SOPHI staff and the University of Sydney's research clusters

A number of research clusters have been established within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and beyond to facilitate inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary research. A research cluster is an association of academics who share common research interests. The environment established within the research cluster is designed to facilitate collaboration and collegiality between academics.

Just a few of the research clusters SOPHI academics participate in are listed below.

Archaeology of Sydney Research Group

The Archaeology of Sydney Research Group (ASRG) is a joint initiative between academic staff from the Department of Archaeology, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney and professional archaeologists and researchers who work in Sydney. We aim to provide a focus and forum for supporting, developing and promoting research, professional, educational and other public benefit outcomes from archaeology conducted in the Greater Sydney region.

Research themes:

• Life in Sydney: Food and diet, fish and marine resources, market gardening; Ethnicity and gender; Mercantilism.
• Convicts: Convict institutions; development of a free society.
• Industry and Infrastructure: Maritime, potteries, defence, transport, standing buildings
• Landscapes: Urbanisation, Aboriginal land use, Parramatta, cemeteries
  Aboriginal Sydney: Stone tool evolution, resource use, land use patterns, rock art, contact
• Public Archaeology and Heritage: Synthesis and publication, grey literature, sustainable digital archives, public education
• History of Sydney Archaeology

Archaeology of Sydney Research Group website

Environmental Humanities

The Environmental Humanities Group is a collaboration of scholars from across the Faculty of Arts who are currently researching environmental dimensions of cultural and urban history, English literature, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, politics, gender and women’s studies. We propose to focus this diffuse work into an integrated, interdisciplinary and socially relevant new field of ‘environmental humanities’. Our collaboration will build an enduring cohort of University staff and postgraduate students to shape and disseminate a new national research agenda for this emergent and portentous field.

Environmental Humanities website

Gender and Modernity Research Group

The Gender and Modernity Research Group promotes research in the humanities and social sciences on gender across key social, political, cultural and historical coordinates of modernity. Established in 2009, this group brings together researchers in the humanities and social sciences working on the intersection of gender and modernity across a range of periods and contexts and drawing on a range of disciplines and methods. It aims to promote the importance of, and build capacity for, feminist research into the ways modernity produces ideas and experiences of gender and the way gender shapes the uneven development and experiences of modernity, including degrees of access to the narratives of progress and self-determination captured by the idea of modernity.

The Gender and Modernity Research group hosts master classes, symposiums and visiting speakers as part of an intensive research program that fosters cross-institutional and international collaboration for early career researchers and postgraduate students as well as senior academics and professors.

Gender and Modernity website

Human Animal Research Network (HARN)

The Human Animal Research Network (HARN) at the University of Sydney is an interdisciplinary and cross-Faculty research group comprising members from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences , Faculty of Science , Faculty of Veterinary Science and the Sydney Law School. From the perspectives of Science, Law, Veterinary Science and the Humanities, both the ‘animal’ and the ‘human’ carry different meanings and unique philosophical genealogies, and much can be learnt when these perspectives interact, consult, teach and learn from each other. HARN aims to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue within the university and between the university and community groups, international human animal studies organizations and other Australian University based organizations.

HARN website

Nation Empire Globe Research Cluster

The University of Sydney is a leading centre for the study of three of the most important contemporary subjects of inter-disciplinary inquiry in the humanities and social sciences: colonialism, nationalism and globalisation.

RIHSS established the Nation Empire Globe Research Cluster in mid-2005 in order to bring together academic staff currently divided by disciplinary and administrative boundaries, to build on complementary research methodologies and to develop research opportunities.

Nation Empire Globe website

Network for Childhood and Youth Research

The Network for Childhood and Youth Research is a broad, interfaculty research cluster, and is part of the Worldwide Universities Network.

Coordinated though the Faculty of Education and Social Work by Professor Derrick Armstrong and Drs Dorothy Bottrell, Kathy Edwards and Linda Graham (Senior Research Associates in Child and Youth Studies) the University of Sydney Network for Childhood and Youth Research comprises researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in issues relating to young people.

SOPHI staff involved in the cluster include:

• Dr Anna Hickey-Moody, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies
• Dr Catherine Driscoll, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

Network for Childhood and Youth Research website

Religion and Post Kantian Philosophy Research Cluster

The Religion & Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Cluster is an inter-disciplinary group, based in the Department of Philosophy, whose overall goal is to consolidate and expand upon the active research program that has built up in the last few years around the Philosophy of Religion Research Seminar, the KAPKI (Kantian & Post-Kantian Idealism) Seminars, and an ARC funded project on "The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian Idealism".

In 2008 and 2009, the Philosophy of Religion Research Seminar addressed and put into perspective many questions and challenges surrounding the discipline of the philosophy of religion by inviting a number of philosophers to present papers. In 2008, the Philosophy of Religion Research Seminar has received an increasing attention from scholars working on post-Kantian tradition (broadly conceived), both inside and outside the Department of Philosophy.

At the same time, there has been an increase of postgraduate research interest in the post-Kantian approach to the philosophy of religion (including research in the areas of German Idealism, Existentialism, Hermeneutics,) A significant expression of this interest is the KAPKI (Kantian and Post-Kantian Idealism) Research Group. Further evidence of the fruitfulness of research in this area is represented by the ARC grant, related to the project “The God of Hegel’s Post-Kantian Idealism”, that has been secured by Paul Redding and Paolo Diego Bubbio in 2008.

As a result of the merging of these two successful experiences, the Religion & Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Cluster has been established in 2009. The overall goal of the “Religion & Post-Kantian Philosophy Research Cluster” is to bring together academic staff currently divided by disciplinary and administrative boundaries, to build on complementary research methodologies and to develop research opportunities.

Religion and Post-Kantian Philosophy website

Mellon Sawyer Seminar (2009-2010)

The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009

The Seminar
The University of Sydney is the proud host of the first Mellon Sawyer Seminar to be held in Australia. The seminar will run roughly from March 2009 to August 2010, consisting of eight special seminar sessions and one international conference.

The Sydney Sawyer Seminar explores the history of how the Antipodes - and especially the Indo-Pacific lands and oceans - has constituted a laboratory for the Atlantic world over a broad intellectual, geographical and temporal scale. Our seminar covers three centuries from 1700 to 2009, and focuses on Atlantic-derived conceptions and experiences within the Antipodes that bear especially on the themes of humanity and cultures, of sovereignty and imperialism, and of environment and ecology. Our prime method is comparative: the intellectual and social colonization of the Antipodes was never a simple one-way process of control and exploitation. Ideas also flowed in reverse, moving from periphery to metropole, from Indo-Pacific fields to Atlantic worlds, and with consequences that could be conservative, subversive or much else. In short, we examine the reciprocal exchange of selected discourses and practices between these two great geo-political spheres from the early modern period to the present. At the same time we investigate whether, and to what extent, local concerns and ideas have been able to achieve autonomy from the long reach of Atlantic influence.
Generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Sydney

Melon Sawyer Seminar website