Research Vacation Scholarships
2013 /2014
Projects available in Education, Arts and Social Sciences
Organise your own project, or select an existing project
Organise your own project:
You can identify research areas of interest to you and then contact an academic staff
member as a potential supervisor, eg lecturers, course co-ordinators, program directors.
Scholars organising their own project would usually undertake a substantial piece of
supervised research work, which may result in a report/paper, possibly for publication.
Below is a list of EASS academics who have indicated they would be happy to be contacted
in relation to supervising a Research Vacation Scholar
Name and contact details: Dr Amrita Malhi, email: amrita.malhi@unisa.edu.au 83022958
Areas of interest: History and politics in Malaysia, especially in its international/inter-Asian
contexts; history and politics in Indonesia. Malay world, Southeast Asia, Muslim world,
Indian Ocean Rim, Asia-Pacific: land, resources, customary tenures and identity conflict,
inter-ethnic and inter-religious relationships. Colonialism, anti-colonial movements, the
national, national liberation, postcolonial identity negotiation. Islam and the Caliphate.
Name and contact details: Dr David Radford email: david.radford@unisa.edu.au 83021003
Areas of interest: Areomobilities – the transformation of global airports: impact of
globalisation, innovation and experimentation on mobile lives. Multiculturalism and
migrant integration into regional Australia. Religion studies – transformations in religious
and ethnic identity. International relations – Middle East/Central Asia, nationalism and
national identity, religion and the state, post-Soviet/Communist studies.
Name and contact details: Dr Eric Hsu email: eric.hsu@unisa.edu.au 8321836
Areas of interest: Sociology of sleep; social theory of time; sociology of time-shortage;
globalisation theory; sociology of food cultures.
Name and contact details: Dr Michelle Short email: michelle.short@unisa.edu.au
Areas of interest: Sleep, cognition, circadian rhythms
Name and contact details: Dr Tim Curnow, RCLC/CIL, tim.curnow@unisa.edu.au, 83024627
Areas of interest: languages education policy, language in society, language variation and
change, Spanish, indigenous languages of South America
Name and contact details: AsPr Jill Dorrian email: jill.dorrian@unisa.edu.au
Areas of interest: Neurobehavioural effects of sleep deprivation; productivity, safety and
health in shiftwork operations; health psychology; alcohol consumption, dependence and
abuse
Name and contact details: Dr Barbara Spears email: barbara.spears@unisa.edu.au
Areas of interest: Cyber bullying; covert bullying; bullying behaviours; girls' friendships and
peer relationships; friendship; conflict management; negotiation; wellbeing
Name and contact details: Dr Daniel Chaffee email: daniel.chaffee@unisa.edu.au 83022968
Areas of interest: social theory, globalisation, networks and social media
Select an existing project:
Project title: Safe and Well Online: Young and Well CRC
Project summary: This project examines how online social marketing can be used to
enhance young people’ safety online. If you have an interest in cyberbullying, cybersafety,
and young people’s use of social media, then the project has a place for you. We have
created two campaigns, which are now being analysed.
We are interested particularly in the notions of respectful behaviours online, promoting
positive messaging online and how and why young people seek help (online) when things go
wrong. We have collected data on young people’s use of the internet, social media,
cyberbullying, help seeking, stress and anxiety, and notions of respect. Your work on this
project will help to contribute to outcomes associated with this very important project.
This project is part of an Australian Government Cooperative Research Centre: Young and
Well http://www.youngandwellcrc.org.au/safe-and-supportive/safe-and-well-online
Contact: Dr Barbara Spears, School of Education: 83024500 barbara.spears@unisa.edu.au
Project title: How cognition changes with age
Project summary: We are looking at how cognitive processes change with age, and what
factors (environmental and biological) relate to these changes. The Vacation Scholarship
work would focus on this project, including data collection, psychological test scoring and
data entry. The position would also assist, to a lesser extent, on other lab projects. The
person would need to commit to working business hours.
Contact person and details: Dr Hannah Keage, Hannah.Keage@unisa.edu.au or Dr Mark
Kohler, mark.kohler@unisa.edu.au
Project Title: Race, Religion & Reconciliation: Social Media and PR/Communications in
Malaysian Election Campaigns since 2008.
Project Summary: The student would be interested in tracking how the Malaysian
opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance), used social media techniques to a)
argue for racial and religious reconciliation to underpin their anti-corruption platform; and
b) to conduct a successful ‘get out the vote’ campaign which resulted in the highest voter
turnout in Malaysia’s history in May 2013. This would suit a student interested in the
professionalisation of politics, electoral campaign techniques ,and public relations,
marketing and communications. The project could entail work with English-language and/or
Malay-language materials, depending on the student’s interests.
For further guidance, consult: http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/10/21/pr-machine-whenanwar-ibrahim-won-over-adelaide/
Contact Person and Details: Dr Amrita Malhi, Hawke Research Institute. T: 830 22958 E:
amrita.malhi@unisa.edu.au W: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/amrita-malhi/57/626/6b6
Project Title: Ethnic & Religious Frictions in a Sulawesi Supply Chain.
Project Summary: The student should be interested in developing a bibliography and
literature review related to ethnic and religious frictions around land, resources and identity
in Sulawesi in particular, and Indonesia more broadly, since the fall of Suharto’s New Order
regime in 1998. This project would suit a student interested in competing tenures,
customary land and resource rights, and activism, negotiation and mobilisation around
ethnicity and religion in Indonesia/Southeast Asia. The project could entail work with
English-language and/or Indonesian-language materials, depending on the student’s
interests.
For further guidance, consult the introduction in Murray Li, Tania. The Will to Improve:
Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics. Duke University Press, 2007.
Contact Person and Details: Dr Amrita Malhi, Hawke Research Institute. T: 830 22958 E:
amrita.malhi@unisa.edu.au W: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/amrita-malhi/57/626/6b6
Project title: ARC Indigenous Knowledges: Law, Society and the State
Project summary:
This project explores methodologies for social inclusion within the legal order. Critiques of
the legal order have led to programs for inclusion of indigenous knowledges and experience.
Similarly, commitments to social justice have led to acceptance of the need for reform to
formal law, administration and education. However, beyond inclusion of Indigenous people
in governance projects, there has been no attention to developing appropriate
methodology. This oversight has meant Indigenous perspectives are misrepresented or coopted even whilst being included. This research creates a space in which Aboriginal voices
can engage the academy and those that administer justice to develop more sophisticated
and effective practices of inclusion.
Contact person and details: Irene Watson
Email: irene.watson@unisa.edu.au
Project title:
Victoria Square's changing political faces and urban spaces: Researching changing public
attitudes towards Victoria Square in Adelaide's newspapers
Project summary:
The ongoing role and legacy of Adelaide's Victoria Square continues to dominate
both political and popular debate in South Australia. As Adelaide's largest inner-city public
space and its geographic centre, it is at the forefront of debate about how to urbanise and
densify Adelaide; both in terms of how the public perceive its urban and civic value, but also
how governments in turn value its amenity through their financial investment in its ongoing
development. Revealing what the public has said about Victoria Square in the popular media
in parallel to understanding the changing roles of the square in Adelaide's cultural history
provides a concise understanding of changing opinions about what public space is, how it is
useful and, ultimately, what the Public values in their city's public spaces.
This research project seeks the assistance of a research collaborator to mine newspaper
articles, photographs and satirical cartoons that comment upon the various incarnations of
Victoria Square since its inception in the 19C. This research will primarily be conducted in
the Architecture Museum, housed in the Kaurna building. Outcomes will be used to frame a
concise popular history of the square and underpin subsequent critical commentary on the
contemporary design of the square today.
Areas of interest: this would be suitable for students with a background in architecture,
popular culture, photo-journalism, media studies, journalism, publishing, cartoon satire and
urban history.
Contact person and details: Dr. Chris Brisbin, Phone: 8302 0282,
Email: chris.brisbin@unisa.edu.au
Project title: Critical Perspective: Planning, Shooting and Editing a series of microdocumentaries of Critique 2013: An international conference reflecting on creative practice
in art, architecture, and design
Project summary:
Critique 2013 aims to provide a forum to bring together engaged professionals and scholars
from various disciplinary backgrounds, fields of knowledge, production, and methodological
approaches to discuss and debate the role, value and future of both traditional and
emerging forms of critique; such as, written critique in the form of blogs, wikis, and social
media, traditional print media and academic journals; visual critique in the form of online
video and digital imagery and audio critique in the form of traditional radio and online
audio. It also considers opinion versus critique; verbal critique; relationships between critics
and creative practitioners; designed artefacts as critique; and curated exhibitions as critique.
This research project seeks the assistance of a research collaborator to capture and produce
a series of short micro-documentries of keynote presentations and audience responses
during the conference. This research aims to better understand the reception of presented
content and promote the outcomes of the conference to a wider audience and encourage
engagement with the content of the conference, while incorporating the critical perspective
of the conference itself into the research project. Consequently, this research will take the
form of both a creative outcome (series of micro-documetries) and conventional published
reflections on issues relevant to the dissemination of conference content as a whole. This
combination of published outcomes, in combination with conference proceedings and other
published outcomes, will be used by the CIs to seek publications support for book-based
outcomes for a second Critique conference in 2015.
Contact person and details:
Dr. Collette Snowden
Phone: 8302 4474
Email: collette.snowden@unisa.edu.au
Dr. Myra Thiessen
Phone: 8302 0678
Email: myra.thiessen@unisa.edu.au
Dr. Chris Brisbin
Phone: 8302 0282
Email: chris.brisbin@unisa.edu.au
Project title: ‘Marriage, migrants and moral panic in the Australian media’
Project summary: This project aims to map and analyse media discourse on marriage and
migration in Australia. It seeks to 1) contextualise recent sensationalist media accounts of
the issue of forced marriage by looking at media coverage before and after September 11,
2001; 2) develop a timeline of the key events in the recent evolution of the concept of
forced marriage in Australia; and 3) identify and analyse recurring
tropes/stereotypes/explanatory narratives surrounding media representations of the
intersection between gender, culture, religion and coercion.
Contact: Dr Chloe Patton, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, International Centre for Muslim
and non-Muslim Understanding, chloe.patton@unisa.edu.au or Kiera Lindsey, Lecturer,
David Unaipon Centre for Indigenous Education and Research, kiera.lindsey@unisa.edu.au
Project title: Teacher blogs: Knowledge, practice and identity
Project summary: Blogging is an increasingly popular practice for professional educators.
Teachers set up blogs for many reasons: to voice their thoughts and views on education
issues, to share practice, to involve their students, to model writing, to express and share
their emotions. This project will consist of two phases, carried out simultaneously: 1) active
monitoring of three teacher blogs 2) content analysis of the archives of 20 - 30 teacher
blogs. The teacher blogs will be selected on blog sites such as Edublog and Wordpress. For
the active monitoring cohort, it is anticipated that bloggers will be North American
educators, since the US Spring term starts in early January whereas Australian teachers are
on holiday and less likely to be actively blogging.
The Vacation Scholar will be provided with a reference list of relevant papers and will be
expected to read and annotate these. This project is one of a series of studies on resource
production and use in education. Previous Vacation scholars monitored teacher resource
websites, contributing to the theorisation of the teacher as resource prosumer and cyber
bricoleur
Nichols, S., Maynard, A. & Brown, C. (2012) Teacher resources online: Literacy swap shops
and webpreneurs. Language and Literacy 14(2) 62 – 74.
Name and contact details: Sue Nichols sue.nichols@unisa.edu.au 83024225
Areas of interest: Digital literacies, Actor Network Theory, professional practice, identity
Project title: Responding to the needs of children placed in foster homes or alternative care
due to abuse or neglect.
Project summary: This project is part of a program of research being undertaken at the
Australian Centre for Child Protection. This research aims to improve the life of children
who now live in alternative care settings, such as residential group homes, foster care or
kinship care, usually due to child abuse or neglect in their family of origin.
This program of research will establish the support needs of children in alternative care and
those that care for them. It is envisaged that this program of research will ultimately result
in more effective supports that have been developed in response to the needs of children
and their carers. More effective support will assist children to realise their educational,
vocational and social potential. As a summer scholar, you may engage in a range of research
activities that support this program. Example research activities include literature reviews,
ethics applications and data collection and analysis.
Contact person and details:
Dr Sara McLean, Research Fellow, Australian Centre for Child Protection
sara.mclean@unisa.edu.au 8302 2939
Project title: Yuntuwarrun Learning Centre: Community Engagement Project
Project summary: Since 2009 staff at the David Unaipon have been involved in field trips
and more recently a Student Engagement Project (STEP 2010) involving the Raukkan
Aboriginal Community, Camp Coorong, and the Wilderness Lodge all of which are part of the
Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA). The recent purchase of the old Narrung Primary
School and an adjoining house has presented potential for the development of a
collaborative community engagement project associated with the development of the
Yuntuwarrun Centre. DUCIER has identified a number of students who would be interested
the project outlined below over the summer period:
Project title: Ngarrindjeri Tourism: A scoping study
Project Summary: The Raukkan Community (E.g. Cropping and beef cattle, a nursery
associated with natural resource management and landcare programs, housing projects, the
continuing development and maintenance of community infrastructure, and more recently
a café which includes training and employment for people residing in the community), Camp
Coorong (A Race Relations program that attracts thousands of children and adults each
year) and the Wilderness Lodge (Eco-tourism) are grounded on the sharing of Ngarrindjeri
culture, the creation of learning opportunities, employment opportunities, and tourist
ventures for the Ngarrindjeri community. More recently, Raukkan and the David Unaipon
College of Indigenous Education and Research have initiated a consultation process to
facilitate the development of a Learning Centre (YLC), Media Centre, hospitality
training/Kitchen Centre, accommodation for student interaction, field trips, collaboration
and research, and ongoing possibilities for tourism.
Proposal: Undertake a preliminary study with all three organisations to identify the viability
of various existing or emerging plans for Ngarrindjeri people’s engagement with, and
potential for, tourism ventures to facilitate ongoing sustainable community development.
Contact person and details:
Ron Nicholls
Lecturer/OUA Coordinator
David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research
Yungondi Building (Y2-48)
Ph. (08) 8302 7392
Mob: 0419 714 815
ronald.nicholls@unisa.edu.au