Having supported hundreds of scholars over more than five decades, the Publication Subsidy Scheme is one of the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ (AAH) longest running awards programs.
The Australian Academy of the Humanities is pleased to announce the successful applicants who will receive a grant under the 2024 Publication Subsidy scheme.
The successful applicants will work on manuscripts of national and international significance, with topics including unions and labour relations on Pilbara mining sites, trans-Pacific contact between the Americas and Oceania, and role of the Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbooks in the development of Australian food culture.
The publication subsidies come at an essential time for early career researchers.
‘This is a really exciting award to receive as it will help facilitate publication of my first book, Planetary politics, which of course is a huge career milestone I’ve been working towards,’ said recipient Dr Lucy Benjamin from the University of Melbourne.
‘Planetary politics offers a rereading of Hannah Arendt’s political writings to show how and where she theorised politics in relation to the planet,’ she continued. ‘My hope is that the book will help people understand that all political action is invested with meaning by virtue of it being an earthly activity and consequently that all politics (not just ‘climate politics’) needs to encounter its earthly constitution if we are to advance a legitimate political program.’
Professor Stephen Garton AM FAHA FRAHS FASSA FRSN, President of the Academy, commended the breadth of projects recognised in this year’s awards.
‘Publication is the cornerstone of research, and the publication grant subsidy has a long track record of supporting early career academics to make inroads in their research careers’.
‘Importantly, there is a broader societal benefit, when good humanities research is published — in both the academic and mainstream presses, it ensures a larger audience can access the deep insights into human experience, culture and society that are offered through humanities research – enabling the reader to explore fundamental questions about identity, values and meaning.’
2024 Publication subsidy scheme recipients
Dr Tets Kimura
Title: Fashion, Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy: A Case Study of Japanese Fashion in Australia
Forthcoming in early 2026 from Bloomsbury.
Fashion, Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy: A Case Study of Japanese Fashion in Australia (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026) will employ interdisciplinary research to analyse the influences of Japanese fashion in Australia that position it as a potential vehicle of soft power. By studying Joseph Nye’s understanding of cultural attraction, characteristics of Japanese fashion and Australian social and cultural platforms, he will examine how much we Australians are fond of Japan’s “soft” asset, and how our feelings can/cannot be transformed to meet the Japan’s soft power objective; effective operation of which, according to Nye, is a requirement for a nation to assert its international policies on today’s global stage.
Dr Andrea Ballesteros Danel
Title: Pre-Columbian Contact between the Americas and Oceania
Releasing 7 September 2024 with Palgave Macmillan.
This book weaves together theories of pre-Columbian trans-Pacific contact between Oceania and the Americas. Despite limited factual evidence, trans-Pacific contact theories between the Americas and Oceania have been discussed in various forms since the sixteenth century and remain a persistent trope.
To provide a context for the history of ideas of trans-Pacific contact involving the Americas and Oceania, this book addresses the changing conceptions of the Pacific according to scholars from Europe and the Americas, the development of science and later anthropology and archaeology in this region and in the Americas, and the growing understanding of the history of settlement of the Americas and the Pacific.
Dr Desiree Hernandez Ibinarriaga
Title: Decolonising and Indigenising Design
Forthcoming from Editorial Routledge.
Decolonising and Indigenising design book offers valuable insights into how design practitioners can incorporate Indigenous methodologies and practices to decolonise education, research and design, and dismantle colonised paradigms, ways of thinking and practice in design. This approach is presented through storytelling, theory, methodology, methods and practical examples to enlighten the reader. The book proposes a transformation in the role designers play, through understanding deep connection between people, land and the immaterial, while giving voice and agency to the land, waters and skies, Our Mother Earth. The book critically promotes a more contextual and dynamic understanding of decolonising and Indigenising design practices and spaces through relational design.
Dr Jonathan Kemp
Title: Conservation as Version Control
Forthcoming from Taylor and Francis.
The fundamental argument of Kemp’s book, Conservation as Version Control, is that the continuing preservation of any artwork, whether old or new, is always a process involving many hands and minds and that any display of a work represents a particular time-stamped ‘version of record’. The logic of this approach means that conservation can be re-described as what’s called Version Control in software development. By drawing parallels between software and conservation, Kemp argues that conservators act like art-developers in the ‘versioning’ of the heritage under their care and this has consequences for notions of authorship and authenticity as well as infrastructures for the care of cultural heritage.
Dr Lucy Benjamin
Title: Planetary Politics: Arendt, Anarchy, and the Climate Crisis
Forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.
Critical political theory has been transformed since the identification of the Anthropocene. However, a substantive account of a planetary politics, which begins by understanding politics as planetary – as opposed to politics applied to the planet – is yet to be developed. Planetary Politics offers such an account. Rereading the key works of Hannah Arendt, it suggests that Arendt was a theorist of the planet and that claims of hers, such as the fact that ‘plurality is the law of the earth,’ have been radically overlooked. Recovering these moments in Arendt’s writing, this book makes the case for a planetary anarchism and the restaging of revolutionary politics.
Dr Alexis Vassiley
Title: Union power: its rise and fall in the Pilbara mines
Forthcoming from Monash University Publishing.
The Pilbara iron ore industry is today almost completely un-unionised. In the 1970s and 1980s it was a bastion of militant unionism – ‘union power’. In its periods of strength and subsequent decline, from the 1970s to the 1990s, its story mirrors that of Australian unionism more broadly in an exaggerated and time-compressed way, giving it wider applicability. Based on archival research and interviews with participants, this book centres workers’ agency to answer the question of how this union power came about, what it meant for the workers and their communities, how it was destroyed and the legacy of unions’ defeat.
Dr Michael Lazarus
Title: Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx
Forthcoming in 2025 from Stanford University Press.
Despite incredible wealth under capitalism, many of its critics argue that the ethical value of social life is poor. Centering analysis in the thought of Karl Marx, Dr Lazarus will shine light on his inheritance from Aristotle and G.W.F. Hegel. By bringing these thinkers into dialogue, he will articulate a distinctive interpretation of the ethical impoverishment of capitalism and the possibilities for political and ethical action. Lazarus highlights points of connection and tension in the work of Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre. The challenge for social criticism today is providing a rigorous understanding of capitalism that can grasp its dynamics and point to an ethical life beyond.
Dr Lauren Samuelsson
Title: A Matter of Taste: The Australian Women’s Weekly and the creation of Australian food culture
Releasing November 2024 from Monash University Publishing.
Since its inception in 1933, The Australian Women’s Weekly has been Australia’s highest-selling women’s magazine, in large part due to its hugely popular cookery section and companion cookbooks. The Weekly taught generations of Australians what to eat and how to cook it at home, yet the magazine and its influence on Australian cooking has been overlooked in histories of Australian food. Drawing on recipes, food editorials and readers’ memories A Matter of Taste restores the Weekly to its rightful place at the centre of Australia’s food culture and celebrates its vital role in the development of an eclectic, Australian way of eating, which is still reflected on our tables today.
Dr Nathan Gardner
Title: In the Face of Diversity: A History of Chinese Australian Community Organisations, 1970-2020
Forthcoming from Sydney University Press.
In the Face of Diversity is the first nationwide study of Chinese Australian communities in the time since the end of the White Australia Policy. It follows the history of more than a dozen Chinese Australian community organisations — using the English — and Chinese-language materials they produced and oral history interviews with ten current and former community leaders — as they responded to major developments in Australia and abroad. The book challenges prevailing conceptualisations of a unitary ‘Chinese Australian community’ and highlights the vibrant and important contributions these organisations made to modern multicultural Australia.
Dr Shannon Sandford
Title: Digital and In/Visible Lives in Autobiographical Webcomics
Forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic.
From three-panelled strips to self-published zines to detailed graphic novels, the medium of comics continuously redesigns its aesthetic possibilities and vigorously expands its structural form, with its more recent shift into digital spaces exemplified by webcomics. This book examines webcomics as cultural-literary texts that offer new and dynamic formats for representing autobiographical stories and subjectivity. Its case studies are clustered around urgent themes and issues for life writing in the contemporary moment – stories of women’s lives, graphic medicine, mental illness, vulnerability, and memory. At its core, the book engages in robust discussion of the ways webcomics invite complex questions around self, identity, and embodiment that are not only particular to life narrative studies but significant to broader fields of Humanities.
