2024 Winners:  Distinguished Prof Cassandra Atherton A/Prof Jessica Wilkinson & A/Prof Tracy O'Shaughnessy for ‘Poetic Portraits’ (2023) was a successful program of community-based and community-directed poetry activities that explored the ‘uses of poetry’ and what poetry can ‘do’ to, for and within communities. project used a combination of poetry and publishing as a means for generating meaningful community connections and elevating everyday voices. In the wake of Victoria’s long pandemic lockdowns, ‘Poetic Portraits’ addressed issues relating to community wellbeing and feelings of disconnection by using poetry workshops to encourage self-expression and community dialogue. The project team developed partnerships with local councils across Victoria (City of Greater Bendigo, Pyrenees Shire, Yarra Ranges Council, Frankston City Council) and liaised with council representatives in order to shape poetry-writing workshops that addressed specific community and demographic concerns. Supported by Creative Australia funding, the team used poetry’s toolkit to elevate underrepresented lives and encourage empowerment through creative self-expression. Workshops provided a space for listening, respect and positive reinforcement, giving lessons on poetry craft to enable participants to express aspects of themselves and their experiences through poems. Then, unique poetry publication approaches provided a platform to draw communities together and allow voices, stories and perspectives to be heard. This publication aspect of the project involved a WIL collaboration with students in RMIT’s Master of Writing and Publishing, providing them with experiences in editing, design, proofreading, engaging with participants and events organisation. The project has, therefore, reached across the domains of research, teaching and engagement in its exploration of what poetry can ‘do’ to, for and within communities.


2023 Winner: Vic McEwan for 'Face to Face: The New Normal'


The panel selected Vic's work due to its ‘distinctiveness’, the cross over between HASS and medical science together with the significant, beautiful and tangible outcomes of the project. 

"Face to Face: The New Normal" evolved through four years of artistic research with patients experiencing facial nerve paralysis due to conditions like cancer, brain tumours and Bell’s Palsy. It explored the intersection of medical science and the arts, addressing human experiences of illness, trauma and identity.

The project was delivered by Vic McEwan as part of his PhD. PhD supervisors were Dr Claire Hooker, Dr Susan Coulson and Dr Paul Dwyer

This work is distinctive because it is the first time an artist has been accepted into the PhD program at the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney, potentially setting a precedent nationwide. The artistic process was undertaken at The Chris O'Brien Lifehouse, a cancer research hospital (Sydney, NSW), specifically at the Sydney Facial Nerve Clinic. Here, for the first ever time, a contemporary artist became an integral part of the clinical team, working alongside multi-disciplinary specialists and employing artistic methods to contribute to patient care. Instead of adopting the role of an arts-therapist, this project explored the value of open-ended, experimental contemporary arts practice.
Facial Nerve Paralysis profoundly impacts individual identity, leading to high rates of depression and significant social stigmatisation. Patients often express that they encounter substantial social and psychological impacts resulting from their condition, and that these issues are often overlooked in conventional biomedical encounters. This project not only advanced the concept of "socially engaged arts practice" as an impactful form of care giving, but also validated it as a legitimate form of art-making. It presented 15 artworks in a three month exhibition in 2022 at the Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery (and an earlier development period at the Tate Liverpool in the UK). During this time, it showed immense benefits to patients and medical professionals who engaged with it, while also encouraging general audiences to explore their own complex responses to facial difference, discrimination, and vulnerability. The success of the research outputs have led to an invitation being made to Vic McEwan to become an ongoing member of the Sydney Facial Nerve Clinic team. This is an extraordinary development in that it is recognition of the immense potential that open-ended, non defined, creative activity can have on the patient experience.


2022 Joint Winners: Marg Rogers et al. and Ian Michael & Chris Isaacs

Marg Rogers et al. 'Child and Family Resilience Programs children's literature project'
Marg Roger's et al. project produced a suite of twelve free, online research-based children’s storybooks created from the narratives of Australian children and their families from the defence and veteran community. The books build children’s resilience to deal with the stresses of military family life or when their parent gives their physical/mental health in service. This is the first time Australian young children’s narratives from defence/veteran families have been voiced, enabling them to see their lives reflected in young children’s literature. This builds children’s sense of identity and belonging.

Ian Michael & Chris Isaacs   York 
Ian & Chris's project is a play titled 'York' that is set in and around an abandoned hospital in York, on Ballardong Nyoongar country. This epic truth-telling play blends humour and horror to uncover our buried histories. Traversing multiple eras and inspired by 200 years of real accounts, this daring new work explores how stories are told – and who tells them. York was Shortlisted for in Nick Enright's Prize for Playwriting as part o the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2022. York is a raw, resonating new work written by two incredibly talented local artists Ian Michael (Wilman Nyoongar) and Chris Isaacs.

2022 Social Sciences Week discussion between the then CHASS President, Dan Woodman, and one of the 2021 winners of the CHASS Distinctive Works Prize, Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy.




2022 CHASS Distinctive Works Award winner Marg Rogers in conversation with Prof Dan Woodman, the then CHASS President, for Social Sciences Week.

2021 Joint Winners: Carla Pascoe Leahy and Christiana Aloneftis

Carla Pascoe Leahy 

My project has charted the changing experience of first-time motherhood in Australia since 1945. By creating and analysing a new archive of interviews, it has established new understanding of what becoming a mother feels like, what supports new mothers need, and whether the experience has become more challenging over time.
Carla's Bio
Project outputs 

Christiana Aloneftis

My goal is to equip Australian opera singers with the necessary language resources to compete on the international stage by providing quality, accessible, industry-specific coaching 1:1 and via live group masterclass, online. The CHASS Scholarship will support me in organising an online Masterclass for disadvantaged Australian singers who would like to re-invest in their artistic careers post-covid. This type of training is deeply lacking in Australian tertiary institutions and must become a stable in the continued training of singers from student to professional levels. As both an active singer and coach, I am able to fully communicate and embody the concepts I impart in my singers and connect declamatory technique and diction theory with a simple, practical application. I currently work in theatres and with singers from theatres which underlines the relevance of this training. It is not purely academic. The training I am offering is FROM the industry FOR the industry.

Christiana's Bio

Christiana's Website

2020

Robyn Gulliver


The Campaign Explorer database and citizen science project is a Australia’s first ever large scale database of environmental collective action, designed to help activists and researchers design more effective grassroots activism to address our environmental challenges. It has two project components. The first is a dataset hosted by the University of Queensland on an OmekaS website platform (https://enviro-activism.uqdhss.cloud.edu.au/s/emap/page/about). The database is available for download by researchers and activists and includes information on over 1,600 environmental groups, 900 environmental campaigns and 195 climate change campaign outcomes. The second component is the citizen science platform, found at http://www.activismresearchhub.org/campaignexplorer/, which offers a range of tasks and projects for volunteers to contribute to the project.

These two components enable capturing environmental advocacy history and practice which has gone unrecorded in the past. The data collected also includes historical campaign archives, spatial data to enable mapping of environmental groups and campaigns, and the identification of network ties between groups. The innovative development of a citizen science component enables new data and insights to be added every day. To date, the data has informed a range of academic papers, as well as diverse outputs such as ArcGIS storymaps, Twitter stories and activist reports.