Policing the border: security, human rights and gender. 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.
Food/body encounters: New approaches and alternative solutions to obesity prevention and policy. There is growing recognition of the need for new ways to tackle the obesity problem, and for forms of intervention that move beyond the limitations of individual behavioural changes. This project provides a paradigm for re-orientating how we have come to know obesity by investigating the cultural and institutional processes that shape everyday food and activity practices. Understanding and intervenin ....Food/body encounters: New approaches and alternative solutions to obesity prevention and policy. There is growing recognition of the need for new ways to tackle the obesity problem, and for forms of intervention that move beyond the limitations of individual behavioural changes. This project provides a paradigm for re-orientating how we have come to know obesity by investigating the cultural and institutional processes that shape everyday food and activity practices. Understanding and intervening in these dynamics of social practice are central to the challenges of reversing trends in the prevalence of obesity.Read moreRead less
Risk shifting, retirement and low-paid work. This project will respond to the pressing need for greater understanding of the new socio-economic terrain of social risk shifting. The project will situate retirement financing within a discourse of risk shift to households and individuals, which is seeing social roles and identities tied, in cultural as well as monetary ways, into global finance.
Governing Climate Futures: The Social and Political Ramifications of Climate Modification. In light of the slow progress of international climate negotiations momentum has been developing behind a range of proposed strategies for manipulating climatic systems. Collectively referred to as ‘geoengineering’, current projects include technologies designed to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and techniques for directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Though these techniques may prove ....Governing Climate Futures: The Social and Political Ramifications of Climate Modification. In light of the slow progress of international climate negotiations momentum has been developing behind a range of proposed strategies for manipulating climatic systems. Collectively referred to as ‘geoengineering’, current projects include technologies designed to reflect sunlight away from the Earth and techniques for directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Though these techniques may prove to be a cost effective response to global warming, the deployment of these technologies will pose significant social, political and diplomatic challenges. This project will document the international development of geoengineering and will provide critical insights into the wider social and political ramifications of these developments.Read moreRead less
Experimental workers of the world - the labour of human research subjects in the emerging bioeconomies of China and India. China and India have become significant new hubs for domestic and multinational clinical trials, the process by which new drugs are tested for global consumption. Developing the concept of experimental labour, this project will investigate the growing numbers of the poor and uninsured who enrol in clinical trials as a means of making a living.
Algebraic categories and categorical algebra. Algebra is the study of operations, such as addition and multiplication, and the relationships between these operations. This project will study two exciting new branches of algebra, quantum algebra and postmodern algebra, which will lead to important advances in physics, geometry, and computing.
Topology through applications: geometry, number theory and physics. Topology is the part of geometry that remains invariant under deformation (as in the inflation of a balloon). We will apply this flexibility to investigate deep problems in several disciplines as diverse as number theory, geometry and the mathematics of string theory.
Architecture on the edge: designing sustainable housing systems for vulnerable communities. The aim of the research is to analyse the disciplinary experiences of architects working on the design of housing across four vulnerable communities and to identify best practices within the profession that might enable architects to address a wider range of global problems including civil conflict, climate change and natural disasters.
Towards a new concrete theory of cohomology: a fundamental concept in geometry. This project will develop a geometric linearisation method related to Witt vectors, an exotic but important number system. This will let us take one more step towards solving a fifty-year-old mystery: to find the elusive universal linearisation in algebraic geometry, which is the linearisation that controls all the others.
Enriched categories: Applications in geometry and logic. The project aims to apply enriched categories to fields including algebraic and differential geometry and theoretical computer science. Enriched categories, introduced in Australia in the 1960s, underlie major mathematical results such as Grothendieck’s revolutionary work in algebraic geometry. Emerging scientific areas like higher differential geometry and homotopy type theory urgently need the formalism of enriched categories to be made ....Enriched categories: Applications in geometry and logic. The project aims to apply enriched categories to fields including algebraic and differential geometry and theoretical computer science. Enriched categories, introduced in Australia in the 1960s, underlie major mathematical results such as Grothendieck’s revolutionary work in algebraic geometry. Emerging scientific areas like higher differential geometry and homotopy type theory urgently need the formalism of enriched categories to be made applicable to them. Success in this could rapidly develop these areas and solidify Australia's position as a leading international force in mathematics.Read moreRead less