ARC Discovery Project success for arts and social sciences researchers

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Duncan Ivison welcomed the announcement and congratulated researchers whose projects had received funding under the 2020 Discovery Project grant scheme.

“These results are an outstanding achievement and the funding will help further knowledge across a range of disciplines,” said Professor Ivison.

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences researchers awarded grants in this round include:

• Associate Professor Lina Markauskaite and her team were awarded $592,000 to create a strong integrative research foundation to explain how university researchers and students develop the expertise needed to work in interdisciplinary teams. The outcomes will provide a much better understanding of the qualities that help individuals and groups to work productively across disciplinary boundaries.
• Professor Deborah Cobb-Clark and her team have received $393,000 for their project which aims to use new Australian data to study the way that people’s self-control affects their economic behaviour. The project should provide significant benefits in supporting policy agendas such as the Government’s Priority Investment Approach and behavioural economics teams.
• Professor David Schlosberg, Dr Rebecca Pearse and their team were awarded $340,000 to improve two key areas of environmental policy by investigating the meaning of environmental justice and how it is best implemented. Expected outcomes include an updated and enhanced theory of environmental justice, a new understanding of the enablers and barriers to its implementation in practice, and recommendations to make policies on urban food security and energy transition more just.
• Professor Elspeth Probyn and her team have been awarded $296,000 to conduct the first comparative interdisciplinary ethnographic study about how urban fish markets act as vital infrastructures connecting the oceans and cities, fishers, buyers, tourists and consumers. They expect to generate new knowledge about the local impacts of the global issues of overfishing, ocean warming and geo-political disputes about fishing regulations.
• Professor Heather Horst has received $295,000 to explore the development and growth of the Fijian fashion industry in relation to the integration of technology in the processes of design and production; the use of digital and social media to build and expand markets; and capacity building for fashion entrepreneurs.
• Associate Professor Helen Proctor, Professor Susan Goodwin and their team have received $282,000 to investigate the activities, networks, ambitions, and rationales of community groups advocating for education policy reform across Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. The project expects to generate new knowledge about the relationship between education policy change and civic participation in Australia’s recent history.
• Professor Roger Benjamin and his team were awarded $220,000 for their project which aims to give a first-time analysis of visual culture at the Strait of Gibraltar. They will explore how painting, photography, film, and maps relate to colonial expansion, with a focus on Australian, French and Spanish involvement in the Western Mediterranean.
• Professor Peter Marks was awarded $129,000 for his project which aims to reorient our understanding of George Orwell via case studies of different zones demarcated in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Its significance derives from uncovering and assessing for the first time Orwell's diverse, evolving international importance.
• Postdoctoral Research Associate Sophie Chao is part of a team awarded funding for a research project titled The Promise of Justice. The project will focus on the province of West Papua, a region plagued by diverse forms of conflict, unsustainable resource extraction, and ongoing racial discrimination. It seeks to reconceptualise the notions of justice and make recommendations with regards to the environment, human rights and health.
• Associate Professor Frances Clarke is part of a team awarded funding to investigate the cultural, social and psychological aftermaths of wars between 1815 to 1950 from a comparative, transnational perspective. By connecting the displacement of people, the brutalization of warfare and the trauma associated with it, the study will offer a broader and more complex understanding of the experience of civilians and combatants in the wake of armed conflicts. 

All successful grant recipients and projects are listed on the ARC website.