From a prestigious Churchill Trust Fellowship to four successful Macquarie University Research Fellowship schemes, see where the Faculty of Arts was recognised this month.

GRANTS

Congratulations to the recently announced recipients of the 2023 Macquarie University Research Fellowship (MQRF) Scheme:

Ms Ceridwen Dovey, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, for the project ‘The Art of Planet Hunting: The role of artistry and imagination in visualising exoplanets’. This innovative project aims to understand what is at stake when astronomical artists synthesise scientific and creative knowledge to depict exoplanets (planets outside our solar system). This research is urgent because the golden age of exoplanet discovery has only just begun, thanks to next-generation, advanced telescopes. While artists’ visualisations of exoplanets make an essential contribution to public understandings of the universe, there is little scholarship on artists as co-creators of astronomical knowledge. This project will develop new conceptual frameworks for analysing exoplanet imagery, grounded in both the aesthetics and ethics of how scientific data about exoplanets is creatively interpreted.

Dr Emma Mitchell, Macquarie School of Social Sciences, for the project ‘Children caring: shadow care infrastructures sustaining low-income families’. Children in low-income families are more likely to take on caring due to lack of income and available supports. The hidden care-load children carry intensifies as pandemic, environmental crisis, and economic turbulence disrupt already stretched infrastructures of support. This project uses a child-focused, creative approach to investigate how children’s care activities help sustain low-income families and impact on child and family wellbeing. Expected outcomes include the development of child-centred care theory and a better understanding of the care capacities and care gaps that shape children’s experiences of poverty. Benefits include refining supports for children and families to improve their quality of life and promote positive health and employment outcomes in the long-term.

Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Department of Security Studies and Criminology, for the project ‘Reforming Australia's policy approach to hostage diplomacy and wrongful detention’. This project offers the first comprehensive study of how states respond to the significant international issue of wrongful detention. It aims to analyse the Australian government and partner countries’ existing policies on wrongful detention to identify scope for meaningful domestic policy reform. By examining international best practice, this project will also investigate the broader geopolitical and diplomatic implications of the international growth of hostage diplomacy, and the prospects for tackling this emerging phenomenon through international collaboration.

Dr Kurt Sengul, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, for the project ‘Media Populism, Democracy, and the Public Sphere in Australia’. This project aims to provide the first significant study of media populism in Australia across digital and traditional media. Adopting an innovative and interdisciplinary conceptual approach, it will benchmark evidence to help journalists, scholars, and policymakers understand the implications of media populism for liberal democracy and an inclusive public sphere. The project will develop a new theory of media populism; inform policymakers on the role of media populism in processes of political polarization, extremism, and the erosion of democracy; and devise recommendations for media practitioners on how to avoid amplifying populist discourses for a more vibrant and multicultural public sphere.

Churchill Trust Fellowship

Congratulations to Professor Bronwyn Carlson, Head of the Department of Indigenous Studies, who has been awarded a prestigious Churchill Trust Fellowship to investigate community approaches to rethinking colonial commemorations and their wider impacts. In 2023 she co-authored a book entitled Monumental Disruptions: Aboriginal People and Colonial Commemorations in So-Called Australia and coedited and contributed to a global collection entitled, The Palgrave Handbook on Re-thinking Colonial Commemorations. This achievement builds on Professor Carlson’s stellar year, which has seen the release of four books, multiple keynotes, reports and her world-leading expertise across both the online and in-physical community space go from strength to strength. Find out more here.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Associate Professor Trevor Evans, from the Department of History and Archaeology, and HDR students Samuel Wessels and Mark Matic recently presented at the conference 'Language and Cultural Identity in Postclassical Greek', held at Jesus College Cambridge. The event honoured the memory of Cambridge scholar Professor James Aitken (1968–2023) and was the first conference of the Septuagint within the History of Greek (SHG) network, founded by Associate Professor Evans and Professor Aitken in 2018. Professor Aitken had a significant relationship with the ancient-history sphere at Macquarie University and took part in several research collaborations over the years. The second SHG conference is to be held in Sydney in 2025.