Postgraduate Research Activities
A selection of current postgraduate research students
| Student | Research Area | Supervisors - (P) Principal Supervisor, (C) Co-supervisor |
| Jennifer Baker | Equalisers: Sexism and Gender Imbalance in the Australian Entertainment Industry (Television Series script accompanied by an exegesis). My research project aims, initially, to establish that there has been, and still is, sexism and gender imbalance in the Australian entertainment industry and will cover the period from the 1980s to present day. By highlighting the issue in a television series, I hope to encourage more women to enter, and stay in these fields, and to discover methods to improve conditions for them. The television series, about female sound engineers, and loosely based on personal memories, will be set in the 1980s. | Dr Janie Conway-Herron (P) Dr Lisa Milner (C) |
| 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 | Prof. Baden Offord (P) Dr Adele Wessell (C) |
| Martin Chatterton | The Last Slave Ship: in an era of converging cross-media production, the notion of what constitutes a 'book' (as artefact) is mutating and continually evolving. What effect does working within an changing media landscape have on a work of fiction, when that altered world is a fundamental creative imperative from the outset, not merely a post-production commercial consideration? By writing/creating a narrative historical fiction based around the voyage of the final slave ship to leave Liverpool in 1809, I will be exploring and examining the creative possibilities of embedded cross-media via the production of a hybrid literary artefact. My research will examine both the 'book' (as artefact) and 'the novel' (as content) in the shifting arena of book consumption, working on the supposition that there is somewhere else for both 'the novel' and 'the book' to go, with the role of the artist (writer) altering in tandem to become that of a catalyst capable of operating between differing creative and technological platforms. | Dr Moya Costello (P) Dr Grayson Cooke (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. | Prof. Baden Offord Dr Lisa Milner (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) |
| Nollie Nahrung | Relational anarchy with Art: Textual escapades in theory, practice, form and content. Extensively read in Australia during 1910s–1960s, Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia positioned Australian children and their educators within an Anglo-centric worldview, communicating dominant norms of Empire, whiteness and masculinity. My thesis takes words, graphemes and image fragments from the ten-volume Children's Encyclopedia (circa 1932–1939) and reassembles them as fictocritical montages about Relational Anarchy (RA), an emergent mode of relationship practice. RA advances non-hierarchical, egalitarian relationships grounded in honesty, autonomy and freedom. In constructing new works from the Children's Encyclopedia, I engage with Australia's legacy of white invasion while exploring the relationship between destruction and creation. My thesis seeks a multi-layered, situated exploration of RA as both prefigurative utopian vision and practical mode of social change. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, my thesis embodies methodological anarchism, in which theory and creative arts practice, and additionally form and content, play equal and inter-related roles. | Dr Adele Wessell (P) Dr Janie Conway-Herron (C) |
| Jessica Seymour | Phoenixes, Mockinjays and Chameleons: Child abuse and re-empowerment in contemporary fantasy and speculative YA Literature. My thesis will examine the domestic and institutionalised child abuse in contemporary fantasy and speculative young adult fiction, and the genre conventions (such as magic, science and era-specific weaponry) used to create a transition for the fictional victim from a position of disempowerment to a position of power. This analysis will involve three contemporary young adult series: the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling; The Hunger Games trilogy by Stephanie Collins; and The Hunchback Assignments series by Arthur Slade. | Dr Janie Conway-Herron(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. Web: www.inaudible-visions.net | Assoc. Prof Rebecca Coyle (P) Dr Adele Wessell (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. | Prof. Baden Offord (P) Dr 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) |
| Bob Percival | Creative work: Strange Tale from a Baisha Studio (Novel) and Exegesis: Poetics and Politics of Memory. A narrative exploration of the emerging political and psycho-geographical spaces (real and imaginary) within contemporary China; the protagonists within this 'strange tale' allow space for ontological and epistemological speculations on memory, place, language and transcultural experience. The novel argues for an expanded boundary of the narrative fiction genre, in regards to a reincorporation (through a process of 'creative reading'') of academic journal articles, photos and other 'found objects' in the form of 'reimagined experiences'. The exegesis will examine the politics and poetics of writing memory in two parts: 'creating the authorial space as an outsider' and 'creating the memory space as poetics and politics'. | Dr Janie Conway-Herron (P) Prof. Baden Offord (C) |
Updated: 19 March 2013