in the fields of trans studies and queer theory, with a particular focus on examining how anxieties around nationality and racial difference come to be transposed onto queer, trans and gender diverse bodies and subjectivities.
Dr Ken Setiawan
Ken is a Senior Lecturer in Indonesian Studies in the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Ken’s research interests include globalisation and human rights, as well as historical violence and transitional justice.
Dr Abdul Wahid
Abdul Wahid is teaching staff at the Department of History, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He earned his bachelor's and master's degree there, his M.Phil. from Leiden University, and his PhD from Utrecht University. His book on the political-economic of taxation in colonial Indonesia was published in Bahasa Indonesia in 2020. From 2017 until 2021 he was a research fellow at the KITLV Leiden to conduct research about Indonesia in transition: A History from Revolution to Nation Building, 1943-1958. From 2018-2022, he was coordinating the research collaboration between UGM and KITLV on The Regional Studies, a sub of the research project on Independence, Decolonization, Violence, and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950 organized by three Dutch’s research institutes: NIOD, KITLV, and NIMH.
A/Prof Jini Kim Watson
Jini is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne. Her scholarship and teaching lie at the intersection of postcolonial literature and theory; decolonisation and the global Cold War in Asia; the urban humanities; and transpacific migration. Her most recent monograph is Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021).
Prof Sonja van Winchelen
Sonia is a Professor of Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. Sonia’s research takes place on the cross-disciplinary node of law, life, and science in a globalising world. She is currently working on the postcolonial politics of bioscience governance in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Indonesia.
Dr Antonia Wimbush
Antonia is a Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research investigates how forgotten and marginalised historical events in the French-speaking world (primarily in the French Caribbean) have been remembered in literature, film, and visual culture.
Prof Sara Wills
Sara is currently the Deputy Dean (External Relations) in the Faculty of Arts and Head of Program for the Executive Master of Arts in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Sara’s research focuses on migration, multicultural and refugee histories, with particular reference to memory and museum studies.
Dr Abbie Yunita
Abbie is a postdoctoral researcher at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University. Her current research investigates articulations of cultural heritage and climate change in Indonesia and the Netherlands: the narratives/images that mediate meanings of heritage, their place in climate adaptation and mitigation, and their implications on how heritage is seen, valued, practised and governed.
PhD and Honours Students
See our PhD and Honours students and their research abstracts
Zico Albaiquni
Lukisan, negotiation through the evolution of painting
This study explores the evolution of painting in Indonesia, examining its pre-colonial roots and colonial-era transformations. It questions how this evolution influenced modern ideation and contributed to the decolonisation of painting concepts. The research employs collage as a method, utilising historical images from various sources, and considers the negotiation of representation within these depictions. Colour transformation is another pivotal aspect, as it disrupts traditional narratives and introduces new perspectives. This project aims to challenge hierarchical and classificatory lenses applied to ancestral depictions, contributing to the broader discourse on decolonisation and the power of creative praxis in reshaping cultural narratives.
Jacobin Bosman
Abominable Crimes, Queer Cases: Institutional Cartographies of the Settler-Capitalist Civic Body at its Outer Limits, Victoria and South Australia 1835-1901.
Turning away from a focus on identity, historians of sexuality and gender have increasingly acknowledged the centrality of defining, controlling and policing sexuality and gender to the settler-capitalist project. Taking Victoria and South Australia as case studies, this thesis therefore interrogates how institutional responses to sexual and gender transgression amongst settler populations were used to map the boundaries of the colonial civic body. Working across legal, colonial and economic histories, I argue that sexual and gender transgression-- rather than notions of normativity-- provided a key framework for assessing settler utility for the colonial project.
Asangi Mira Gunawansa
Understanding the Mental Load of Immigrant Mothers
Immigrant mothers lie at the heart of historical and present-day global migration patterns, and are a demographic critical to the dynamics of socio-economics and the wellbeing of our communities.
In our ever-growing multicultural society, it is critical to unlearn ways of knowledge sourcing, development and valuation. By incorporating a gendered focus on migration and family studies, this project adopts an actively decolonial approach to best understand and unpack the un/under-recognised complexities and intersectional considerations of Immigrant Mother’s Mental Loads and their role in the protection, empowerment and direction of their kin. Oral histories through qualitative interviews inform the recollection of memory and experience amongst the world’s growing immigrant population and their intersectional experiences of resettlement and putting down roots in new homes.
The lack of acknowledgement and accommodation of these factors in migrant integration initiatives - which are already insufficient, often inappropriate, and unsustainable - increasingly contribute to the cycles of pressure and challenges immigrants face, as well as the intergenerational influence and impacts on future generations. This finding of this thesis, if acknowledged and adopted appropriately, presents the opportunity to break this cycle of painful memory and disparity in immigration history.
Chitrangi Kakoti
Women’s Stories as Counter-Narratives: Building Feminist Digital Archives against Sexual Violence in India
This project aims to study ongoing efforts by feminist NGOs in India to build feminist digital archives to document sexual violence against women. Documentation of women’s stories of sexual violence has been important to ensure that women’s narratives become a part of national histories, and to counter the masculinist and patriarchal foundations of the postcolonial Indian nation-state. With the advent of the digital age, a new space has emerged to document and archive women’s stories, which also challenges the techno-masculinist dimensions of the nation-building project under the current right-wing Hindutva regime in India. By centering the material and embodied nature of sexual violence within the context of postcolonial nation-building and citizenship, this research project aims to explore feminist digital archives and archival practices as forms of decolonial embodied resistance against increasing violence, surveillance and hegemonic Hindutva nationalist discourses that also rely on decolonial rhetoric. The project will further explore collective feminist archival practices needed to sustain accessible and inclusive digital archives as well as politics of representation, in/visibility and silences that are inherent to archiving processes.
Raisa Kamila
Sensing Order: Space, Society, and Colonial Infrastructure in 19th- and 20th- Century Aceh
My research project examines the production of space in Dutch East Indies by looking at the development, repurposing, and eventual decline of the railway system in Aceh. Construction of the railway system began in 1876, shortly after the opening of Suez Canal and the establishment of Agrarian Law in Dutch East Indies. I aim to present the construction of railway network along the east coast of Aceh together with the Dutch invasion as motivated by spatial ambitions. Situated within scholarship on colonial Aceh, which at one hand have focused on popular resistance (Ibrahim Alfian, Anthony Reid, Isa Sulaiman) and the other, concerning matters related to the environment (Gade Ismail, Emmanuel Kreike, Matthew Minarchek), my research addresses the ways in which people sense, negotiate, and subvert colonialism through their everyday space. It does so by combining oral history accounts, archival materials —ranging from colonial reports, correspondences, maps, photographs, and periodicals— with a close reading of literary works such as memoirs, travelogue, and novels. By reading various source materials closely and together, this research wishes to unpack new ways of knowing and narrating the production of space in the Dutch East Indies while also seek to decentering the growing field of history of infrastructure from its focus on the Global North.
Arthur Knight
Art of The Lost Future: Cultural Memory of Martial Law in Philippine Visual Art
"Art of the Lost Future" is a study of visual art created during and after the period of martial law in the Philippines—a time marked by the authoritarian presidency of Ferdinand E. Marcos, who consolidated total political power, oversaw numerous human rights violations, and was ultimately ousted in 1986 by the mass protests known as the People Power Revolution. This study explores the connections between visual art and cultural memory in the post-Marcos Philippines, specifically examining the link between the memorialization of martial law and the revolutionary aspirations that defined the era. These aspirations encompass Marcos's grandiose nationalism as well as the anti-authoritarian, democratic, and socialist hopes that briefly came to fruition in the People Power Revolution of 1986, which led to Marcos's expulsion from the country.
In doing so, the work seeks to analyse the colonial and authoritarian legacies that have shaped the many political, economic, and social inequalities in post-Marcos Philippines. This decolonial perspective highlights the role of art in intervening to produce more inclusive and truthful accounts of the nation's past and future as well as subverting dominant narratives shaped by colonial structures of power, the ultimate expression of which in the post-independence period being Marcos. As decolonial memory work, this research delves into how these artistic representations challenge dominant historical narratives and offer alternative visions of the nation's past and future, thus contributing to a broader understanding of cultural memory and decolonization in the Philippines.
Thu Le
Lost nations, spaces, and times: Memories and imagination of the Second Indochina War and South Việt Nam in present-day Việt Nam and Australia
The Second Indochina War (the ‘Vietnam War’) officially ended in 1975 with the collapse of South Việt Nam as a nation and an exodus of over two million Southeast Asian refugees. Despite having lost their country, many former South Vietnamese across different parts of the world continue to live with memories of the defunct state and retain their cultural and emotional ties with a place that now exists only in memory and imagination. A South Vietnamese identity is particularly complex given the absent nation and a historical amnesia both within current Việt Nam and the diaspora. South Vietnamese histories are largely neglected in historical and cultural studies of the War and twentieth-century Việt Nam. Drawing on cultural geographical knowledge of affective nationhood, memory, place, and emotion, this project provides evocative nuances into how former South Vietnamese soldiers and generations of their families – in Việt Nam and the diaspora in Australia – imagine, feel, remember, forget, reconstruct, silence, make present, and let absent memories of the War and South Việt Nam. This project does so by combining a range of methods, including storytelling, oral histories, and sensory-based ethnography. The findings of this research enrich understanding of how lost nations and displaced people negotiate with past existences through imagination, remembrance, feeling, presence, and absence across various spaces and times.
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno
Artist, filmmaker and PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam who focuses on critiquing coloniality related to Indonesian history
Dismantling the Nostalgia: Art Practices Dealing with Colonial Leftovers
This research critically examines the intervention of artistic practice in dealing with colonial heritage and the shared history between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Employing an autoethnographic approach, I, as a cultural producer working in post-New Order Indonesia, reflexively utilize my art projects and films as a starting point to delve into this discourse. As an artist and filmmaker, I engage with archival materials and objects from the colonial period, now hosted in cultural institutions, predominantly in the Netherlands. This research employs autoethnographic methodologies to explore how artistic practice involves working with artifacts and representations and collaborating with museums and cultural institutions in the Netherlands under the shadow of colonial history. Through the artistic projects, I navigate, create, and speculate meaning within the decolonial approach and examine the power relations at play. This artistic research aims to critically examine power dynamics of the reproduction of knowledge systems, and to explores how artistic practice can intervene and participate to dismantle the colonial system of thought. This approach allows me to reflexivelly interrogate my position as an artist, navigating the complexities of (de)colonial discourses while creating artistic interventions that disrupt and reimagine historical narratives.
Patriot Mumkin
The Woven Wounds: Memorialisation and Indonesia’s 1965-66 Mass-killings
This project is an investigation of the collective memory of a society that has suffered multiple historical violence and trauma as framed through artistic practice. The scope of the project begins in Indonesia, a country that has experienced three centuries of colonialism, civil war and human rights abuses. The project’s current focus is the anti-communist killings of 1965-66, where the violence claimed up to half a million lives through torture, imprisonment, sexual violence and extra-judicial killings. This project explores the tension between memorialisation and remembrance as the country continues to struggle with reconciling the dark past. It proposes a series of artistic interventions including processes that involve cutting one picture and recombining it with another picture to form a woven image. This merging of imagery is an attempt to voice the idea of reconciliation related to the mass killings of 1965-66, as it has been primarily memorialised in statues and monuments.
While Indonesia is a starting point for the project, there are clearly shared histories of historical violence across the Asia Pacific. The project will evolve to incorporate other histories and elements that have similarities in themes and narratives. I aim to gather narratives regarding the historical violence in the region as a base of visual construction in making the artworks.
Mehdi Ait Oukhzame
Enacting a Poetics of the “Gaze from Below”: The Queer of Colour Child as an Optic for the Critique of Heteronormativity and Anti-Blackness
This PhD project conceptualises the standpoint of the ‘queer of colour child’ as a critical optic for examining the logics and ramifications of heteronormativity and anti-Blackness. In this way, the categories of race, gender, and sexuality are brought back to the body and lived experience of the child as the “fleshy materiality” (Jackson, 2020) from which the violence of heteronormativity and anti-Blackness is examined. In attending to the question of what emerges out of addressing heteronormativity and anti-Blackness alongside from the standpoint of the queer of colour child, this research project derives its material of analysis from seven biomythographies written by Black and queer of colour authors who reflect on their childhood and adulthood experiences navigating an anti-Black heteronormative world. The project approaches these texts as ‘intimate archival materials’ where personal memory supplies a generative force for alternative historical writing (Morrison, 2019; Cvetkovich, 2001). Further, rather than treat the child in infantilising terms or as a racially unmarked abstraction (Edelman, 2004), the project dwells on the very materiality of the queer of colour child and foregrounds the perspective of this child as agentic social actor with insights into their lived experience(s) and the world. Situated within the realm of queer of colour critique and critical childhood studies, the project attempts to articulate a textured notion of difference from the liminal space the queer of colour child occupies.
Louis Stokes
Noken Diplomacy: Incorporating Papuan cultural heritage into an Indonesian settler colonial project
Since its formal incorporation into Indonesia in 1969 over one million, mostly Javanese, migrants have settled in the provinces of West Papua. This settlement, known as transmigrasi, has operated within a larger state sponsored project of resource extraction which has faced ongoing civil and armed resistance from Indigenous Papuans. In the post-Suharto era, there have been significant changes in Indonesia’s approach to West Papua. This research focuses on one these developments, Indonesia’s submission of noken, a Papuan multifunctional knotted or woven bag, to the UNESCO List of Intangible Heritage. Inscribed in 2012, the use of noken has featured in international diplomacy and has been incorporated into several internal development programmes. Building from the increasing body of work focussed on the efficacy of UNESCO’s engagement with indigenous stakeholders, this project looks at how noken’s inscription has been used to support Indonesian sovereignty in the context of ongoing West Papuan separatism. With reference to Indonesia’s historic engagement with UNESCO and cultural heritage preservation, this research explores how Indonesian nation building has been central to its heritage policy. In doing so, this project aims to highlight the at times contradictory outcomes UNESCO heritage recognition provides for indigenous groups in settler colonial states.
Bin Wang
Fragile Oasis: queer space and the quest for identity in urban China
My research aims to explore how queer spaces are constructed, developed, consumed and reshaped in urban China, and how such spaces influence the ways queer individuals connect to the city. By focusing on the peculiar experiences of ordinary queer Chinese, this project seeks to understand how queer identity and queer space are constructed outside of the western context, where the modern queer theory was originated. Queer Asians studies are not case studies – this project could provide a foundation to challenge the coloniality embedded in the theorisation of queer identity, which is often tied to privatisation, individualism, and neo-liberalism. Building on the complex experiences as well as perspectives of the queer community in China, this project intends to build a more holistic and comprehensive theorisation of queer identity that is grounded in specific social and cultural contexts.
Ava Wansbrough
Uncovering Memory and Finding Meaning: The Implications of Popular Representations of “Queer” History
Focusing within an Australian context, this thesis explores how popular representations and explorations of queer history impact how the public relates, understands, and feels connected to ‘queer’ Australian history. The authorship of popular representations shape how these stories are constructed and thus connected with by the consumer. Often these representations fail to deconstruct colonial systems that reinforce our understanding of sexuality, gender, and desire. Thus, the popularised exploration of ‘queer’ history might fail to queer history at all. My thesis enacts a queer and decolonial reading of the 2023 book, She and Her Pretty Friend by Danielle Scrimshaw and the 2023 ABC documentary series Queerstralia. Through analysis, these representations are problematised, uncovering how they construct meaning and connectivity between contemporary understandings of queer identities and historical evidence of gender and sexual diversity found in the margins of the colonial archive. With a strong grounding in feminist and queer approaches to memory, this thesis will centre how embodied experiences of connectivity shape how we relate to and approach the study of ‘queer’ history. The vital duality of how connection shapes construction is at the centre of my analysis, as I uncover how representations of historical ‘queerness’ are impacted by contemporary understandings of identity.
Yichen Zhang
The postgraduation lives of mainland Chinese students of gender studies after their return home
Yichen’s doctoral project examines the post-graduation lives of Chinese international students of gender studies upon their return to China. This study aims to explore how Chinese former students of gender studies adopt, adapt, reinterpret and reconstruct the diverse feminist knowledge they acquired overseas, and domestically, to address gender inequality in their everyday lives within China’s unique socio-political landscape.
While there remains debate over whether China, as a cultural entity, warrants inclusion in post-colonial or decolonial studies given its semi-colonial history, China’s pursuit of modernity since the twentieth century has been intertwined with its grappling with the enduring impacts of the ‘humiliating’ imperialist and colonial invasion. The interconnected relationship between China’s haunting semi-colonial and semi-feudal history, China’s developmental aspirations vis-à-vis Western modernity, and the differences and disparities between the global (Western) and local realities, constitutes the threads and features of the emergence and development of Chinese feminism, as well as the broad context of my research. By investigating the post-graduation lives of Chinese students who studied gender or feminism in Western institutions, I seek to explore the possibility of complicating or breaking the Western-Sino hierarchical dichotomy and developing practical approaches to combat gender inequality in China’s context from a transcultural perspective.