Projects
Culturally Regenerative Universities – Curating the CRF Research Narrative – Peta J. White and Jo Raphael.
Project summary: The CRF has taken many valuable community actions over the past three years. We have recorded and generated considerable outputs and will now curate these into useful repositories (website and report) that are augmented by vignettes of colleagues citing outcomes and impacts through their engagement with the CRF. Careful analysis will be crafted using the language of the Guidelines for Research and Faculty research ecology trajectories. This will be usefully applied in our Culturally Regenerative Universities research – due for completion at the end of 2025. Action examples include the CRF: Futures Fora, Regenerators, Enablers – with impacts, and case study vignettes of successful researchers’ capacity building, as well as key strategic projects, will be the focus of the showcase.
We want to employ a Research Fellow to curate the engagement and impact of the CRF via our website and in a report. $3250 to be spent by early November 2025 (RF – contracted early September, Impact analysis and website/report generation in September – October and finalising/review in November).
Wrap-up graphics for my projects within the Arts Activism and the Anthropocene – Shelley Hannigan.
Project summary: Having worked in and across different but connecting research projects, I am seeking regenerative funding to “wrap up my research activity” as opposed to “starting up” to incorporate design and image representations of these projects. These images will be used for planned publications and conference presentations. The projects include:
- Facilitating Professional Development and Well-being for Art Teachers,
- Sustainability and climate change art projects (including Artefacts of the Future and my own practice NTROS)
- Researching sustainable arts-wellbeing programs in school.
- Visual/sculptural Climate Aware Creative practice research.
Timeline of activities: as soon as funding is approved, I will employ a visual photographer/designer to capture relevant visual materials and guide them in the curation of this information for presentation and publication. Funds will be spent by the deadline of mid-November 2025.
This project was awarded $1500.
Trans-boundary online peer-to-peer youth environmental engagement – Joe Ferguson.
Project summary: John Micael Callao to be employed as an RA to support data analysis (surveys, interviews) and undertake a literature review (environmental/ climate change education journals and youth journals) as part of the project ‘Trans-boundary online peer-to-peer youth environmental engagement’ led by Dr Michael Chew (as part of his existing CRF funding) and Dr Joe Ferguson. Literature review and support of undertaking data analysis will take place in September and October of 2025.
This project was awarded $1,779
Embodied Practice – Sustainability – Decolonisation – Olivia Millard, Raffaele Rufo, and Abigail Benham-Bannon.
Project summary: This project brings together the individual research of Olivia Millard, Deakin PhD graduate, Raffaele Rufo and current Deakin PhD student Abi Benham-Bannon to interrogate the notions of sustainability and decolonisation through the unfolding of each of our approaches to embodied practice. Raffaele Rufo will work as a postdoc research fellow at the Centre for Regenerative Futures (CRF). We are going to engage in the inquiry through online conversations, working under the umbrella aim of regenerating futures and considering the different situatedness and positionality of our embodied practices in a cross-cultural perspective.
This project was awarded $4,380.
Ethics application for Exploring trans-boundary online peer-to-peer youth environmental engagement – Michael Chew and Joseph Ferguson.
Project summary: This ethics application seeks approval for the study “Exploring Trans- boundary Online Peer-to-Peer Youth Environmental Engagement” through Deakin’s Lower Risk pathway. The research will examine how youth aged 16- 30 in Australia, Vietnam, and the Philippines use online platforms for environmental commitment-making and peer engagement. Key ethical considerations include cultural sensitivity, secure online data collection, and informed consent processes. Methods include surveys, focus groups, and analysis of the Stories to Action database. The application outlines protocols for participant anonymity, data security, and withdrawal rights, adhering to the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2023).
This project was awarded $3,250
Hidden Utopias and critical engagement in climate change
education through arts-based approaches – Jo Raphael.
Project summary: This project extends the 2024 post-doctoral research project with CRF allied member Dr Michelle Tourbier and Jo Raphael and Robin Bellingham. In 2024 the theoretical concept of ‘hidden utopias’
developed by Michelle was applied to the Deakin University’s Centre for Regenerating Futures (CRF) ‘Artifacts of the Future’ and ‘Time to Act’ projects. These arts-based projects aim to help young people critically engage with climate change discourses and creatively envision more hopeful and sustainable futures. Drawing on theories from Ernst Bloch, Michèl Foucault and Ruth Levitas, Michelle proposes that utopian discourses are increasingly a crucial way in which power is produced and reproduced in society by political opportunists. By calling utopias ‘hidden’, the aim is to help draw attention to what is often hiding in plain sight, to critically engage with such discourses and to creatively imagine a more hopeful and sustainable future. Michelle has undertaken an analysis of project data identifying multiple layers of competing utopian imaginaries at play and has represented these in a visual format. The preparation for the publication underway, and a related Futures Forum presented by Michelle (April 2025) have raised valuable new theoretical directions inspired by feminist/ decolonial utopian authors. This extension to the project would allow for the additional consideration of feminist and decolonial theory to analyse hidden utopias and investigate interesting conceptualisations of some of the more ‘hidden’ aspects of hidden utopias.
This project was awarded $2,345
CRF Post-Doctoral Support
Decolonising Knowledges and Practices in ‘Artefacts of the Future’ – Danielle Hradsky.
Project summary: Academics are increasingly committing to decolonising knowledges and practices; in practice, what does this look like and mean? ‘Artefacts of the Future’ is an arts-based, science-informed learning and research project that supports young people to imagine and design sustainable futures. Iteratively developed curriculum materials have included progressively more First Nations content which teachers report successfully teaching. However, students’ artefacts indicate little influence from First Nations knowledges and practices. This CRF Post Doctoral Support funding will be used to critically examine past and current curriculum materials and data collected thus far with the aim of informing future iterations of the project.
This project was awarded $3,126