Research projects — School of Culture and Communication

Reconfiguring the World: China. Art. Agency, 1900s to Now

This research project takes modern and contemporary Chinese art as a field for thinking more broadly about the challenges of intercultural communication in the twenty-first century.

Art Market Studies

This research project investigates the global art market with a view to providing new art historical perspectives and contributing to topical art market discourses.

Towards an Australian Ecological Theatre

This project explores how the Australian performing arts is responding to the climate emergency and how human interactions with the natural world have been represented historically on Australian stages since the 1950s.

Decentring Australian Art: Looking Past the Mainstream

Writing the history of non-mainstream art in Australia to paint a richer, more complex picture of Australia’s artistic culture.

The Future Cemetery

The research investigates the potential of new and innovative technologies to be incorporated into Australian cemeteries and memorial spaces.

World-Pictures: Art Finding Pathways Across the Century of Turbulence, 1914-2024

The project maps how and where artists across the world, both as subjects of these forces and as embedded or detached observers, reflected on and documented borders and bodies subjected to migration and exile.

UNESCO and the Making of Global Cultural Policy

An Australian Research Council funded project researching the role that UNESCO, the UN body with a cultural mandate, plays in the formation of cultural policies around the world.

Lost Plays Database

The Lost Plays Database is a wiki-style forum for scholars to share information about lost plays in England, 1570-1642; its purpose is to add lost plays to scholarly discussions of early modern theatrical activity.

Disability and the Performing Arts in Australia: The Last Avant Garde

The Last Avant Garde is an ARC Linkage project exploring artistic innovation and the work of disability artists in Australia.

Chinese international students in Australia: A study of the transformative potential of education abroad

This longitudinal study of Chinese women students in Australian universities traces these students’ subjective experience of their journeys from China to Australia and on to their post-graduation destinations.

The Invention of Melbourne: A Baroque Archbishop and Gothic Architect

Understanding the cultural vision of the first Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, James Goold (1812-1886), whose architectural patronage has left a permanent imprint on the built environment of Melbourne

Eco-Colonial Australian Literature: Environment, Species, Climate

Exploring the ways in which colonial Australian literature gave expression to species classification and the management of habitat, extinction, climate change, and the impact of environmental disasters.

Creative Convergence

By researching both the creative processes of theatre-making and audience participation, this project asks how theatrical impact can be enriched through relationships and activities that extend beyond the immediacy of the event.

New tastemakers and Australia's post-digital literary culture

This project examines how engagements with digital media and platforms have changed the ways in which Australian literature is produced, distributed and consumed.

The Pasts and Futures of Virtual Reality

Oculus Rift offers a point of reference in relation to which the possible futures of VR technologies can be explored while bringing these futures into dialogue with some of the histories of VR.

William Blake and the History of Imagination: Poetry, Prophecy, and Secularization

This project compares Blake's revisionary dialogue with his competitors in the subcultures that flourished in London in the aftermath of the French revolution.

Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds

This project explores the roles played by fiction and imagination in the production of space during the long eighteenth-century (1700-1835)

Contemporary Australian Comics 1980-2020: A New History

An ARC Linkage project mapping the contemporary history and cultural impact of comics as a narrative art form in Australia.

Indigenous Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge

An ARC Discovery Indigenous Fellowship project that aims to develop a non-linear, interactive archiving system in collaboration with Aboriginal people.

Environmental Citizenship: Identity Formation in the Face of Climate Change

This project aims to advance our thinking on how to connect cosmopolitanism and environmental citizenship in relation to cultural policy.

Breaking up with ARIA: towards a new taxonomy of data for predicting live touring success

A research report examining the impact of Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) charts, New Zealand (NZ) charts and regional Spotify charts on consumer purchasing behaviour in the Australian live music industry.

Beyond Skin-Deep: Social and Emotional Work in the Beauty Industry

This project aims to produce a nation-wide qualitative study of the role that salon workers play in the emotional lives of their clients.

Aesthetic Politics

This project sets out to establish terms for an ecocritical aesthetics for the 21st century in three thematic groups, Truth, The Good and Beauty.

Merchants and Museums

Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce.

Natural Born Subjects: A Cultural History of Naturalization in Britain and the Australian Colonies, 1660-1850

This project uses the tools of literary and cultural history to bridge the gap between citizenship as an aspect of identity and the concept’s legal operation.

The George Lyell Collection

Australian entomology past and present.

Eurasian Exchange and Artistic Change in Italy, c. 1250-1450

This project places the early Italian Renaissance into the larger geopolitical context of Mongol Eurasia, focusing on artistic change in two Italy and in China, where Italian and other foreign merchants and missionaries were resident.

Incentivising On Country Aboriginal Employment: Anangu Futures

This project analyses the complex social, political and economic conditions that have enabled the Indigenous community of Mutitjulu to endure ongoing and extreme economic and social marginalisation.

Indigenous mobilities to and through Australia: agency and sovereignties

This project will create previously unwritten histories of Indigenous travel to and through Australia, exploring the historical mobilities of Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders, Maori and Pacific Islanders through three targeted case studies.

New Beats: Mass redundancies, career changes and the future of Australian journalism

This ongoing project is investigating what happens to around 3,000 journalists who became redundant in Australia during or since 2012.

First Nation’s Media Australia research

The Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ) is working with First Nations Media Australia (FNMA) on research to measure the reach and impact of Indigenous broadcasting channels and services across remote, regional and suburban Australia.

Melanesia Media Freedom Forum

The Melanesia Media Freedom Forum was initiated in 2019 in response to concerns around increasing media repression in Melanesian nations which are our close neighbour.

Art Precincts and Cultural Participation in Networked Public Space

This project investigates new modes of cultural participation in urban public spaces.

Engaging older Chinese Australians with digital media during COVID-19 lockdown

This project studies digital media use among older Australians from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

How parenting factors and child educational environment influence children’s online risk-taking behaviours: A mixed method assessment

This research project examined how parenting and educational environmental factors were associated with children’s online risk-taking behaviours.