Current Projects
Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2025
Curated by Simon Lawrie, Lorne Sculpture Biennale 2025’s artistic vision derives from the iconic geology of Gadubanud Country–the stratified landscape of the Great Ocean Road serves as an analogy for the fact that one place is many places, layered both physically and experientially through time, culture, and species.
Border Wall
In the wall, all nations occupy an empty and negative space, through which the viewers are invited to contemplate the ceaseless changes of the tides, and the multiple temporal, geological and social trajectories that had haphazardly converged into the coastlines of Lorne.
The wall becomes a window, when the notion of the boundary is hollowed out and opened up to unbiasedly enframe the landscape.
Collaborator: Chaohui Xie
Digital Studio, the University of Melbourne
While newly arrived migrants, refugees and asylum seekers (MRAS) are sometimes depicted as the recipients and social inclusion programs through arts and cultural means, they are often underrepresented and under-supported as professionals and producers who enable multiculturism. This project addresses an absence of MRAS roles and contributions in scholarship, policy and public perception of the creative economy.
Economic participation, fair access to markets and resources and innovative technologies are central to the well-being and prosperity of migrant and refugee communities. This research priority focuses on migrants and asylum seekers as enterprising and active agents. It helps solve new problems that arise with the current conditions of employment, emerging business models and changed policy priorities to advance inclusive and sustainable societies.
Key collaborator Prof Paul Long
Research and author a report on models of digital humanities, arts and social sciences (DHASS) support and training in Australia
This project directly addresses the Studio’s central goal of increasing researcher participation and cultivating the next generation of DHASS researchers.
Part of an international collaboration, the project examines the existing Digital Humanities and Social Science (DHASS) training resources in Canada and Australia and engages in monthly meeting and conversation with a team of Critical Digital Humanities Initiative scholars (led by Dr Elspeth Brown) based at the University of Toronto.
The project is in the process of producing an environmental scan of the Australian DH training sector and initial recommendations for best practices in supporting DH training in Australian universities. It also aims to publish two academic journal articles in 2024, also hosting the team visit from the University of Toronto in late February 2023.
Main collaborator: Prof David Goodman
Previous Projects
Countering CCP-sponsored Disinformation Campaigns: Taiwan as an Example
March 2020 - December 2021
Chinese state-sponsored disinformation campaigns have attracted increasing media attention and global think tanks. Yet, academia has yet to join the discussions. Based on big data facilitated case studies, our project examines two disinformation campaigns that target Taiwan regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as Taiwan’s countermeasures. Our paper explores the communicative routes and major actors in such campaigns. In a non-democratic and highly-controlled information ecology, the media industries, social media, online communities and Taiwan-based local communities are all susceptible to disinformative mobilization. Particularly, it has acquired the strategy of the “people’s route” afforded by media technologies and social networks. The success of Taiwan’s counter strategies relies on an all-in “participatory politics” that requires collaboration between government, non-government actors and the public participation. Understanding Chinese state-sponsored disinformation campaigns not only illuminates on the modus operandi of the current authoritarian system, it also offers lessons for other countries.
Art and Cosmopolitanism in the Digital Era
July - August 2021
In a world fraught by strife and division and yet that is criss-crossed by a highly energised tangle of digital and human networks, what is the role of cosmopolitanism today? Is cosmopolitanism merely a dated Western concept or does it have more to offer than ever in terms of the resources it might provide to bridge gaps across seeming chasms of cultural difference or to explain the deep reserves of goodwill and commonality that sustain global interconnectedness? And what role might be played by the visual and sound arts in sustaining established relationships and forging new ones? In this conference we bring together scholars and arts practitioners from China, Australia, Europe and the US to explore these themes with the hope of setting new directions for the discussion of art and cosmopolitanism in the digital era.
Symposium brochure download here
Symposium documentation here
The “Representing Families on Instagram” Study
June - October 2018
The project explores different family representations on Instagram, through a qualitative study of a purposive sample of posts (images and text) related to family relationships and moments. Data includes hashtags associated with family, generations and memories. One hundred and fifty posts were collected which included public images and user-data, text, and comments. The researchers have identified some coding and ethical issues that have halted the project.
Publication outcome