Engage with us

The school fosters collaborative relationships with government, community organisations, and the private sector to produce impactful research and exciting career pathways for our graduates.

We work with stakeholders to:

• contribute to government policymaking
• understand and engage with our local and global environment
• build knowledge-sharing partnerships that respond to urgent social problems.
• Our projects range from multi-year Linkage grants to short-term consultancies.

Our students develop their skill and knowledge through industry placements that provide practical assistance to industry bodies such as Australian federal and state government departments, business councils and trade bodies, and community cultural organisations.

Examples of industry/student partnership projects include:

• Noetic IT Services: Students explored how artificial intelligence technologies can be utilised to improve the security of smart city infrastructure (including public utilities, traffic management systems and IoT devices). They analysed how AI systems can be exploited or manipulated by malicious actors, prioritising public safety, individual privacy, and the ethical considerations.
• Cyber Security: Students explored the cybersecurity implications of advanced cybernetic technologies, identifying vulnerabilities and potential threats and assessed the ethical dimensions of cybernetics, considering issues like autonomy, consent and the digital divide for Kinetic IT Services.
• NSW POLAIR: Students completed 360-degree scoping exercise for NSW Police on applications of next generation drones, fixed wing and rotary aircraft for the NSW Aviation Command/NSW Police.
• Statecraft Strategies: This project focused on the intensifying strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific, with an exploration of ways to best avert crisis or conflict. The project was set to challenge perspectives, identify tools, build a common understanding of key concepts, and consider strategies in times of competition, crisis, and conflict.
• Collaboration in International Security: A short-term and long-term educational training for international delegations that included a combination of theoretical, conceptual, and historical teachings, together with practical skills and knowledge.
• Intelligence Training Program: A project designed for Intelligence government departments focused on crafting and communicating intelligence assessments, communicating intelligence assumptions, challenge assessments in order to improve intelligence performance, and navigating how elements of intelligence professionalism can help to build successful team cultures.

Academic staff in the school frequently provide expert commentary in national and international media on contemporary challenges and world events.

Expertise in the department includes:

• Asian popular culture
• Australian politics
• Australia’s strategic and defence policy
• Chinese foreign policy
• climate politics
• community languages
• corporate crime
• cross-cultural communication and media
• diasporic literatures, film and cultures
• gender and sexual identities and representation
• gender, crime, and media
• Indo-Pacific security
• intelligence
• language teaching and technology
• police and crime in Australia
• religion and politics
• second language acquisition
• terrorism and extremism.

We partner with cultural institutes such as the Goethe Institute, and work with two language study centres:

• Greek language examination centre – Sydney's Certificate of Attainment in Greek language exams take place at Macquarie University.
• Japanese studies centre – The centre offers grants and fellowships to support Japanese teaching and research in Australia.