Dr Filip Slaveski, along with Professor Stephen Wheatcroft (University of Melbourne), Professor Hiroaki Kuromiya (University of Indiana, USA) and Professor Yuri Shapoval (Kuras Institute) have been awarded Discovery Project funding for ‘The Last Soviet Famine, 1946/47: Drought and food crises in war’s aftermath’.

The project analyses the most recent, though least understood famine in Soviet and Modern European History with the aim of increasing understanding of the relationship between drought and famine.

The famine followed a massive drought in the summer of 1946 across the western Soviet Union and led to the deaths of at least one million people. With food security, markets and trade all increasingly under threat by the increasing incidence of severe and enduring drought in Australia and globally, this research promises to produce new historical knowledge with contemporary application to better inform policy approaches to reduce the threat of food crises emerging from drought.

ADI researchers have also built on the Institute’s long record of working in successful partnerships and have been awarded grants for two Linkage Projects.

Dr Jason Gibson along with Professor Alistair Paterson (University of Western Australia), Professor John Carty (University of Adelaide), and Ms Carly Lane (Art Gallery of Western Australia), in partnership with South Australian Museum, Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corpo, Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation Inc, and Art Gallery Of Western Australia will receive funding for their project, “Collecting at the Crossroads: Anthropology, Art & Cultural Change (1939-85)”.

This project will apply current scholarship on museum collecting practices, art and anthropology to produce a better understanding of one of Australia’s most significant, yet little known, collections of Aboriginal art and culture —the Berndt Museum collection.

The project will explore the legacy of the collection and generate new ways of appreciating its depth in partnership with the descendants of the Aboriginal people who made it. Focusing on materials collected in inland Australia, the project will develop a collaborative means of interrogating the collection and ultimately benefit Aboriginal communities and the wider Australian public via the production of online resources and public exhibitions celebrating this unique cultural collection.

ADI’s Professor Gregory Barton and Associate Professor Anthony Ware with David Husy and Plan International Australia will be receive funding for their Linkage project “Appropriate Development Interventions to Violent and Hateful Extremism”. The project investigates how the international development and humanitarian activities of Plan International should best address violent and hateful extremism (VHE).

VHE impacts about 70% of Plan’s global activity and around US$80 billion of foreign aid globally. The new project will examine VHE impacts on PLAN’s work in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Philippines and Indonesia, to develop new situation assessment tools and indicators, in order to facilitate mainstreaming VHE into project planning and design and offer recommendations for interventions at all levels. Reduced VHE will benefit not only the individuals participating in programs, but societies in those countries and the region more broadly.