ARC funding to help consumers face ethical challenges

The question of how consumers can justify their choices ethically, when “serious wrongdoing” occurs in producing consumer goods, has long puzzled Associate Professor Christian Barry. 

Having received a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award (DORA), announced in November by the Australian Research Council (ARC), Dr Barry can now develop a project that will explore the ways consumers navigate the dilemmas they face.

Dr Barry, Director of the ANU Centre for Moral, Social, and Political Theory, received a $593,000 Discovery Project Awards grant in the latest ARC round.

“I was very excited to get the DORA, since it will allow me to focus in a sustained way on a question that has intrigued me for a long time: what are the implications of the fact that many of the goods we consume – coffee, electronic devices, and so on – have been produced through processes that many consider to involve serious wrongdoing, somewhere along the line?” he says.

“This question is empirically complex and it is also philosophically challenging. It’s also one that nearly everyone I know has puzzled over.”

Dr Barry will lead a team that analyses product case studies and evaluates potential strategies – including ethical purchasing, consumer boycotts, and consumer activism – that consumers may use in discharging their responsibilities.

Consumers, he says, are typically left feeling overwhelmed by the moral questions they face in the decision making.

“It seems to them that whatever they do, their lives will be morally compromised by their conduct as consumers, in which case they despair of doing anything at all. Or alternatively, consumers feel that they are being driven to a kind of unappealing purism,” he says.

“Our hope is to develop and justify individual responses to consumer responsibility that can avoid these extremes.”

The ARC grant was one of 16 awarded to applicants from the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) in the most recent round of ARC funding grants.

In total, CASS researchers received more than $5.5 million in funding.

CASS Dean and Director Professor Toni Makkai praised applicants and their support staff for working tirelessly on their submissions.

“It takes a lot of hard work to get an application up, but the rewards for doing so are significant in all sorts of ways,” she said.

She encouraged those who had missed out this time to apply again, as many applications are not successful on their first or second time.

ANU achieved the highest success rate of any university in Australia, with 85 applicants sharing in more than $31 million of funding.

In total, the University received more than $56 million to fund 127 research projects – representing more than 10 per cent of the total awarded across all institutions.

A full list of successful CASS projects is outlined below.

CASS Discovery Project Awards:

  • Archaeology and Anthropology: Peter Bellwood, Philip Piper, Hsiao-chun Hung, Landscape, resources and human migration during the Southeast Asian Neolithic, $401,320
  • Language Studies: Patrick McConvell , Nic Peterson, The long-term dynamics of higher Order social Organisation in Aboriginal Australia, $146,000
  • Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute: Robert Ackland, Understanding online attention and user-generated content creation: An information consumption and production perspective, $225,000
  • History: Christian Goeschel, Mussolini and Hitler: fascism, the cultural history of diplomacy and male friendship, $145,985
  • History: Angela Woollacott, Don Dunstan and political and social reform in Australia, $150,000
  • Philosophy: Nic Southwood, Phillip Pettit, John Broome, Victoria McGeer, The demands of reason, $166,000
  • Philosophy: Christian Barry (DORA), Kate McDonald (Uni of Melbourne), Robert Goodin (University of Essex/ANU), The ethical responsibilities of consumers, $593,000
  • Politics and International Relations: Renee Jeffrey, Amnesties and peace accords in the Asia-Pacific, $155,823
  • Politics and International Relations: Renee Jeffrey , Lia Kent, Joanne Wallis, The impact of political reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific, $165,000
  • Sociology: Darren Halpin, The organised interest system in Australian public policy: Size, focus, impact and transformation, $382,000

CASS Discovery Indigenous Awards:

  • History: Jeanine Leane, The David Unaipon Award: Shaping the literary and cultural history of Aboriginal writing in Australia, $558,272

CASS Discovery Early-Career Researcher Awards:

  • Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research: Katherine Curchin, Reconciling rival visions for Indigenous development in remote Australia, $306,770
  • History: Samuel Furphy, A Due Observance of Justice? Protectors of Aborigines in Britain's Australasian Colonies: 1838-1857, $392,403
  • Politics and International Relations: Nikola Regent, Francesco Guicciardini as a political theorist, $394,105

CASS Future Fellowship Awards:

  • History: Dr Patricia O'Brien, Colonialism, violence and resistance in the interwar Pacific: Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Samoa and beyond, $689,524
  • Archaeology and anthropology: Dr Melinda Hinkson, Place and displacement in Aboriginal Australia: A Warlpiri visual cultural enquiry, $688,593