TfC Grants
Please find on this page information on grants currently held by TfC members.
Anne Cranny-Francis
1. Skin Jobs: biopolitics, embodiment and haptic technologies (ARC Discovery Project)
2. Jack Lindsay: Critic, writer, socialist (ARC Discovery Project)
Tara Forrest
‘Alternative Public Spheres: Alexander Kluge’s Film and Television Experiments’ (ARC Discovery Project)
Meredith Jones with Emily Hunter
Sun, Sea Sand and Silicone (Economic and Social Research Council Grant (UK))
Julie Robert
Faculty Enrichment Program Grant (UTS/FASS)
Katrina Schlunke, Andrew Hurley, Emma Fraser
Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements (ATN-DAAD - Germany Joint Research Co-operation Scheme)
Ilaria Vanni, Chris Ho, Devleena Ghosh, Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd
Ripple Effects: community building, participation and cultural citizenship through creative practices in Western Sydney (ARC Linkage Project)
Anne Cranny-Francis
1. Skin Jobs: biopolitics, embodiment and haptic technologies (ARC Discovery Project)
The aim of this recently concluded project was: to develop a way of understanding touch as a meaning system, which can be used to develop and enhance haptic technologies. When I wrote the grant application, I specified haptics because that was the touch technology that was receiving a lot of attention in the media; however, touch technologies have proliferated since then – both (hard) touch screen technologies and (soft) wearable technologies. The grant application continued. This aim is grounded in the following hypothesis: Touch is a meaning-making system that, like sight and hearing, is both physical and cultural … My work has focussed on exploring what constitutes the ‘cultural’ element of touch. It has led me to talk with people in a wide range of fields and disciplines, including design, engineering, experimental psychology, anthropology, marketing, the arts, education, performance studies, sound studies and cultural studies.
The outcomes of the project include a number of publications: 4 book chapters, 14 journal articles and 2 refereed conference papers, as well as three special journal issues:
• “Wearable Technology”, Visual Communication, Volume 7, No. 3 (2008)
• “Biopolitics of the senses: touch, sound and embodiment”, SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture, Volume 5, No. 3 (2008)
• “Touch”, Social Semiotics, Volume 21, Issue 4 (2011)
Other outcomes include the research exhibition, The Sense of Touch, shown at the Macquarie University Art Gallery, 11 February-20 March, 2009 and its later iteration, Touch Too, exhibited in the UTS Tower exhibition space, 21 June-29 July 2011. The work has been discussed in 15 papers and invited addresses and a book based on the research is under consideration by a major academic publisher.
2. Jack Lindsay: Critic, writer, socialist (ARC Discovery Project)
The principal aim of this new project is: To identify how Jack Lindsay was able to move critically across disciplines and across media to create an understanding of cultural and social practices and their impact on the formation of embodied social subjects – a mode of analysis and knowledge-formation that is vital today, in a world that is increasingly multimedia, multimodal, trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural. This ability situates Lindsay within a lineage of trans-disciplinary thinkers and writers, which includes the subject of one of his greatest biographical studies, William Morris to whom the title of this project alludes. By locating how Lindsay was able to interrelate aesthetics with social and political practice and also with the feelings and thoughts of everyday people, the project offers a model for designers and cultural theorists who are developing products and practices to which people can relate as embodied social subjects. This project overlaps significantly with the project above through its focus on inter-disciplinarity and on the nature of embodied subjectivity.
The major development in this project is the discovery of an unpublished typescript by Jack Lindsay in which he meditates on the production of his own work, relating it to his experiences, relationships, beliefs and values. I am currently exploring the possibilities for publishing this typescript.
‘Alternative Public Spheres: Alexander Kluge’s Film and Television Experiments’
(ARC Discovery Project, 2010-2013)
Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer, and television producer. This project focuses on the important role that Kluge’s work has played in the establishment of alternative public spheres in which audiences are encouraged to actively participate in the meaning-making process pertaining to a diverse range of political issues. Drawing on Kluge’s extensive critical writings on politics, media, and experience, this project will illuminate the significance of Kluge’s experimental film and television practice and highlight the important role that alternative media producers can play in nourishing a healthy democracy.
Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials For the Imagination is one of the publications that has been produced as a part of this project. This collection – the first sourcebook on Kluge’s work to be published in English – comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be published by Amsterdam University Press in 2012: http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_book&isbn=9789089642721
Meredith Jones with Emily Hunter
(with Prof Elspeth Probyn, Sydney University, and UK Researchers Prof Ruth Holliday, Dr David Bell, Dr Jacqueline Sanchez)
Economic and Social Research Council Grant (UK)
Sun, Sea and Silicone: aesthetic surgery tourism
This research project is looking for participants. Please click here for participation information.
This interdisciplinary project will look at Britons and Australians who participate in cosmetic surgery tourism, and at the countries and people that provide this service. It will comprise in-depth interviews and key on-site observations in order to explore the peculiarly contemporary phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism and its connections to global flows of people and capital. Cosmetic surgery tourism has a crucial wider context: it is part of a general medical tourism trend. Women and men travelling abroad for cosmetic surgery are likely to become the pioneers of medical tourism and cosmetic surgery is leading this growth industry because it is a largely privatized healthcare practice. In the US, for example, where healthcare is packaged with salaries, some big companies now only allow workers to have expensive surgeries if they agree to obtain them more cheaply by going overseas for them.
Cosmetic surgery tourism is a new and developing industry that incorporates novel forms of labour and organizational structures which straddle national boundaries. For instance, it is possible for a cosmetic surgery travel agent to arrange a car to collect a consumer from their doorstep in the UK or Australia, fly them to Spain or Thailand, transport them from the airport to a hotel near the hospital, allocate a nurse/ guide/ interpreter to be constantly at the consumer's side throughout their surgery, recovery and post-surgery tourist 'experiences', before returning them once more to their doorstep. Although the 'credit crunch' has undoubtedly slowed the growth of the cosmetic surgery industry globally, it has simultaneously swelled the numbers prepared to travel for 'cut-price' surgeries made possible by favourable currency exchange rates and lower labour costs outside the richest countries in the world. Little research has yet been conducted on mapping out this new industry and the experiences of those that enter into it. This research aims to broaden our understanding of the modes of operation of the organizations involved, the surgical tourist experience, and the potential implications for a globalized system of healthcare organized around consumption.
The research examines two sites of origin - the UK and Australia-and five popular cosmetic surgery tourism destinations: Thailand, Korea and Singapore, Spain and the Czech Republic. The research team will conduct in-depth interviews and detailed observations with cosmetic surgery tourists, cosmetic surgery tourist agents, care workers, interpreters and tour guides, as well as clinic staff and surgeons. It will explore the demand for surgery abroad through individual consumer motivations and chart their experiences and the structure, organisation and experiences of workers in the cosmetic surgery tourism industry. This study represents the first multi-site, empirical and systematic analysis of cosmetic surgery tourism and is being carried out by an internationally renowned research team.
Data from the study will be used to predict some of the key issues facing surgical tourists and healthcare providers in the future, in what will undoubtedly become a more mobile and internationalised market.
Julie Robert
Faculty Enrichment Program Grant (UTS/FASS)
The grant I received this year was a Faculty Enrichment Program grant funded by the Understanding Canada: Canadian Studies initiative (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Government of Canada). The award is for $6200 CDN to fund a research-based teaching overhaul of the Contemporary Canada (Quebec) subject in the International Studies program. I'll be in Quebec in December and January to carry out research, to gather materials to build new case studies for the students and to source new resources for the library. I'll also be meeting with academics in both Quebec and in Ontario to discuss the challenges of researching, teaching and writing about Quebec when you cannot count on French-language materials.
Katrina Schlunke, Andrew Hurley, Emma Fraser
University of Technology, Sydney (ATN-DAAD - Germany Joint Research Co-operation Scheme)
University of Potsdam, Potsdam (ATN-DAAD - Germany Joint Research Co-operation Scheme)
Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements
Project Description
This project is interested in exploring the ways in which the past is written, framed and forgotten through material objects, a variety of writings and media forms, embodied subjects and forms of national and transnational identification through the nexus of German/Australian imaginings that arise within a colonial experience. Colonialism is here understood not just as particular moment in history but an ongoing form of power that
continues to produce contemporary effects and affects. In a similar way both Germany and Australia are not understood as simple national frames but sets of emotions and imagined geographies. Entanglements is
therefore our best description of this transnational environment and suggests what we hope is a productive means to approach it.
Project Activities 2011 (UTS)
A ‘ Symposium’ was held at UTS within the Transforming Cultures Research Centre on Friday the 12th August. The day consisted of some key discussion papers including Anja Schwarz on ‘Memories entangled, affective and 'stuffed': Australian Animals at Berlin's Natural History Museum?’. There was also an extended panel session on Further Entanglements (Works in Progress) and a roundtable on the Appearing and Disappearing Leichardt. Ten papers were given by participants from across Australian Universities and two visitors from University of Potsdam. The areas of interest included tourism, ANZACs, natural history, missionary activity and selves in migration. A symposium concentrating on colonialism was held in Potsdam in September and a further related workshop will be held in 2012 at UTS.
Ilaria Vanni, Chris Ho, Devleena Ghosh, Tanja Dreher, Justine Lloyd
ICE Linkage Project (ARC)
Ripple Effects: community building, participation and cultural citizenship through creative practices in Western Sydney
This study explores emerging media and creative practices developed through and around Information and Cultural Exchange in Western Sydney by engaging with participants, peers and the wider community. The project seeks to provide a new framework for understanding the nexus between cultural production and citizenship practices. It considers ICE as situated in and producing an ecology of relations, projects, impacts and in turn it examines the way the organisation operates, the path of individual cultural producers, specific programs and enterprises. Led by researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), the project is a partnership with new media arts and community organisation ICE, the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts NSW.
The project will offer new ways to think about questions on the relation between new media and creative practices and cultural diversity, belonging and participation beyond multiculturalism. Lines of enquiry for research have included:
• a study exploring the way ICE successfully operates as a ‘creation space’.
• a study following specific cultural producers
• a survey mapping recognition of ICE among ‘mainstream’ Western Sydney organisations
• evaluations of specific ICE projects, analysing community responses to project outcomes
• profiles of key arts and community organisations, focusing on the influence ICE has had on their professional practices and approach
• an analysis of media coverage gained by key ICE projects
• funding policies analysis identifying the ways in which policies inform the development and sustainability of projects
Project officer/Research assistant: Jemima Mowbray (jemima.mowbray@uts.edu.au)
