ANU wins almost $4m in arts, humanities and social sciences funding
Most of the grants have come from the Australian Research Council for its 2016 round of Discovery Projects and Discovery Early Career Research Awards. Image: ANU
More than a dozen researchers from the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences have secured almost $4m in grants to investigate topics of national and global importance, ranging from alcohol-related policing to safe migration to Western Desert art.
The sixteen projects cover the College’s Research School of Social Sciences and the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, especially the School of Sociology and the School of Archaeology and Anthropology.
About $3.8 m has come from the Australian Research Council for its 2016 round of Discovery Projects and Discovery Early Career Research Awards. The policing study was funded by the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund.
Among the highlights are $192,000 for Dr David Bissell from the School of Sociology to assess the social aspects on personal and family life when people are working away from home for days or weeks at a time.
Dr Iwu Utomo from the School of Demography is co-chief investigator of a $427,000 project to assess the needs of older people in rural Indonesia. Younger people have moved from villages to the archipelago’s rapidly growing cities, posing problems for Indonesia’s traditional family-based aged care system in Indonesia.
The RSHA’s successes included an Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for Dr Glenn Roe, from the Centre for Digital Humanities Research in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, which aims to provide a comprehensive examination of 18th-century authorship practices using techniques developed in the digital humanities.
Also from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dr Sverre Molland’s research will ask ‘what is safe about safe migration’ and will examine claims of safety made by new policy models.
Dr Martyn Jolly from the School of Art and his team will study an early form of the moving image: the glass magic lantern. His project will seek to discover and analyse the large number of glass magic lantern slides that remain under-used in Australian public collections.
Associate Professor Kylie Message, Interim Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts congratulated the grant winners and praised the calibre of the researchers funded.
‘Researchers from the RSHA have achieved outstanding successes in this Australian Research Council round’, she said. ‘The research proposals that have been funded have been recognised for the potential impact they will make on ways of knowing, experiencing, and engaging critically with the world, and for potentially guiding the future directions of social and cultural policies’.