We explore ways to mitigate, educate and support adaptation to socio-ecological challenges in the Anthropocene. We underpin our work on addressing Anthropocene challenges and decolonising knowledges and practices through our four research themes.
Arts, Activism, and the Anthropocene
It is through the arts that human beings make sense of the world and of themselves. Place and identity are integral to the arts. The arts are social and they reflect, communicate, carry and hold important cultural knowledge. The arts offer embodied and multimodal ways to understand the world around us, to communicate, and express ourselves. As vital and profound forms of communication and expression, the arts are often used politically and are important forms of activism. Yet dominant systems, such as education systems (which have tended to prioritise literacy and STEM and undervalue the arts), struggle to fully understand or appreciate the important qualities and roles the arts can play.
This strand seeks to use arts practice-based research, embodied practice, arts-led research, arts activism, and arts education in ways that decolonise knowledges and offer new ways of configuring agency in the face of the significant local and global challenges we now face: the Anthropocene, colonisation (and attempts at re-colonisation), climate change, and wellbeing in uncertain times. Our research in this strand is a form of rebellious research activism as we move toward change in and through the arts to imagine and realise better possible futures. Our research also seeks to bridge the lack of value and understanding of the creative arts across all levels of education and in life, as we research art trends and influences in areas of wellbeing and education toward positive change. The way the arts exercise imagination and creativity and draw upon all other disciplines underscores their potential and relevance for regenerating futures. Our research will shed light on important global issues, helping people across generations with ways to think, act and feel differently.
The members of this strand bring their unique areas of art-practice-led, based and informed research knowledge and experiences, to work towards change. Arts-based and Arts-informed activism (Artivism) is explored through art-practice-led research, arts-based research and socially engaged participatory research, which brings people together from across generations as artists, audience and activists. This strand weaves together threads co-led by researchers who are performance practitioners and makers, creative writers, established artists, arts health and wellbeing experts, and arts educators. We are recognised globally and nationally for our disciplinary and transdisciplinary expertise.
Decolonising knowledges and Practices
The Decolonising Knowledges and Practices strand seeks to decolonise the taken-for-granted knowledge, epistemology and ontology of settler-colonialism and the hegemonic project of modernity. Our research agenda disrupts, resists, and transforms methodologies that support practices and knowledges that entrench inequalities in settler-colonial societies.
Reading group happens via Zoom unless otherwise arranged, once per month on Fridays.
Intergenerational Learning for Environmental Justice
This strand responds to the urgent challenges of how we educate, communicate and act as educators and learners in the face of global environmental harms. The work of this strand assumes that environmental and climate literacy for all is the basis for the transformative action needed to tackle climate and environmental crises. Such literacies are essential for pro-environmental decision-making to support the requisite change at every level of society.
The Intergenerational focus recognises that learning is a life-long process and that people of all ages are both impacted by and can play a role in addressing climate and environmental crises. We also see diverse media platforms as crucial spaces for information – and dis/misinformation – about climate and environment. Our research brings generations together and privileges diverse voices through active, participatory and decolonising research approaches. Central to our focus is respect for nature in First Nations’ knowledges and other relational diverse worldviews.
Learning encompasses education in formal and informal spaces, occurring within institutions and organisations, located in nature and on Country. We focus on learning across the lifespan, incorporating early childhood, school, university and community environmental education programs. In order to respond to environmental harms, learning needs to be transformative, promoting creative responses for change.
We understand the environment as our planet and people, underscoring that humans are not separate from the more-than-human world. We also know that this planet and its people are experiencing extensive harm and that these harms are felt unequally. This stream investigates the role of biophilia, hope and relationality in generating respect for nature and inspiring activism to address these harms, while at the same time attending to climate grief and anxiety.
Justice relates to what is fair, our moral obligations to do what is right for the planet, for all species, for each other. It includes environmental justice, climate justice, social justice, and multi-species justice. It incorporates actions, including embodied and digital activism and volunteering, in the pursuit of just futures.
This strand weaves together threads co-led by researchers recognised globally and nationally for their transdisciplinary expertise, engagement and impact as internal and external partners across the arts, humanities, media, communication and education. Current and emerging projects for each thread offer opportunities to generate quality outputs, mentoring for ECR/MCRs, research training for HDR candidates and the potential to generate significant future funding.
Socio-ecological Nexus
Representing human-environment systems as a nexus, we acknowledge that humans, human social and economic structures and institutions, human beliefs and actions are an inextricable part of a wider ecology impacting the natural environment. Any plan to implement innovations designed as ‘solutions’ involving shifting of practice in one area is inextricably linked to other impacts across science, technology and society. A lack of critical perspective on science-society relations has contributed to increasing inequality through an accelerating global demand for energy, food, and water, and has hampered efforts to provide equitable access to resources.
We focus on the implications for the development of a critically aware and committed citizenry cognisant of the entanglement of human actions and ecological well-being, supported by an enlightened policy environment committed to the maintenance of planetary health and well-being and to principles of social justice. This requires community and school education that develops a critical awareness of the conscription of science and technology to reinforce unsustainable and inequitable socio-ecological arrangements and the need to recognise and promote responsible scientific research and innovation. It centres the societal complexities associated with local and global environmental challenges and the misinformation spawned by sectional interests and power structures.
Our program of work aims to frame science and technology as a ‘social good’ that is central to the implementation of a regenerative and just world. This requires inquiry into how science and technology can be co-opted in support of power relations, economy and politics that drive unjust and damaging socio-ecological relations, and ways in which the science and social science/humanities research communities can work to resist these tendencies. We share an ambitious and achievable vision to influence and reorient the trajectory of technology innovation of our partners, internal and external to Deakin, working towards more-than-human futures.
The Socio-Ecological Nexus (SEN) strand weaves together threads co-led by researchers recognised globally and nationally for their transdisciplinary expertise, as well as their engagement and demonstrable impact as internal and external partners across science and the social sciences. Initial projects, current and emerging, for each strand offer opportunities to generate quality outputs, mentoring opportunities for ECR/MCRs, research training for HDRs and the potential to generate significant future funding. The strand builds on established research programs of its members to generate opportunities and add value to these through interdisciplinary collaboration and the opening of opportunities for ECRs and MCRs to carve a research trajectory in these new spaces.