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Future Fellowships

Future Fellowships Success

The Australian Research Council Future Fellowships scheme provides funding for outstanding mid-career researchers. Fellowships have a 4-year duration and are open to both Australian and overseas researchers.

Monash Arts secured the following 6 Future Fellowships in the 2010 ARC round:

SOPHIS has also secured an external Fellow in Megan Cassidy-Welch.

These 6 fellowships were amongst 17 secured by Monash overall. This is a terrific result for the Faculty which is a tribute not just to the talent of the recipients but also to the excellent support provided by our Associate Dean, Pauline Nestor, and research support staff in the Faculty.

Jane Lydon

Recognising Aborigines: From Objects of Science to First Australians 

Research program description

Photographs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have played a powerful but unexamined role in shaping global views of race and identity. Reversing the flow of this significant heritage resource from European collections to descendants will enhance international research collaborations and our understanding of current Indigenous issues.

From Jane Lydon’s speech at the award ceremony in Canberra, hosted by Minister Kim Carr

“I am very grateful to the Minister, Kim Carr, and to the Australian Research Council, through its Chief Executive, Professor Margaret Sheil, for the award of a Future Fellowship. I feel honoured to receive this award, which is such an affirmation of the research program I will now be able to pursue over the next four years. 

The Future Fellowship is a wonderful opportunity to build on experience I have acquired over a career spent working in heritage and Australian colonial history, across several different spheres: it will enable me to build links between museums, universities and Indigenous communities.

My project is titled: ‘Recognising Aborigines: From Objects of Science to First Australians.’ It will explore the powerful and diverse ways that photographs have shaped our understanding of Aboriginal people. Where Reconciliation between settler Australians and Indigenous people remains a much-desired goal, it will explain the emergence and persistence of many enduring ideas about Aboriginal people, and so contribute to understanding our colonial past and its legacies in the present. It will contribute to the current national imperative to establish guidelines, protocols and concrete resources for Indigenous communities eager to access their heritage. It will explore current Indigenous valuations of visual archives, providing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with an internationally significant resource for heritage and identity-building. It will further research initiatives in Indigenous intellectual property, decolonisation methodologies and visual histories.

It will create collaborative relationships with four key European cultural institutions, enhancing international understanding of Australian Indigenous culture and history.
In doing so the project will contribute to resolving the momentous and complex intersection of two very different ways of seeing this material: that is, the emergence of new digital technologies, on the one hand, and Aboriginal cultural traditions regarding visual imagery, on the other.

I will investigate ways of balancing Indigenous and international intellectual property regimes, and I will work with Aboriginal descendants to return these images and learn about their role in Indigenous communities today. I believe that this collaborative approach is a fundamental ethical and intellectual tenet of colonial historical research.

Finally, on a personal note, I am particularly grateful to the ARC for its efforts in recent years to address the long-term gender imbalance in Australian research: having had two children in the last five years, I am very mindful of the challenges that many women face in attempting to do justice to both family and career. I applaud the ARC for its continuing efforts to level the playing field and provide equal opportunities to all Australians.”

Associate Professor Anita Harris

Young People and Social Inclusion in the Multicultural City

Research program description

This project investigates the ways young people cultivate cohesion and inclusion in multicultural communities. It will provide critical insights into their civic practices to assist policy makers and service providers develop effective means to maximise social inclusion, civic participation and community cohesion in culturally diverse societies.

Anita’s reaction to receiving the award

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work intensively on my programme of research over the next four years. It is an exciting time to be involved in the interdisciplinary study of youth and social inclusion, which is a truly global field of research.

Undertaking the Future Fellowship at Monash provides me with a perfect platform to develop international research networks and deepen intellectual links between Australian researchers and those at the cutting edge abroad who work in the areas of cohesion, youth citizenship and multicultural community building.”

Jakob Hohwy

The Human Mind in Prediction: Conceptual, Experimental and Practical Implications of the Theory that the Brain is a Hypothesis-tester

Research program description

The relation between the mind and the body is investigated through analysis and experimental studies of the idea that the human brain is essentially a hypothesis-tester. This radically changes our understanding of experience, self and belief, and may lead to clinical and technological discovery and innovation.

Jakob’s reaction to receiving the award

“I am trying to straddle philosophy and neuroscience. These are very different disciplines and it is very time consuming to get things to gel, both theoretically and in terms of practical issues.

In the last few years I have had to delay or shelve many projects simply because there isn't enough time. This fellowship now frees me up to pursue fully this interdisciplinary agenda.  Now I can capitalise on groundbreaking advances in theoretical neuroscience and explore their impact across disciplines.

It is extremely exciting to win this fellowship. I can now really expand our research group where we, as something very rare in philosophy, conduct empirical, ’neurophilosophical‘ experiments. It makes such a difference after years of doing purely theoretical research to be encouraged to break the mould and help change the conception of what philosophy can be. “

Megan Cassidy-Welch

War and Memory in European Culture: A Long Perspective.

Research program description

This project provides a new account of the integration of the crusades into European cultural memory. As an innovative study of war it offers a long perspective on European history; as a study of religious warfare, it will enrich present-day debates on the consequences of international conflict.

Megan’s reaction to receiving the award

“Being awarded an ARC Future Fellowship is a great honour and I'm delighted to be able to engage in long period of sustained research and writing. I'm especially pleased to be joining a group of wonderful historians at Monash, many of whose interests intersect with my fellowship project on war memory.

I see my fellowship project as a great opportunity to include medieval history in conversations about the aftermath and memory of war, and I'm very much looking forward to the next four years.”

Professor Sharon Pickering

Policing the Border: Security, Human Rights and Gender

Research program description

Women are the fastest growing group undertaking extra legal border crossing yet we know little about the gendered character of border enforcement. This project will develop a regulatory framework for border policing that is adaptable to the gender determinants of mobility, human rights and the future challenges of
border management.

Sharon’s reaction to receiving the award

“I am very excited to have been awarded a Future Fellowship. This will give me the opportunity to catalyse already significant inter-faculty collaborations by focusing criminological research efforts in partnership with industry and communities internationally. The Fellowship will provide me with the time to concentrate my energies on research leadership for Monash University and Australian criminology.”

Dr Rob Sparrow

A New Ethics for the Development and Application of Genetic Technologies in a Pluralist Society

Research program description

New technologies for prenatal testing and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis will soon grant us an unprecedented power to choose our children’s genes. This project will develop an ethical framework to govern the development and use of these technologies and thus help ensure that future Australians enjoy a healthy start to life.

Rob’s reaction to receiving the award

“The project combines my interests in political philosophy and bioethics. I am hoping that looking to debates in political theory about multiculturalism, about education, and about the proper role of the state will allow me to make some progress in arguments about human enhancement in bioethics, which are currently stuck in a not-terribly-interesting dispute between conservatives and liberals.

Perhaps the best thing about being awarded this Fellowship is that it will allow me the opportunity to travel internationally to conduct and promote my research. One of the disadvantages about working in Australia is being so far from the US and Europe. Being able to spend an extended period at bioethics centres at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tokyo, and at Oxford will be wonderful.

These latest results also show, I think, just how strong philosophy and bioethics are at Monash: we now have three Future Fellows in the Philosophy Program within the School.

Nobody achieves results in research by themselves, of course, and I am very grateful for the support I have had from the Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics, Justin Oakley, since I've been at Monash - as well as from my other colleagues in the School and the Monash and Arts Research Offices.”

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