Audit of Research Capacity
Audit of Australian capacity in cultural research, identifying strengths and potential opportunities for development
There is abundant anecdotal evidence of the quality of Australian cultural research; in cultural studies alone, there has been considerable media attention to the brain drain of senior researchers over the last five years, and to the international recognition and take-up of their work. However, a more legitimate means of auditing the research capacity in these fields is through an analysis of their performance in competition for grants from the Australian Research Council.
Over the period 1996-2003, the ARC has funded 1257 projects in the Humanities, spread across 24 disciplines. The stand-out performers over this period have been research applications in the RFCD categories of Cultural Studies and Journalism, Media and Communication. In 1996, cultural studies projects constituted 1.69% of the total number of grants in the Humanities; by 2003, it accounted for 9.6%, a percentage increase of 465.7%. Journalism, Media and Communications increased from 1.7% of the total grants in 1996 to 4.6% in 2003, an increase of 169.4%. (To set this in perspective, over this same period the share of the grants going to Literature fell by 26.8%, and to Historical Studies by 20.2%.) This is clear evidence of a dramatic increase in capacity and achievement in these areas over the last eight years.
There is no single RFCD code for the group of disciplinary fields associated with what we have called ‘Cultural Research’ (cultural studies, media studies, cultural history, cultural anthropology, cultural geography, cultural policy studies, creative industries and new media). However, we have constructed such a field by analysing the grants awarded between 1996-2003, and drawing together those with a focus on the production and consumption of culture. What we find is that cultural research, so defined, accounts for almost 27% of the total grants awarded by the humanities EAC in 2003. This constitutes a significant increase from a low of 17.8% in 1997 and demonstrates how large a proportion of innovative work in the humanities falls into this category.
A feature of the cultural research grants over this period is their high degree of collaborative activity and interdisciplinarity; they include many projects with RFCD codes in fields that would not necessarily be associated with cultural research: Law, Justice and Law, Economics, Literature Studies and Philosophy, for instance. The humanities is not known for a high proportion of collaborative research. However, of the 273 cultural research grants 1996-2003, 57 were collaborative, and involved a total of 74 partner organisations from the public and private sector.
The performance of network participants over this period has been significant as well. Of the 273 grants in our sample, 52 (19.5%) went to participants of this network; 40 have involved collaboration between network members and 27 have involved non-network collaborators. Of the 44 Journalism, Communications and Media grants awarded over the period, 18 (41%) went to network participants. Of the 65 Cultural Studies grants awarded over the period, 15 (23%) have gone to network members. This demonstrates the high level of performance, and the research capacity in these fields and among this group of network participants.
Click here for a list of ARC grants in cultural and media studies, 1996 - 2003.
Click here for a list of Network participants' grants 1996 - 2003.
A further guide to activity in this field is through reference to the research centres currently focusing on such areas within Australia. The ARC’s stocktake of research in the humanities has located 164 humanities research centres around the country. Many of these are names on a door, or one-person operations. Some are very broadly based, without nominating particular areas of humanities research as their primary interest; among these is the oldest and most established, the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU, and the Research Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. Among the most prominent of those with a particular research focus, and also among the most successful—in terms of size, impact, critical mass, and a history of collaborative research—are those which fall within the category of cultural research: the Cross Cultural Research Centre (ANU), the Australian Centre (Melbourne), the Creative Industries Research and Applications Centre (QUT), the Centre for Cultural Research (UWS), the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (UQ), the Centre for Research in Culture and Communication (Murdoch), the Australian Studies Centre (UQ), the Trans/forming Cultures Centre (UTS) and the Centre for Australian Studies (Curtin). Although the humanities generally have not taken part in the CRC initiatives because of the science and technology focus, there is one CRC with active interests in these areas of research: The Australasian Centre for Interaction Design (QUT). There are researchers from each one of these centres included as participants in this network proposal.
Even in the best of these centres, however, their activities do tend to be institutionally bound; even their collaborative activities tend to focus on those working within one institution or within groups of institutions in the one metropolitan location. This is limiting for staff, but also and more crucially for postgraduate students whose opportunities are especially diminished by this tendency. For both categories of researcher, there is potential for the strengths of cultural research to be disseminated far more widely than is currently the case. Furthermore, while the list of centres does indicate there is much interdisciplinary collaborative work going on, there are no actual processes in place to assist or encourage such practices. The CRN will address this by recognising the crucial element of cultural research: that it is dealing with a research object that is unbounded, and demands multi-perspectival approaches if it is to be understood.
There are considerable strengths in cultural research in Australia at present, but they can be utilised and developed better than they are at present. There are significant opportunities for future development if better linkages can be made between the various disciplinary formations working on cultural research, between interdisciplinary research centres and groups of researchers, and between individual researchers and postgraduates. While strong, and laying the basis for confidence in future developments, it is important to stress that the current structures do not maximise the opportunities for interchange between researchers in cultural research in Australia.
Relevant Websites
The Australian Academy of the Humanities