Opportunities for Collaborative Research

Professor Chris Chamberlain is an expert on homelessness. He is the joint author of Youth Homelessness: Early Intervention and Prevention (1998), Counting the Homeless 2001 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2003) and Counting the Homeless 2006 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008).

Counting the Homeless 2006 found that the number of homeless people had increased from 99,900 in 2001 to 105,000 in 2006. These findings influenced the Commonwealth Government’s white paper on homelessness (The Road Home, 2008) which set the target to halve homelessness by 2020. The Australian Government will spend $7.8 billion over the next five years to reduce homelessness. Chris was invited to attend the 2020 Summit in Parliament House, Canberra because of his expertise on homelessness.

In 2009, Chris completed reports on homelessness for each state and territory government. These reports provide information about the social characteristics and geographical distribution of homeless people at the local level. All state and territory governments use these reports to make decisions about the allocation of resources in their state.

Chris’s other research interests include an ARC Linkage project on Homeless Pathways (with Dr Guy Johnson). The industry partners are the Salvation Army Crisis Services and Homeground Services. Chris also has an interest in young people and substance abuse.

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Global Studies and Research Leader of the Globalization and Culture Program of the Global Cities Research Institute at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa and an Affiliated Graduate Faculty Member with the Department of Political Science. He has served as an academic consultant on globalization for the US State Department and as an advisor to the PBS TV series, “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.”

He is the author or editor of twenty books on globalization, global history, and the history of political ideas, including: The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2008); the award-winning Globalisms: The Great Ideological Struggle of the 21st Century 3rd ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) and the bestselling Globalization: A Very Short Introduction 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Suellen Murray is a Senior Research Fellow/Senior Lecturer based in the Centre for Applied Social Research. As well as working as an academic, she has worked in a range of positions including those concerned with human services service delivery, policy development and program administration. In the past she taught in social sciences and women's studies; more recently, she coordinates and teaches the research strategies course.

Suellen's research expertise is multi-disciplinary and covers the fields of social policy, history, sociology and gender studies. She has extensive experience in qualitative research methodologies including archival research and in-depth interviewing. Her areas of research interest include the history of domestic violence services and social policy concerning domestic violence which were the topics of her book, More than Refuge: Changing Responses to Domestic Violence (UWA Press, 2002). She has also researched the life histories of people who grew up in care and co-authored the book, After the Orphanage: Life Beyond the Children’s Home (UNSW Press, 2009).

She has been lead chief investigator on four Australian Research Council-funded projects and chief investigator on a fifth. She has also lead social policy research projects funded by the Western Australian and Victorian governments and with non-government agencies including the Salvation Army and CASA (Centre Against Sexual Assault) Forum.

Pavla Miller’s key areas of expertise are in the areas of historical sociology, gender relations, history of education, demography, and feminist theory. Her publications include Long Division: State Schooling in South Australian Society, and Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500-1900. She has also published on demographic explanations of low fertility, masters and servants legislation, and children and work.

Pavla is currently working on two projects. One deals with children and the contested meanings of work in contemporary Australia, the other with feminist and non-feminist theories of patriarchy. Pavla wrote the Honours and postgraduate Research Strategies course and currently coordinates it. She is one of the network representatives of the Social Science History Association.

Research Interests

Cross-cultural communication, Interactional style, Discourse analysis, Pragmatics

Current research projects

Humour in Australian English and French conversational data (with Béal, C. and Traverso, V.). Task-based learning in a group project in the FLE (French as a Foreign language) classroom (with de Saint Léger, D.).

Edited volume (forthcoming): Conversational joking during social visits in France and Australia. In Peeters, B., Béal, C. and Mullan, K. (eds.).

Articles in preparation

French academic mentoring program: a case study among language students. Local-Global Journal, Globalism Research Centre. Special Edition.

Une entente glaciale? A comparison of French and English Interactional Styles, Explorations: a journal of French-Australian connections.

Forthcoming Publications

(2010): Expressing opinions in French and Australian English discourse: A semantic and interactional analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

(2010): “I couldn’t agree more, but …”: agreeing to disagree in French and Australian English. Conference Proceedings from Les enjeux de la communication interculturelle: compétencelinguistique, compétencepragmatique, valeursculturelles, 5-7 July 2007, Montpellier, France

(2011): Saying what you think: an analysis of French and Australian English non-native speaker expression of subjectivity. In Baumgarten, N., Du Bois, I. and Kranich, S. (eds.). Subjectivity in Discourse – Unity in Diversity? Emerald Press.

Elizabeth Kath is a Research Fellow with the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University. Her past work has mostly been interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of political/social science, public health and development. This includes a major study of the social and political dimensions of Cuba’s public health system, specifically its Maternal-Infant Health Program, for which she spent nine months conducting field research in Havana. The findings of this research on Cuba were published in July 2010 as a book: Social Relations and the Cuban Health Miracle. Her work has also been published in numerous academic journals and presented at international conferences. Aside from her ongoing work on Cuba, she also co-authored the health components of the Global Cities Institute’s Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development report, which identifies alternative, community-engaged pathways to development in Papua New Guinea. Her more recent research interests relate to issues of reconciliation, particularly as they relate to health in various global contexts. She has played a key role in establishing Global Reconciliation, an international organization with partners from over 35 countries, which seeks to promote human security through community engagement and local-global collaboration.

I research gender problems arising in the practice of community interpreting in Australia. I am concerned about whether interpreters are acting in the best interests of non-English speaking women who seek help from state agencies as victims of male physical or sexual violence. These women are crucially reliant on interpreters when they approach the police, social services, and the courts. However, interpreters in Australia are not currently required to undergo awareness training about violence against women.

The national accreditation authority also emphasises interpreter 'impartiality' in its training regime, which may be unhelpfully dissuading interpreters from properly advocating on behalf of their women clients. My research seeks to 1) identify problems in the professional practice of interpreters with regard to women who are victims of violence, and 2) recommend training and gender awareness raising strategies for interpreters in Australia. My research follows up on initial efforts made by the Office of Women in the Victorian government which sponsored a gender-awareness raising workshop (at Monash University) for interpreters in early 2010.

Shanthi Robertson is a lecturer in International Studies in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning; a researcher in the Community Sustainability program and an associate researcher in the Globalism Research Institute.

Shanthis’ research interests centre broadly on the socio-cultural consequences of globalization, and more specifically on the sociology of migration and mobility, including migrant and refugee rights, citizenship and transnationalism. Recent research projects have been on the social implications of international education as a skilled migration pathway and remittances among transnational families of the Indian diaspora. My current research is focussed on changing conceptualisations of citizenship and rights within the nexus of student and labour migration.

Carmel’s research interests centre on the provision of flexible and responsive social services. Her particular interest is the introduction of individualised funding. She was involved in the development and evaluation of some of Victoria’s first disability individualised funding programs in the early and mid 2000s, and more recently her involvement has extended to aged care services.

In 2010, Carmel worked on individualised funding and other projects with Health Workforce Australia, UnitingCare Community Options, Wesley Mission Victoria and the Association for Children with a Disability.

Dr. Phipps situates his research work in the Globalism Research Centre and the Global Cities Globalization and Culture Program, both of which provide great opportunities for research collaboration and mutual support. Dr. Phipps completed his PhD at Melb Uni in 2008/9 on the cultural politics of postcolonial theory. Other research interests derived from this central concern with the politics of public cultures include the history of theory in anthropology, global tourism, Indigenous cultural festivals, urban ethnic cultural precincts, transnational religious movements, Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and the Pacific. Consistent with an attempt at global comparative research Dr. Phipps has specific, ongoing research engagements in Melbourne, NE Arnhem Land, Port Moresby, Hawai'i, and Tibetan Amdo (Chinese Qinghai), as well as research interests in a number of other places.

Dr. Phipps became a CI on an ARC funded linkage project in 2008 (before completion of his PhD) on the basis of consulting work he had done with Indigenous organisations. The preliminary report from the Australian component of that research, Indigenous Cultural Festivals: Evaluating Impacts on Community Health and Wellbeing, has just been completed, and is being picked up with interest in the sector. Dr. Phipps is continuing work on the international material, which most recently involved some serendipitous connections between a festival in PNG and the global political economy of LNG: local villagers, multinational corporations and the Chinese market. This PNG work seems to be emerging as a whole project of its own. Dr. Phipps is also lead author and CI on a research consultancy to the City of Melbourne and Victorian Multicultural Commission on urban ethnic precincts. This research has involved the exciting combination of conceptual innovation in the area of urban ethnic precincts, and the opportunity to make direct policy recommendations for the future of these precincts in the City of Melbourne and the State of Victoria.

Val Colic-Peisker is a Senior Research Fellow / Senior Lecturer in the AHURI-RMIT Research Centre. Val’s research is interdisciplinary, theoretically as well as policy-oriented, spanning sociology, political science, social psychology and economics, and uses qualitative as well as quantitative research methods.

Val’s central research interests are in the areas of migration, mobility, globalisation, multiculturalism, refugees and Australian immigration and settlement policies. Her research has focused on notions of ethnicity/race, nation, identity, community and class. Val’s recent publications cover topics such as labour market integration of migrants, especially those from non-English speaking backgrounds, mobility of professionals and socio-cultural and class aspects of the housing market.

Val actively promotes cross-disciplinary, inter-university and international research collaborations. She is currently preparing an ARC-Linkage application with colleagues at UQ and considering collaboration on an ARC-Discovery application with colleagues at Swinburne and La Trobe Universities, and is engaged on AHURI-funded research projects. She has an extensive research record of books, refereed articles and conference papers, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, research reports and other research outputs. Her current research plan includes an analysis of the labour market aspect of Australian multiculturalism through census data.

Iain Campbell is a Senior Research Fellow at CASR, working on several major projects to do with labour market restructuring, working time patterns and the quality of work. Prior to this appointment, he was an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CASR, working on a project that examined trade union strategies and changing working-time patterns in Australia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Before joining CASR, he worked as a Research Fellow at the National Key Centre in Industrial Relations at Monash University. He has a background in the sociology of work, industrial relations and economic geography. His doctoral research at the University of Melbourne was on the topic of casual employment in Australia. Apart from working-time, his research interests include labour regulation, labour restructuring, casual employment, work and family issues, unemployment and the future of work.

Iain is experienced in the use of official labour force statistics, both in Australia and cross-nationally. He can speak German and French and has an extensive knowledge of contemporary European debates and policy initiatives in the general areas of employment and social welfare. He is a member of several professional associations, including the International Sociological Association (ISA), the International Industrial Relations Association (IIRA) and the International Working Party on Labour Market Segmentation (IWPLMS).

Iain has published numerous academic articles on work and employment. He is a co-author of the book Fragmented Futures: New Challenges in Working Life (2003) and co-editor of Gender and the Contour of Precarious Employment (2009).

Martyn’s main research interests are in the areas of professional knowledge and learning. His studies include the effects of organisational and policy change on professional identity and practice; and the place of reflexivity in creative practice. Martyn has provided consultation on professional supervision and the development of learning environments for professional and organisational development. Martyn has a particular interest in learning across professional boundaries, and in the assessment of complex learning outcomes. He is presently engaged in the following research projects:

Generating Academic Standards for Planning Practice Education. A project funded by the Carrick Institute, conducted with Griffith and La Trobe Universities.

Professional Reading Habits of Social Work Practitioners. A joint project with Deakin University.

Professor Wood is a Professor of Housing and Urban Research. He was previously Director of the RMIT Research Centre of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and held positions at Murdoch University, Western Australia and the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Professor Wood’s main research interests are in public policy and urban studies, housing finance and labour economics. He has published widely and is currently on the International Editorial Advisory Board of Urban Studies. Gavin Wood has consulted to a number of organisations including: the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the New Zealand Department of Labour, the Office of Fair Trading (WA), the Northern Housing Executive and the Australian Commonwealth Government’s National Housing Strategy.

In November 2006 the Australian Research Council awarded the RMIT centre a Linkage International Social Sciences Collaboration Grant for the project “Housing wealth and welfare: unlocking housing wealth over the life course". This is collaboration with researchers at the Department of Geography, Durham University.

Sara is a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre of Applied Social Research, within GSSS&P. Sara’s research interests centre on gender equality in employment at both the labour market and organisational levels. She has worked on many government and industry-funded research projects around pay equity, work & family balance, organisational change, discrimination and industrial relations. Sara has undertaken a number of ARC-funded projects, including a post-doctoral fellowship on discourses of discrimination in the workplace as well as ARC projects on the quality of part-time work including in policing and in legal firms, on the links between job quality and the mental health and well-being of working parents and their children, and on gender equitable organisational change. Sara is currently working on a number of major research projects on the impact of changing employment regulation on work/family/community balance through a regional perspective, the impact of government funding models on employment in the non-profit community services sector and the context, causes and prevention of sexual harassment in Australia.

Tracey Ollis lectures in the Bachelor of Youth Work in the School of Global Studies, Social Sciences and Planning. She teaches the courses, Knowing Young People and Young People and Health Issues. She is interested in the intersection between education and social justice and in particular embodied knowledge and informal learning practices. Her current research for her PhD explores informal learning dimensions in activist contexts. Tracey has worked in a range of youth and community groups. Her position at the North West Youth Accommodation Group required her to convene a network of Youth Housing Services across the Northern region of Melbourne. This role was crucial in the coordination and service development of youth housing organisations and in providing housing to homeless young people. She has also been involved in regional and state-wide ministerial advisory committees regarding young people and homelessness. She is interested in housing and homelessness issues, in particular how they relate to women and children.

Prior to her appointment at RMIT, Tracey lectured in the Bachelor of Youth Work at ACU and the Bachelor of Community Development at Victoria University. At Kangan Institute she was program coordinator and teacher for the Diploma of Community Services, community development and welfare studies, where she taught many of the emerging migrant and refugee communities in Broadmeadows. Tracey has extensive experience in supervising students on fieldwork placement in both the disciplines of community development and youth work. She is interested in critical pedagogy in the contexts of fieldwork education and volunteer practices in human service organisations. She is co-founder of the Popular Education Network of Australia (PENA) a network of academics, educators, community workers and unionists with an interest in the intersection between education, social justice and civil society.

In Semester 1 2010, Dr Georgina Heydon is teaching SOCU2116 Contemporary Criminology and SOCU2073 Law and Criminal Justice Policy in the Criminal Justice Administration program, and in Semester 2, 2010, Georgina is teaching SOCU1025 Cross Cultural Communication. She is an active researcher currently working on a number of projects and publications (see below) and also provides expert testimony as a forensic linguist.

Dr Heydon published the first monograph to analyse the language of police interviewing in Australia from a linguistic and discourse analytic perspective. Her foundational work on the linguistic structures of police interviews (2004) and moral frameworks in questioning (2003) provides a new insight into investigative interviewing by revealing the language strategies used by police and suspects to construct evidentiary narratives. Over the last ten years, Dr Heydon ’s research has contributed a new level of detail to the analysis of legal-societal issues in policing by focusing on the discursive phenomena that underlie testimonial integrity (2008b), methods of detecting deception (2008a), formality (2007) and the right to silence (2007).

Dr Heydon is a chief investigator with Dr Bronwyn Naylor, Prof Marilyn Pittard and Dr Moira Paterson (all of the Law Faculty, Monash University) in an ARC Linkage Project ‘Living Down the Past’ (LP0990348 2009-2012) that examines the impact of police record checking by employers on ex-offenders and their rehabilitation. Earlier work on the project received funding through the Law Services Board Small Grants Scheme.

Dr Heydon is also working on the use of lie detection in law enforcement and is in the early stages of a collaborative project with the Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University New York.

Dr John Whyte is a Lecturer in the Social Work program. Prior to coming to RMIT, he was a Research Fellow and Project Coordinator at The University of Melbourne. Dr Whyte has taught and researched in social work, social theory and the human services for nearly a decade, internationally. His particular interests are in the general areas of cross-worldview social work practice—particularly with Indigenous Peoples—and the development of chaos and complexity approaches in practice contexts.

In addition to his extensive practice and research engagement with Indigenous Australian and Native American communities and agencies, he has also served as program manager on a number of urban low-income housing and rural community development projects.

Currently, Dr Whyte is a Chief Investigator on the ARC international Linkage Project From colonisation to conciliation: A collaborative examination of social work practices with Indigenous populations. He is also involved in a community project examining concepts of wellbeing informing human service agencies.

Professor Michael Buxton joined RMIT in 1998 after 12 years in senior management with Victorian Government Planning and Environment agencies, and with the Victorian Environment Protection Authority. He formerly headed the intergovernmental process for developing Australia’s National Greenhouse Strategy, and the group responsible for the development and implementation of environmental policy in Victoria. He was an elected Victorian local government councillor and Mayor for ten years and was a member of the Upper Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges Authority for six years. He is a former lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne.

Michael heads a research team carrying out extensive research into peri-urban regions, including a national study titled Change and Continuity in Peri-Urban Australia. This team’s national and Victorian studies have investigated the nature and extent of contemporary peri-urban regions in Australia; identified future patterns of socio-economic, environmental change in peri-urban landscapes; and developed scenarios for future land use and management based on 'business as usual', interventionist and deregulated options. Change and Continuity in Peri-Urban Australia was a collaborative project between RMIT and Griffith Universities, funded by Land and Water Australia.

Marietta coordinates and lectures in several Criminal Justice Administration courses, including Crime Prevention, Contemporary Criminology, Foundations of Criminology and Thesis Writing A. She is also coordinating a joint project, ‘Global Collaborative Partnership in teaching and learning’, with William Paterson University (USA). Marietta is responsible for supervising 4-5 Honours and Masters students’ dissertations in her areas of expertise and interest, and is also responsible for supervising approximately 15 students undertaking internships engaged in work-place learning. She is actively engaged in contributing to the wider community through research, publication and consultancy. As part of this, Marietta reviews submitted papers for the International Journal of Social Inquiry as well as the Hawaii International Conference on Social Sciences. Marietta is also involved in training Department of Human Services (Youth Justice) professionals in Court report writing.

Dr. Makuwira is currently involved in research urban poverty and the role of the non-governmental sector in mitigating urban poverty in Malawi. Over the past six months he have been engaged in a desk review of research in 'disability-inclusive development' in Asia and Pacific. These reviews have now concluded with several recommendations on research priorities in disability and inclusive development. Dr. Makuwira is interested in collaboration in developing a research grant in this area. There are two industry partners who are keen to collaborate: Christian Blind Mission (CBM) Australia and World Vision Australia.

Jock McCulloch has worked as a Legislative Research Specialist for the Australian parliament and has taught at a number of universities. His principle interests are in the colonial history of southern Africa and the history of medicine in particular. He has done field work in Algeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa , Swaziland, Lesotho, Malawi and Kenya. Jock is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Dr Harris’s research has covered a broad range of topics, including development and culture, development partnerships and participation, and international policing, with a particular focus in Southeast Asia.

Kevin McDonald is a sociologist who has recently joined RMIT to work on an international research development process that aims at building new research tools and ways of processing user-generated data, focusing on sound, image and movement, in a collaborative project involving social sciences, design, sound, movement and visual studies together with computing. Kevin has come to RMIT from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he was a Marie Curie International Fellow, and has held appointments at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. Kevin’s research focuses on action, movements and culture, his recent books being Global Movements: Action and Culture (Blackwell 2006) and Our Violent World (Palgrave in press). He is also a facilitator with CARA (the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics) and works on its programme with Iraqi academic refugees in Jordan.

Dr Robin Goodman is Director of the AHURI RMIT Research Centre. Prior to this position she was a Senior Lecturer in the Environment and Planning Program at RMIT University. She holds a BA (Hons) from La Trobe University and a Masters of Urban Planning and a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Robin’s research interests centre on various aspects of urban planning and public policy. In 2009-10 she is directing an AHURI project on the effects that various planning policy changes have had on the types of housing constructed, particularly in new growth areas, in Victoria in the last 20 years.

Other current research projects and recent publications concern the forms of private collective ownership of community assets in master planned estates, the planning for activity and retail centres in growth areas on the urban fringe, a comparison of retail form in the various Australian capital cities and an analytic history of the practice of planning for Melbourne. Robin has been a member of the Planning Institute of Australia since 1994 and has served as a judge for the Victorian Planning Awards and a Chair of a Visiting Board for planning course accreditation.

Robin is currently the project leader on an AHURI funded research project investigating the connection between planning policies and the built form, focussing on the particular characteristics of new housing built in Melbourne since 1990. She is also working on a project on the spread of the shopping mall in Australian cities over the past few decades and continues with work on aspects of the private ownership of community assets in master planned estates. Robin has on ongoing interest in questions of governance and strategic planning and is particularly interested in the influence that neoliberal thought has had on planning practice in Australia.

Christopher Ziguras is Associate Professor of International Studies in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning. His research focuses on international education policy, particularly related to higher education in the Asia Pacific region.

Assoc. Prof. Ziguras teaches within the Global Studies discipline at RMIT University. He was a founding member of the Globalism Research Centre and has continued to be closely involved with the Centre since its establishment in 2002. He manages the Learning Cities program within RMIT’s Global Cities Research Institute, and established RMIT’s Research in International and Comparative Education (RICE) network in 2007.

Since joining RMIT in 2001 Assoc. Prof. Ziguras has held a range of leadership roles, both in the School of International and Community Studies (Acting Head, 2004-05; Research Coordinator, 2003-06) and the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning (Director of Research 2007-08; Research Higher Degrees Coordinator, 2007). Before joining RMIT Assoc. Prof. Ziguras was a Research Fellow at the Monash Centre for Research in International Education.

Before joining the Globalism Institute in 2004, I worked for 10 years in the innovative Social Ecology program at the University of Western Sydney where I developed new courses in areas related to ecological thinking and environmental education. During this time I conducted the research for a book titled Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action co-authored with Prof. Stuart Hill and published by Cambridge University Press (2001). This book was nominated for both the NSW Premier’s Prize for history writing and the Queensland Premier’s Prize for history writing. With Professor William Adams of Cambridge University, I collected and edited a volume of writings published under the title Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era by Earthscan (London, 2003).

I am interested in ways of deepening discourses on sustainability through the promotion of ‘ecological literacy’ and in exploring how a deeper ‘sense of place’ can bring together concerns for the environmental and social sustainability of local communities. In particular, I am interested in how we Australians might rethink our attitudes to water by ‘re-immersing’ ourselves in the hydrological cycle. Ecological Pioneers was dedicated to the memory of the great Australian poet and conservationist Judith Wright, who died just before it was published, and I subsequently worked for more than three years to organise a festival that would celebrate and extend her legacy.

Held in March 2005, the Two Fires Festival of Arts and Activism attracted around 1,000 participants and it featured an impressive list of leading Australian writers, musicians, film-makers, activists and scholars. More than 20 of these prominent people are contributing to a book that will explore Judith Wright’s legacy on the interplay between art and activism (currently under consideration by Cambridge University Press). I also have a long-term association with Sri Lanka and I am working on a proposal for a collaboration with researchers at Ruhuna University in southern Sri Lanka on how local communities are recovering from the devastating impacts of the tsunami.

Notions of sustainability; sense of place and local community resilience; rethinking water; local and social histories; community sustainability and nation building in Papua New Guinea.