Social Transformation and Education Research Hub

The Social Transformations and Education (STE) Research Hub addresses questions about educational purposes, policies and practices in light of social transformations. Our work explores new formations of knowledge, identities, social relations and cultural diversity, and how these are shaping and are shaped by education.

We engage with disciplinary perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities, including philosophical, historical and sociological approaches, as well as interdisciplinary policy studies.

The STE Research Hub encourages work that explores new modes of theorizing to better understand the ways in which social and educational transformations are historically constituted and politically contested.

Researchers draw from scholarship in globalization, postcolonial, feminist, socio-material and cultural studies, and also in the sociology of knowledge and political theories of inequality and social justice.

Affiliated researchers include academic staff, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, creating a vibrant scholarly community and hub for working with other researchers and research centres within MGSE and across the university.

We are keen to incubate ideas, build collaborations and partnerships, and seed new research activities that connect with our interests and the following themes and topics.

The kind of research problems we investigate include:

Aims of schools and universities in an era of rapid change
Purposes of curriculum today
Histories of youth and educational provision
Globalization and education policy
Identity and difference
Knowledge economy and the changing nature of work
Education for citizenship
Senior years of schooling and educational policy
New and old forms of inequalities in education
Popular culture and transnational space
Teaching for changing Asia-Australia relations
Objects, affects and public pedagogy
Digital cultures.

Aims

The hub aims to incubate new and existing research projects; to provide a supportive critical mass of complementary scholars; to be a visible presence within the MGSE to attract prospective RHD students as well as high profile academics to, for example, competitive Fellowship schemes; and to provide the intellectual leadership necessary to build these research interests into successful, high profile and strategic programs of research.

Project	Research Contact	Project Status
Affective encounters: Teaching and learning for schools and communities through museums and collections	Dr Dianne Mulcahy
Attuning to affect in museum and school education: Embodied knowledge and its capacities and effects	Dr Dianne Mulcahy	Completed
Designing Australian Schools	Professor Julie Willis
Educating the Adolescent: An historical study of curriculum, counselling and citizenship in Australia, 1930s-1970s.	Professor Julie McLeod
Elite Schools in Globalizing Circumstances	Professor Jane Kenway
Exploring student perspectives on how students from diverse backgrounds manage university studies	Dr Maree Martinussen	Current
IB’s Learner Profile: A comparative Study of Hong Kong, India and Australia	Professor Fazal Rizvi
Knowledge building across schooling and university	Professor Lyn Yates
Pedagogic Possibilities of Cosmopolitanism	Professor Fazal Rizvi
Pedagogic practices in new generation learning environments in Victorian government schools	Doctor Dianne Mulcahy
Peer Learning of Mandarin and English in a transnational learning space	Professor Fazal Rizvi
Privilege and disadvantage in Australian universities, and female postgraduate experience	Dr Maree Martinussen
School-industry partnerships and the production of curriculum knowledge	Doctor Glenn Savage
To labour on 'The Big Issue': homelessness and the construction of education and work	Doctor Jessica Gerrard
Women in the Scientific Research Workforce	Professor Lyn Yates

Dismantling the father’s house? Women as doctoral supervisors

Associate Professor Barbara Grant: Critical Studies in Education, Te Whare Wananga o Tāmaki Makaurau (The University of Auckland)

Time: 1-2pm
Date: Thursday 19 August

More information

The Social Transformation Reading circle

Weekly: Tuesday 12-1pm.
Room 713-714
Level 7, 100 Leicester St, Carlton

Unpacking Education Brown Bag Lunchtime Series

These seminars are generally held on the third Thursday of every month.
Location: Level 7,100 Leicester Street
Time: 1-2pm
Contact: Dr Licho Lopez Lopez

Seminars held in 2017 and 2018 are detailed in past events.

Webinars

Thinking through and against borders

Webinar 1: Thinking Through and Against Borders

Webinar 2: Thinking Through and Against Borders

The Power, Policy and Politics reading group

The Power, Policy and Politics reading group was established in 2015 and meets monthly. The aim of the reading group is to foster collegial and constructive discussion around some of the key issues around policy, politics and power in education today, including the role of the state, accountability, data, equity, curriculum and governance. Dr Jessica Gerrard is the group's current convenor.

Policy and Schooling: Community, Citizenship, and Social Change

Conference workshop featuring: Professor Meg Maguire, Professor Julie McLeod, Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen, Professor Marie Brennan, Associate Professor Helen Proctor, Associate Professor Nicole Mockler, Dr Emma Rowe, Dr Eve Mayes, Dr Howard Prosser, Dr Nikki Moodie, Dr Shaun Rawolle, Dr Sophie Rudolph, Dr Glenn Savage, Dr Jessica Gerrard, Elisa Di Grigorio, Sam Oldman and Mary Purcell.

Location: Frank Tate Room, Level 9, 100 Leicester Street
Date: 27 March 2018
Time: 9.30am - 4.30pm
Fee: free, but limited places available.

For more information and to register, visit the Eventbrite listing.

Making. Indigenous. Borders Book Launch & Colloquium

The Making of Indigeneity, Curriculum History, And The Limits of Diversity

Routledge 2018 Ligia (Licho) López López

In the Making of Indigeneity, López interrogates how what is 'indigenous,' as a category of diversity, emerged, has been made, re-made, and is taken up to fund discourses of multiculturalism and intercultualism. Through historical and ethnographic classroom research López devices event-alizing as a methodological approximation to educational research at the limits of 'the educational' to interrogate how liberal and progressive propositions for educating the “Indian” generate particular ways of organizing difference ostensibly meant to serve historically marginalized indigenous peoples. Asking questions of the historical and scientific involvement of anthropology, sociology, law, photography, and education in the making of indigenous as a kind of people, López accounts for the aspirations, activities, and tactics that perpetuate violence on indigenous lives limiting their futurity as un-fixed beings.

Launched by Liz McKinley, Professor of Indigenous Education MGSE, University of Melbourne

Location: Frank Tate, Level 9 Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Date: 3 May
Time: 4.30pm

Colloquium
Dr Jeanine Leane, Wiradjuri Writer and Senior Lecturer Fac. of Arts, University of Melbourne
Melinda Hinkson, Associate Prof. of Anthropology ADI, Deakin University
Julie McLeod, Professor of Education MGSE, University of Melbourne
MC Jay de Los Reyes, PhD Student MGSE, University of Melbourne

World Curriculum Studies Conference

Location: Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Date: 9-12 December 2018

For further details and registration, visit the Conference website.

Past events

Contact us

Social Transformations and Education Research Hub
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Level 7, 100 Leicester Street
The University of Melbourne
Victoria 3053

Email: info-socialtransformations@unimelb.edu.au