Understanding Place
Governments are increasingly focused on place-based initiatives and recognise the importance of local involvement in service delivery. In this context, conscious engagement with the stories communities tell about themselves presents both a valuable resource for policy development, and also an opportunity to preserve and strengthen social belonging.
Our place-based historical method is a framework for orienting government, university, and development partnerships with communities. It holds that engaging with the ways communities understand who they are and where they have come from is crucial to enabling them to navigate change and build sustainable futures. It offers a set of tools for listening to, documenting, and making accessible individual and community stories as critical evidence to guide place-based approaches to policy and social change.
By engaging with community groups, and working with cultural institutions and state archives, we utilise oral history practices, community storytelling, data and photographic visualisations, and archival research to produce textured and community driven reflections. As well as the generative process of consultation, outputs might include archival collection, data sets, podcasts, immersive audio stories, walking tours, histories of place, interactive data visualisations, listening parties, community events as well as books and written reports.
Our Understanding Place prospectus details our team, our approach, and our place-based projects that leverage academic history, social research and audio story-telling for community and industry engagement.
Histories of Land and Property
This interdisciplinary research group examines the historical construction of land and property in Australia, with a focus on how capitalist development and settler colonialism have shaped regimes of ownership, access, and exclusion. Drawing on work in history, legal history, political economy, urban history, and the histories of the built environment, the group investigates how property systems have been produced, contested, and transformed over time.
Group members participate in regular seminar discussion, aiming to denaturalise contemporary assumptions about land and property by revealing them not as fixed or inevitable, but as contingent outcomes of specific legal, political, and spatial processes. Topics include the legal codification of dispossession and “improvement”, the transformation of landscapes through urban and infrastructural development, and the material and symbolic work of property in consolidating settler power.