2020 ARC Discovery projects announced

The Australian Research Council (ARC) has released the outcomes of the 2020 Discovery Research projects, with several researchers from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences awarded funding under the scheme.

Dr Ben Mercer from School of History has received funding for a project looking at political violence in Western Europe after 1968. The project will look at how the protest era of the 60s grew into a decade of political violence and terror in the 70s, using a transnational anlysis of political violence across France, Italy and Germany.

Associate Professor Maria Nugent, Co-Director the Australian Centre for Indigenous History within the School of History, with her project colleagues have have received funding to build knowledge about Indigenous Australian objects held in museum collections in the UK and Europe. Togeather with Dr Lissant Bolton; Dr Caroline Cartwright; Dr Gaye Sculthorpe; Professor Nicholas Thomas; Dr Shayne Williams, they hope to build relations between Indigenous communities and overseas instititions, and develop a foundation for the future return of Indigenous cultural heritage. Their project will focus on objects from Sydney and the NSW Coast regions, objects that have not previously been accessible to Indigenous communities or researchers.

Emeritus Professor Howard Morphy and Hon. A/Prof Frances Morphy have received a substantial grant to research Placenames and Personal Names in Yolngu Society and Country, in north-east Arnhem Land. Placenames are sung in ceremony, and passed down through the generations as personal names. Their project aims to document the placenames of two Yolngu regions and explore what they tell us about Yolngu society as a system that has been in place for thousands of years. In consultation with Yolngu, it aims to create an interactive map and database archive to which Yolngu historians can add in the future, providing significant benefits for a community for who consider these names to be central to their identity and wellbeing – past, present and future.

Professor Philip Piper; Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood; Professor Thi My Dung Lam have received a grant to investigate 'the missing millennium' – a significant gap in our understanding of the arrival of food producing populations into northern Vietnam between 5000 and 4000 years ago, before their expansion across the rest of Mainland Southeast Asia. 

Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies head Professor Laurajane Smith is part of a team with Associate Professor Cressida Fforde, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies (NCIS) at ANU, Professor Daryle Rigney, Professor Peter Stone and Associate Professor Merata Kawhuru. Their project will combine Aboriginal, Maori and Western intellectual traditions in order to advance theoretical understandings of heritage and to reconceptualise its role in reconciliation.

Associate Professor Gavin Smith, Deputy Head of the School of Sociology, with Professor Mark Andrejevic; Professor Neil Selwyn; Dr Xin Gu and Mr Conor Roche have received a grant to be led through Monash University, to research public responses to Automated Facial Recognition.

Dr Mirani Litster and alumni Kellie Pollard are part of a large team to receive a grant titled 'Before Cook: Contact, Negotiation and the Archaeology of the Tiwi Islands' led by Flinders University. The project aims to conduct the first systematic maritime and terrestrial archaeological investigations of the Tiwi Islands, alongside the study of material culture, oral history and archival materials associated with early Dutch explorers, British colonists, and Macassans.

The College is proud of and congratulates all its successful recipients. It also recognises the significant time and effort that all researchers whether successful or not put into their ARC applications.