Grants & Opportunities

Addressing the Crisis of Local Visual News in Regional and Remote Australia. This project aims to measure the volume and quality of visual content on regional news platforms by diverse publishers in eight key geographic areas. It is the first in Australia to examine the full cycle from production through presentation to consumption for local visual news in a regional context. Expected project outcomes include enhanced relationships between journalists and communities, stronger regional news ecosystems, and a more representative local visual news product. These outcomes boost the academic understanding of an understudied area, help regional Australia, including regional Indigenous Australia, see itself in the journalism that is produced in the regions, and provide commercial benefits to hard-hit news providers.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4701 - Communication and Media Studies. Lead: Dr T.J. Thomson

A study of Torres Strait Islander mobility amid climate change. This project aims to investigate the mobility of Torres Strait Islanders in response to climate change, focusing on how potential relocation impacts their environment, health, and connection to their land and seas. By using innovative participatory methods, the project expects to generate new insights into climate migration. Key outcomes include informed national climate policies and adaptive strategies that enhance community resilience, prioritising the voices and experiences of Torres Strait Islanders. The benefits include a better understanding of human adaptation that integrates Indigenous knowledge, resulting in more effective and inclusive national climate change policies. . Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 4505 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, Society and Community. Lead: A/Prof Felecia Watkin Lui

Intergenerational Healing: A Creative First Nations Approach to Wellbeing. This project aims to address the impacts of intergenerational trauma on First Nations communities. It will investigate how community strengths contribute to long-term healing. This will be achieved using Indigenist mixed methods, including conversational storytelling, a culturally designed survey, and creative practice led research. This project expects to generate new knowledge in culturally appropriate approaches to addressing intergenerational trauma. It will use an interdisciplinary approach to generate outcomes including community-led theory, resources, networks, research tools, and an international dataset. This should provide significant benefits, such as improvements in wellbeing and contribution to international policy directions.. Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 4501 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture, Language and History. Lead: Prof Naomi Sunderland

Malo to Mabo: A community-led archaeological history of the Meriam people. This community-led project aims to archaeologically assess Malo Ra Gelar, a politico-religious system that empowered the Meriam people to challenge terra nullius. It seeks to redefine a nationally significant narrative by focusing, for the first time, on its deep historical roots. Expected outcomes include new insights into the peopling of Torres Strait through groundbreaking ancient DNA analysis, as well as a deeper understanding of agricultural emergence in Australia. Research should offer substantial benefits, deepening Meriam's connection to their heritage while broadening public understanding of First Nations religions and the development of Meriam culture from ancient times to a key moment in our nation's history.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4501 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture, Language and History. Lead: A/Prof Duncan Wright

Kids, bugs and drugs: Human-microbial relations in everyday family life. This project aims to investigate human-microbial relations in everyday family life within the context of escalating Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). While AMR is widely recognised as a potentially catastrophic global health threat, antimicrobials still feature prominently in families’ daily attempts to care for their health. Using innovative qualitative methods, this project expects to generate better understandings of how human-(anti)microbial relations are understood and negotiated in community settings in daily life. Expected outcomes include new knowledge in the field of health sociology and a crucial evidence base that will yield significant benefit by informing and enabling community-centred responses to the growing AMR threat.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 1608 - Sociology. Lead: A/Prof Katherine Kenny

Pursuing Public Health in The Preindustrial World, 1100-1800. This project aims to recover community-health practices in three world regions before the takeoff of European industrialization. It challenges a common chronology and geography in public health history by examining how especially non-urban societies in Europe, the Middle East and India adjusted their behaviors and environments to manage health risks, often relying on the principles of humoral (or Galenic) medicine. A multidisciplinary team will conduct spatial, material, pictorial and text-based analyses, which will collectively extricate public health from Eurocentric narratives of modernization and illuminate preventative-medical cultures often ignored or studied in isolation.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 2202 - History and Philosophy of Specific Fields. Lead: Prof Dr Guy Geltner

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Eliminating violence against women is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. Awareness of the problem has grown exponentially, but solutions to it have not. This Centre aims to transform our understanding of the problem by examining the structural drivers that cause and compound violence against women, and pioneering new, evidence-based approaches to radically improve policy and practice across Australia and the Indo-Pacific. The Centre mobilises survivor-centric and Indigenous methodologies, interdisciplinary collaborations, and Indo-Pacific partnerships to deliver scalable approaches to eliminate violence against women across the legal, security, economic, health, and political systems of Australia and the region.. Scheme: ARC Centres of Excellence. Field: 4408 - Political Science. Lead: Prof Jacqui True

Asgard archaea: the first eukaryotic cells? . This project aims to uncover the role of unique microorganisms (Asgard archaea) in the origin of eukaryotes. These archaea may represent a ‘missing-link’ in eukaryotic evolution and are in abundance in the stromatolites in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Employing an innovative and interdisciplinary approach of cutting-edge molecular biology and high-resolution microscopy, this project expects to generate insights into fundamental aspects of evolution and cell biology. Expected outcomes include the discovery of unique branches of life and the proposal of new models for the emergence of eukaryotes. This research should allow for benefits across a spectrum of environmental and social gains, including improved ties with Indigenous communities.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 3104 - Evolutionary Biology. Lead: A/Prof Brendan Burns

Smart materials for atmospheric water management and water harvesting. Fresh water is a scarce resource in many parts of the globe but uncomfortably over-supplied in other regions. Dehumidifying machines, such as air conditioners, are extensively used in humid climates to enhance human comfort, but with great energy costs. Likewise, the production of potable water in remote dry regions is energy intensive. We propose novel hyper-absorbent desiccating polymers combined into sorption-powered engines inspired by nastic movements in plants to develop extremely efficient dehumidifiers and water harvesting machines. These polymer actuators can help address the auto-acceleration of climate change caused by the increasing use of air conditioners and provide cheap, clean water for remote communities.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4016 - Materials Engineering. Lead: Prof Geoffrey Spinks

Eviction: How private renters lose their homes and the consequences. Australia is experiencing a housing crisis that has been worsened by the pandemic. An estimated 75,000 private renters are evicted annually leading to ongoing housing precarity, poor health and trauma. This first large-scale study of the evicting process in Australia aims to examine how the process of evicting low-income private renters occurs, the actors, instruments and technologies involved and the long-term impacts of being under the constant threat of eviction or losing one’s home. The intended outcomes of the study are to deliver a comprehensive analysis of the evicting process and its impacts, identify how evictions might be avoided and provide evidence for policy changes that could benefit all parties in the private rental sector. . Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4407 - Policy and Administration. Lead: Prof Alan Morris

Storying and repairing water places in Wiradjuri Country. This project will centre Aboriginal knowledges to story, care for and repair Wiradjuri Country around the Mudgee area, central west NSW. Sharing information is a key goal of this project. Wiradjuri people are keen to see their cultural, economic, social and environmental knowledge about Country recorded and shared for people in the Mudgee area and beyond. By documenting in story form the proposed on-Country Learning, this project can facilitate this process and serve as a pathway for other co-management contexts. At the heart of the project is on-Country Learning which will bring key collaborators, community members and local school students together on, and with, Country. . Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4406 - Human Geography. Lead: A/Prof Jessica McLean

Co-research supporting the development of Aboriginal plant knowledges. Successful commercial development of products manufactured from Australian plant extracts based on shared Aboriginal Knowledges and Western scientific evidence is limited. This research project partnering with an Aboriginal Corporation and a skincare company aims to understand the processes that would be needed for Aboriginal-led product development from a traditionally-used plant. This includes examining how plant materials could be sustainably managed and harvested on Aboriginal homelands, the quantities of plant materials needed for product development and the feasibility of a homelands business. The learnings from this project are expected to inform other First Nations groups seeking to develop their plant knowledges.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4506 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sciences. Lead: Dr Susan Semple

Making social cohesion ecocentric through Indigenous language and song . This project expects to develop Indigenous language and song in ways that reframe and Indigenise social cohesion, expanding it from a human-centric policy goal to include connections with everything in Country. Designing and implementing an unprecedented and sustained program of Noongar language and song revitalisation in the south of Western Australia across community, schools, and the performing arts, it should advance the potential for Indigenous expressive culture to nourish reciprocal social and ecological relationships that are adaptable to environmental change. Emerging from a hotspot for biodiversity and global warming, it intends to explore how Indigenous creative responses can focus and spur action on pressing global challenges. . Scheme: ARC Future Fellowships. Field: 4501 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture, Language and History. Lead: Prof Clint Bracknell

Housing, social wellbeing and climate change resilience in Australia. The project aims to investigate the capacity for current and future housing policy to build social wellbeing and reduce vulnerability to climate change. It will be the first systematic evaluation of housing-based reforms in terms of their social and equity impacts in the context of climate change. The evidence generated will inform the development of climate adaptation strategies across Australian jurisdictions. It will also contribute to improving housing suitability in the private rental market and reducing energy hardship. The project will deliver new knowledge using novel data linkage and rigorous methods. By focusing on social wellbeing, findings will contribute to an assessment and monitoring framework based on equity principles.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4206 - Public Health. Lead: Dr Ang Li

A Made in Australia Model for Indigenous-State Treaty-Making. This project aims to address the key public law issues that must be resolved for the negotiation of treaties between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and Australian governments. This project expects to generate new knowledge about the legal, political, institutional, and other factors behind successful treaty-making in the comparative states of Canada and New Zealand and the legal capacity of Australian governments to engage in treaty-making. Expected outcomes of this project include the development of uniquely innovative and flexible ‘made in Australia’ models of treaty-making that are constitutionally viable. This should provide significant benefits, such as improving the likelihood of successful treaty processes.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4807 - Public Law. Lead: Dr Harry Hobbs

Recirculating Indigenous traveling songs. This project aims to develop new understandings of how unrestricted Indigenous traveling songs have spread across vast geographic and linguistic boundaries in Australia, investigating ways these songs can contribute to greater social connectedness today. It intends to energise collaborative networks across Indigenous communities, language centres, and holding institutions around the world. Forging models to reinvigorate the performance of traveling songs across a wide and diverse range of interconnected localities, this project should advance the potential for Indigenous performance culture to contribute to language revitalisation, cultural identity, and the facilitation of cross-cultural diplomacy in national and international contexts.. Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 4501 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture, Language and History. Lead: Prof Clint Bracknell

Building public trust in technologies to secure Australia’s water future. This project aims to identify the most workable solutions to the challenge of explaining why new water-related technologies are needed to guarantee the prosperity and health of the Australian community. We expect to understand the key features that drive public trust and acceptance of wastewater monitoring, as well as the purification of recycled water. Both offer important public benefits but carry with them the risk of community backlash. Using leading-edge, economic techniques the project’s outcome will be the development of the first tool for predicting public trust in water technologies. Expected benefits from the project include more affordable and sustainable urban water supplies and protection of community health and wellbeing.. Scheme: Mid-Career Industry Fellowships. Field: 3801 - Applied Economics. Lead: Dr Bethany Cooper

Social prescribing: linking Australian social, health and community sectors. This project aims to co-design, implement and evaluate a novel evidence-based social prescribing model for Australia—a crucial referral pathway spanning the social, health and community sectors to tackle growing unmet social needs of those experiencing vulnerability. The team, including six Partners across the three sectors, will use an innovative living-lab approach to tackle Australia’s highly fragmented services and funding models. Expected outcomes are a new social prescribing model and referral tools fit for the Australian context, to enable more efficient, effective and connected social, health and community services. Key benefits are enhanced support and wellbeing for the significant numbers of Australians experiencing disadvantage.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4206 - Public Health. Lead: Prof Svetlana Bogomolova

From Oppression to Hope: Reducing Heavy-Drinking with Midlife Women. This project aims to reduce alcohol consumption in 4 heavy drinking groups of midlife women by developing/testing co-designed interventions aimed at changing social practices around alcohol. This project expects to generate new knowledge on the personal, social and cultural drivers of heavy drinking using novel interdisciplinary approaches combining social practice theory, critical consciousness and pedagogies of oppression and hope. Expected outcomes include: community-level actions and policy/practice levers for alcohol reduction; and enhanced capacity for the research team to address the societal impacts of alcohol on the global stage. This should provide significant benefits in terms of reducing alcohol consumption for midlife women.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4206 - Public Health. Lead: Prof Paul Ward

Plants and climate mitigation futures: Museums, communities, knowledges . Acting beyond the Paris Agreement that view trees as carbon sinks, this project advances novel interdisciplinary, Indigenous knowledge alliances and new forms of community engagement facilitated by museums to co-generate innovative climate plant mitigation concepts and strategies in Australia and Vanuatu. It supports Indigenous-led climate agendas around cultural burning and green development, develops new plant sciences and environmental humanities concepts to rework the PA and its human-centred climate plant relations. Expected outcomes include new plant mitigation practices, scholarly and policy approaches for the regeneration of Country with significant benefits to Indigenous communities, project partners and society for climate action.. Scheme: Linkage Projects. Field: 4302 - Heritage, Archive and Museum Studies. Lead: A/Prof Fiona Cameron

Project Delivery Harmonisation for Urban Micromobility Infrastructure . This project aims to enhance delivery of micromobility projects by improved collaboration and consensus building among governments, private practice and communities through participatory research. This project is expected to yield substantial benefits, including facilitating the allocation of billions of dollars for many smaller-scale projects, leading to significant local economic growth. It aims to achieve the strategic goals of governments concerning health and decarbonisation, stemming from increased physical activity and reduced reliance on private vehicles. We will promote our research outcomes through high-profile industry organisations and partnerships with local and state governments to ensure widespread understanding and adoption.. Scheme: Early Career Industry Fellowships. Field: 3304 - Urban and Regional Planning. Lead: Dr Mike Harris

Change The Date? Australia Day, Reconciliation and the Politics of Division. This applied research addresses Australia’s polarised debates over national identity, focusing on reconciling colonial histories with shared modern values to foster inclusivity. By integrating Indigenous knowledge systems, governance frameworks, and media analysis through interdisciplinary methods, it generates new insights into identity formation and new cultural narratives. Expected outcomes include educational resources, inclusive governance models, and strengthened disciplinary collaborations. Benefits include advancing reconciliation, promoting truth-telling. Outputs, such as educational tools, podcasts, and policy recommendations, will empower communities and inform public discourse.. Scheme: Discovery Indigenous. Field: 4410 - Sociology. Lead: Dr Jennifer Mason

Aboriginal Health Equity: culturally safe care and child development . The Aboriginal Health Equity Futures study will be the first longitudinal cohort study to examine and quantify culturally safe care impacts on Aboriginal children's developmental trajectories. Integrated prospectively collected and linked administrative data will establish if children (0-5 years) benefit from maternal exposure to culturally safe perinatal care practices. Building on prior studies, the quantitative design within an Indigenous research framework will provide a novel platform for a comprehensive analysis of wellbeing inequalities in the early life course. The study is critical to sustain culturally responsive maternity care and for health policies and practice which support Closing the Gap targets for future generations.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 4504 - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Wellbeing. Lead: Prof Rhonda Marriott

Can quantum computers solve sensing problems? This project aims to tackle the critical challenge of integrating quantum sensors with quantum computers, unlocking their combined potential for transformative applications. It expects to integrate quantum sensors into quantum computers, enabling practical, large-scale, high-sensitivity precision measurement and computational advancements. Expected outcomes include capacity building, forging collaboration between the sensing and computing communities and advancing applications in magnetometry, gravimetry, astronomy, and medical imaging. This work will significantly enhance scientific and industrial capabilities while strengthening Australia’s leadership in next-generation quantum technologies.. Scheme: Discovery Projects. Field: 5108 - Quantum Physics. Lead: Dr Zixin Huang

Building Deep Debate Evidence Systems for Youth Crime Policy Reform. This project aims to develop a reliable, equitable, and explainable deep evidence system to contribute to global debates on youth crime policy. This project expects to enhance transparency and fairness, aligned with Australian justice priorities, by mitigating bias and misinformation and ensuring legislative changes are backed by diversified evidence. Expected outcomes include AI-driven recommendations from scientific studies, public discourse, and social media via data engineering and data science. This should provide significant benefits to policymakers and communities promoting fairer justice reforms and strengthening Australia’s leadership in data governance by ensuring policy decisions are based on comprehensive, verifiable evidence.. Scheme: Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. Field: 4605 - Data Management and Data Science. Lead: Dr Thanh Tam Nguyen