Postgraduate Research Activities
A selection of current postgraduate research students
| Student | Research Area | Supervisors - (P) Principal Supervisor, (C) Co-supervisor |
| Soenke Biermann | Unsettling Pedagogical Spaces: Decolonisation and Social Justice in Higher Education My thesis aims to understand what motivates university educators in 'settler states' such as Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada to engage in processes of decolonisation, how they understand, theorise and conceptualise these processes, and how they pursue them in their pedagogical practice and within various institutional contexts. Although the interest of my project lies in the concept of intellectual decolonisation and its implications for epistemologies and pedagogies in higher education generally, a particular interest concerns how university educators in 'settler states' conceptualise decolonisation in regard to non-Indigenous (settler and migrant) students and staff. This is particularly important since 'settler' decolonisation, especially in a higher education context, has not been the subject of sustained scholarly scrutiny. This research project thus represents a timely, relevant and significant contribution to understanding what an inclusive twenty-first century 'settler' university might look like. soenke.biermann@scu.edu.au | Ass Prof Baden Offord (P) Dr Adele Wessell (C) |
| Tessa Chudy | Heaven and Hell at the Paradise Motel A novel about nothing in particular and everything in general. The story will be structured around the four seasons and will be woven through with mini narratives, fictions, dreams, fantasies. Key themes will include narrative, the landscape, art and noir philosophy. | Dr Moya Costello (P) Dr Janie Conway-Herron(C) |
| Iris Curteis | Creative work: Watermarks (Novel) and Exegesis: The Story of Rose Bower Research area: The development of storytelling in community building and social responsibility. The PhD aims to encourage greater appreciation of Storytelling in academia within Australian, to provide oral literature with an appropriate status and to contribute to its preservation as oral art form. | Dr Moya Costello (P). Professor Kay Stone, PhD Folklore, professional storyteller and Senior Scholar (honorary research position) University of Winnipeg, Canada. (Critical Reader) |
| Raimond De Weerdt | Database as a Creative Tool My research concerns itself with the image in a binary form. Looking through the lens of art history and philosophy, I am developing an analytical model, within the critical field of image theories and systems, to interpret images not simply as visual objects, but as resistive figurations. Within my visual practice I am investigating the creative possibilities of the image in digital form, how it can be assembled and taken apart, designed and re-designed, printed on paper or projected on a wall. We are living in a time where we are witnessing an exponential growth in the amounts of data we are generating, capturing, analysing and storing. As an artist I am utilising the creative possibilities this abundance of data presents. Like artists from the past finding inspiration from the landscape, I am using the database as my source of inspiration. | Dr Grayson Cooke (P) |
| Ashley Haywood | Non-living artefacts narrate this experimental, nonlinear, space-time-traversing, auto/biographical novel. The critical component explores the role of the writing-self as (re)teller of histories (realities), and as discoverer and inventor through creative practice | Dr Moya Costello (P) Dr Rosemary Webb (C) |
| Lisa Hill | TV's Adaptable Women: Postfeminist Nostalgia and Hollywood Film | Dr Rebecca Coyle (P) Dr Lisa Milner (C) |
| Theresa Mason | Telling Histories: Northern Rivers ~ Exploring the Nexus between Reminiscence as Storytelling and Therapy in an Ageing Australia: explores the nexus of reminiscence as storytelling and as therapy. The aim of this research is twofold: firstly, to collect individual and local histories and experiences of 50 participants aged over sixty-five years who are long-term residents living within the Northern Rivers area in order to provide historical documentation for the benefit of the storytellers and the broader community; and, secondly, to explore participants' feelings and attitudes to determine whether the telling of their stories leads to a sense of wellbeing. | Dr Colleen Cartwright (P) Non-SASS Dr Adele Wessell (C) |
| Nick Mattingly | Plants and power: Imperial science, colonial agriculture and the culture of hemp My thesis explores the relationship between plants and power in the British imperial world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in terms of science, agriculture and political economy. The narrative follows the journeys of natural philosophers on a mission to promote the cultivation of hemp, using evidence drawn from Australasia, North America and India. Events in Europe provide the backdrop. I examine the causes behind the project's failure and its consequences for the management of environmental resources within a world economy. | Dr Adele Wessel (P) Dr Sue Evans (C)(Health) |
| Janice Slater | Dr Adele Wessell (P) | Alison Watts | Releasing the Unreleased: An historical case study of a female family member's insanity in Victoria, Australia: 1920-1936 This thesis critically examines how a mother's insanity was constructed in Victoria, Australia, in an early twentieth century context. The work is based on a female family member's mental patient case files, Ada (a pseudonym) who was diagnosed with puerperal insanity, now known as post-natal depression or post-natal psychosis, and committed to a Victorian mental institution in 1936 when her second child was 14 days old. In the first years as a mental patient, Ada had periods of trial leave home with her family. Yet by 1942 her trial leave had ended and she spent the next thirty years in three mental institutions in Australia. As a feminist project this places Ada's story in history and reconnects me with my motherline. | Dr Angela Coco (P) Dr Catharine Coleborne (C) |
| Robert Lingard | Human Reproductive Cloning (HRC) in Australian public discourse: A critical exploration of attitudes and their justifications A critical exploration of how medico-scientists experience personal difficulty in their work with human embryos in fields related to the potential for human reproductive cloning. | Dr Angela Coco (P) Prof. Robert Weatherby (C) | Isabelle Delmotte | 'Inaudible Visions' is a PhD inquiry that aims to evaluate the influence of sonic 'man'-made surroundings on humans and, by extension, on the physical dimensions of cultural practices. Using cinema sound as a reflective device, this research provides ways to examine the range of audio frequencies used by cinema sound designers who live and work in Australia. An exegesis associated with an artistic practice constitutes this qualitative inquiry. Contact: id@inaudible-visions.net. | Ass Prof Rebecca Coyle (P) Dr Grayson Cooke (C) |
| Michael Eales | Different Voice, Different Perspective: a visual arts enquiry into understanding suicide through original voice narratives The aim of creating artworks that re-present original voice narratives, is to push beyond the taboos and stigma of suicide, beyond the stereotypes, distortions, and the malignant silence that pervades societal understanding and reaction to the phenomena. The difficulty for me as an artist/researcher, and as someone who has attempted suicide, is how to express individual narratives in such a way as to present an underlying sense of humanity that is empathic, considered and is above all, an honest representation of this trauma. | Dr Janie Conway-Herron(P) Dr Alexandra Cutcher (C) |
| Kim Satchell | Enchanting the Poetic Coast: The Confluence of Space, Place and Ecology A body-landscape reverie in seven chapters dealing with forms of attention, modes of inquiry and modes of address. A self-reflexive higher degree research dissertation whose field of inquiry opens questions troubling design philosophy, research methodology and the practice of everyday life. My thesis is an investigation of the Anthropocene in the 21st Century; the work (a minor literature of place and avant-garde performance) thus concerns responses to the implications of exponential processes and their limitations for current and future generations. | Ass Prof Baden Offord (P) Janie Conway-Herron (C) | Marcos Fernandes | Information Technology and Apocalypse Science Fiction and the Cult of Apocalypse The Apocalypse, or the 'Revelation', is often interpreted as a climactic end of time and space that pours forth from the Judgement Throne of an angry Deity, whose seat is surrounded by the nuclear, biological, environmental, demographic, and many other modes of destruction. With cult-like fervour, the propagators of Apocalypse seek a Deity's Judgement of their enemies, looking for a Messiah that will both save the believers and utterly destroy or oppress their opposition during a millenarian rule. Science fiction literature has taken these motifs and created a range of fiction that falls under an 'Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic' subgenre, often with disastrous results. In the creation of my own commercially viable post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, featuring strong elements of dystopic science fiction as well, I intend both to exemplify the genre as well as introduce a Jewish understanding of Apocalypse, which is redemptive of all rather than damning, unifying rather than segregatory, where climactic events bring rebirth rather than destruction, where time and space occur cyclically and non-cyclically, introducing these Eastern rather than Western motifs into a redefining of the Apocalyptic genre. | Dr Moya Costello(P) |
Updated: 24 January 2012