Every year we open applications to Deakin staff and affiliates whose research activities align with those of the Institute to join as members.

In 2019, we welcomed ten new members based within the Schools across the University and it is with great excitement that we officially announce these new members.

Dr Martin Potter, Dr Earvin Charles Cabalquinto, Dr Toija Cinque and Professor Matthew Ricketson join us from the School of Communications and Creative Arts, and Dr Bree Carlton, Professor Reece Walters and Ms Rebecca Barber join us from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences – both Schools based in the Faculty of Arts and Education.

Joining us from the Faculty of Business and Law are Dr Quanda (Samuel) Zhang from Deakin’s Business School and Dr Shiri Krebs from Deakin’s Law School.

We are also very excited to announce ADI’s first member from the School of Health, Dr Evie Kendal who is joining us from the Deakin’s School of Medicine.

The diverse research interests and activities of our new members highlights the deeply interdisciplinary nature of ADI’s research program.

Learn more about each of the newest members of the Institute below:

MARTIN POTTER – SCCA

Dr Potter specialises in large-scale participatory and co-creative works with marginalised communities, using different forms of storytelling to investigate community identity.

His research has found application in a range of settings from traditional broadcast on television and radio to transmedia and interactive works. Previous work has used storytelling for cultural and archival purposes such as Big Stories, Small Towns; for community and international development such as the Youth Today project with UNICEF or The White Building project with Sa Sa Art Projects; for urban planning such as Stereopublic: crowdsourcing the quiet; and for peace and reconciliation such as the Island Connect project with ChildFund and US-AID in Sri Lanka.

Dr Potter is an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, exploring media and storytelling for heritage and Indigeneity, and working with researchers and T.O.s to share deep time stories.

EARVIN CHARLES CABALQUINTO – SCCA

Dr Cabalquinto’s research interest lies at the intersections of digital media, mobilities and migration, cutting across different disciplines including media studies, cultural studies, new media, sociology, and anthropology. His research expertise unpacks the possibilities and limits of digital media use, as informed by broader social, economic, political and technological factors in diverse contexts.

His current research deploys a critical mobilities lens in unpacking the ways in which digital media use among transnational family members engender and undermine the formation of transnational subjectivities, intimacy and caregiving at a distance, crisis communication, and a sense of home and belongingness in a multicultural society. He engages with how distributional politics of resources contributes to the immobilisation of broader structures of inequalities as demonstrated in the marginalisation of certain individuals, families and communities in a networked era.

He is currently working on two research projects. First, he is examining how Filipino women in interracial relationship utilise digital communication technologies in embodying intimacy as well as negotiating subjectivity and transnational mobility. Second, he is exploring the role of foreign workers in the care industry in Australia. This study will be compared to the case of foreign workers in New Zealand and Japan. The project is in collaboration with University of Otago (New Zealand) and Ryukoku University (Japan).

BREE CARLTON – SHSS

Dr Carlton’s research centres on two key areas that align with the Institute: histories of anti-carceral protest; and histories of punishment and institutionalisation. In particular she seeks to identify and explore intersections between these two areas and how these connections and the preservation of these histories can advance our understanding of collective visions, memories and struggles for penal change, freedom and social justice. Ultimately through her research endeavours she hopes to illuminate collective understandings and strategies that can inform contemporary struggles to eliminate prison generated violence and harm.

REECE WALTERS – SHSS

Professor Walters’ areas of research interest and expertise include Green Criminology, Crimes of the powerful, and the Sociology of Knowledge. For the past 10 years he has been at the international forefront of innovations in the field of Green Criminology intersecting with discourses in environmental law and policy; sociology; political science and international relations. He has pioneered work on eco crime and continues to focus on the ways in which corporations and governments exploit and compromise the ‘essentials of life’, namely air, food and water for power and profit. In 2006 he was the recipient of the prestigious Radzinowicz Prize in Criminology for ‘the most innovative and original contribution to Criminology and Criminal Justice’.

QUANDA (SAMUEL) ZHANG – BUSINESS

Dr Zhang is an applied economist focusing on development. His research aims to identity the main constraints faced by households and the most efficient programs to alleviate poverty and improve long-term wellbeing. By conducting quantitative and qualitative analyses based on careful data collection, he assesses the impact of development interventions to better understand both the economic mechanisms at play and the available public policy options to support households. For example, his recent article in The Journal of Development Studies contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between financial inclusion and household welfare.              

SHIRI KREBS – LAW

Dr. Krebs’ research focuses on the impact of legal fact-finding processes on social controversies, at the intersection of law, political science, and social psychology. Her main research project explores the impact of legal discourse on the polarization of social beliefs and the production of “alternative facts” in several contexts, including police violence, military operations, and refugee and immigration policies. In this last context, the project demonstrates how the human rights discourse – adopted to mobilize inclusionary policies about refugees – triggers, instead, perceptions of threat and animosity, backlash and resentment.

To provide fresh insight into these questions, Dr Krebs combines her interdisciplinary academic training in law and politics, and her practical experience as a military intelligence officer and a human rights lawyer, with empirical research tools, including interviews, surveys, and experiments fielded in Australia, United States, and Israel.

EVIE KENDAL – MEDICINE

Dr Kendal’s research is predominantly in the areas of bioethics and cultural studies, with a strong focus on health literacy and the role of popular media on social attitudes toward emerging medical technologies.

Her doctoral studies considered the impact of science fictional representations of artificial womb technology on public attitudes toward ectogenesis. More recently, she has been involved in a large international collaboration focused on planetary defence, both in terms of tackling climate change and preventing asteroidal and cometary impact hazards. This group uses cosmopolitanism as an alternative to securitization, in order to galvanise global responses to these threats.

REBECCA BARBER – SHSS

Ms Barber’s research spans a range of areas including humanitarian assistance, disaster management, international human rights and humanitarian law, and international peace and security law. Most recently she has been focusing on global governance for the maintenance of international peace and security. This includes exploration of the role of international institutions in preventing and responding to conflict-related humanitarian crises, and in particular, the role of the UN General Assembly in circumstances in which the Security Council fails to fulfil its primary responsibility for international peace and security.  Other research interests include accountability for human rights violations, humanitarian access, the role of the ASEAN in responding to humanitarian crises in Southeast Asia, and the increasingly important role played by national actors, particularly in Asia and the Pacific, in disaster management.

TOIJA CINQUE – SCCA

Dr Cinque’s research explores the intersections between mobile screens or scalable media with the reconfigurations of networked publicness tied to mediating technologies such mixed (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and social media. Other interests are in [digital] ethnography, communications policy, audience and reception studies, stardom and celebrity, and critically exploring the contribution of new technology, education and citizen science for biodiversity and well-being. She is a part of the TriSMA (Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis) group which provides researchers with real-time, large-scale access to this stream of public communication, by establishing a subscription to major social media data sources.

MATTHEW RICKETSON – SCCA

Professor Ricketson’s primary research interests are in journalism and the news media, including its current practice and its future viability in a world riven by declining trust in institutions, especially the news media, and rising levels of hyper-partisan hostility. The role of the news media and the practices of journalism need to be reconceptualised in the 21st century even as there is growing awareness of the importance of certain core tenets of journalism and news media that emerged in the twentieth century.