About the Centre
Research Environment
The CRC provides a sustained research environment for related projects through its program of research development, grants, and activities. This coherent research agenda allows faculty a space to incubate and mature joint research projects, and increase research visibility.
For junior faculty, the CRC provides a mentoring structure for collaborative research which improves grant success and increase research publications. For graduate members, the research environment builds skills competency and consolidate skills capability.
Cultural Research
Cultural research prioritises agendas that emerge from outside the academy. It typifies a new kind of research practice that engages industry, government, cultural sectors and community groups, and involves concrete modes of action and intervention (cf. Ang, Morris, Turner). It is characterized by a mode of interest in the world (where research problems are generated and initiated from the concrete non-academic contexts of social life and experience), and a mode of involvement with others (where research is collaborative, cross-sectoral and cosmopolitan). Through these two modes, cultural research is self-reflexive, interdisciplinary and engaged knowledge.
The CRC approaches culture as a site of contestation between people, resources and power (cf. Grossberg). The CRC researches culture in three broad ways (cf. Williams):
- as part of everyday life
- as part of the arts and media,
- and through cultural institutions.
Research Incubator
The CRC is a research Incubator for piloting, testing, and scaling new cross-sectoral and multi-disciplinary projects.
The Centre conducts collaborative lab workshops (“collaboratories”) and public seminars. These bring together academic and non-academic stakeholders from industry, government and community.
Epistemic Partnership
Collaboratories are key to the success of our projects. The CRC brings together cross-sector and multidisciplinary collaborative teams through the practice of Epistemic Partnership (cf. Marcus). This practice views all partners as knowledge producers, and involves all partners in every step of the research development process, including generating research questions that are relevant to each stakeholder interest, and equally involving them in the design, implementation and dissemination of the research.
Rather than a one-way flow of research production and dissemination, research-in-progress is continually returned to each stakeholder in a feedback loop that is immediate, direct, and continuously updated. This ensures research outputs and outcomes are always responsive to exigencies of industry, government, and community.