Enabler success 2025

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).

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.

Outcomes: I therefore employed the Designer/RA Chris Hanger (who has worked at Melbourne Uni and Monash as a designer, technician and RA) to sort and arrange in design form, photographs and pieces of writing relevant to my work in the strand of Arts, Activism and the Anthropocene. Having done this, we have decided to develop it further into a booklet form, which I hope to continue to use to submit to potential publishers as a book proposal. This booklet will be completed in printed form in 2026, and I am looking forward to showing this at future seminars, conferences, on my staff profile page, website and other promotional materials. It encompasses the diverse work I have done, particularly through arts-based research and arts practice-led research.

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 $2345

Outcomes: Two papers for Q1 journals, one an empirical paper and one a methodology paper. Both papers currently being drafted to submit within next few months. The funding was spent to enable Michael to organise and execute the project. The next step for the project is to  publish two papers and using them as springboard to expand the project.

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.

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

Outcomes: Ethics developed, submitted, and approved by HEAG. The funding was spent to enable Michael to develop, submit, and revise an ethics application to successfully secure HEAG approval. The next step for the project is the implementation of the project as detailed in the ethics application.

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 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 is 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

Outcomes: The project represents a continuation of an Enabler project begun in 2024, where Michelle Tourbier developed a conceptual tool for analysing ‘hidden utopias’ in the artefacts of the future project based on theories developed in her thesis. In 2025, this tool was then extended and applied to three different examples from AotF artifacts with the aim of producing a publication. The original team was comprised of Jo Raphael, Robin Bellingham and Michelle Tourbier. A template for the publication and outline was produced in February 2025.  

In April 2025, it became clear that there was enough content in the original publication to justify two publications. This is when additional funding was requested for $2345 to cover the time spent gathering data and collecting research to support the publication. In July 2025, Peta White and Shelley Hannigan joined in the analysis. Each member of the team then used to tool to separately analyse three artifacts through the lens of ‘hidden utopias’. The team then met in August to jointly discuss their findings. Michelle took notes and combined the responses into a comparative document using PowerPoint in September 2025. This data was then used to complete the writing for the first publication in October and early November 2025. The publication currently stands at a length of 11,000 words, and sections will be removed and used as the basis of another publication.

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