Research Support Staff

CCR has a growing cohort of research support staff (comprising research associates, research assistants and research officers). Research support staff bring a wide range of interdisciplinary skills and interests to their roles, contributing significantly to the innovative and collaborative research that is characteristic of CCR. 

Nathaniel Bavinton

Nathaniel Bavinton is a research officer working on the ARC Discovery Project, The City After Dark: The Governance and Lived Experience of Urban Night-Time Culture, with Professors David Rowe, Deborah Stevenson and Stephen Tomsen.  This project is the first comprehensive examination of the use, experience and governance of night-time cultures and spaces in metropolitan Australia.  Nathaniel's credentials for researching nightlife cultures come courtesy of previous experience in the investigation of night-time economies in the cities of Newcastle and Parramatta.  Nathaniel is nearing completion of his doctoral thesis on the Production and Use of Space in the Night-Time Economy, focused on Newcastle, Australia.  This examination of nightlife in the context of a regional city is complemented by a theoretical base concerned with the intersections of space and culture in terms of urban design, cultures of consumption and rhythms and mobilities of nightlife.  Nathaniel has researched, lectured and published in fields of sociology, cultural studies, leisure and architecture.  Additional research interests include everyday life, consumer subjectivities, governmentality, discourse, power and spatial organisation.

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Dr Kylie Brass

Kylie Brass is a research officer currently working on a project with Professor David Rowe examining strategies adopted by universities to manage public academic interventions. She completed her PhD, Going Public: Pedagogy Beyond the Academy, in the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney in 2006. Her research interests include academic culture, public intellectualism, pedagogy, media policy, and contemporary American literary culture. She co-edited the book Anatomies of Violence (RIHSS: The University of Sydney, 2000).  

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Dr Ben Dibley

Dr Ben Dibley's research interests concern questions of globalistion, citizenship, risk and museums.  Ben was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from the Australian National University in 2005 with a thesis entitled, Expositions: Theory, Culture, Museum.  He has recent publications in the International Journal of Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies Review and has co-edited a special issue of New Zealand Sociology.  Ben is currently working as a research officer on an ARC Linkage project, Hot Science, Global Citizens: The Agency of the Museum Sector in Climate Change Interventions.

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Reena Dobson

Reena Dobson is a research officer across CCR. Rather than providing project-specific research assistance, her role provides centre-wide research support, including research project administration, Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) publication returns administration,  benchmarking collation and event management and public relations support. Reena is in the final stages of her PhD, provisionally entitled, A Sociological Analysis of Inter-Ethnic Relationships in Mauritius, a Multicultural Island, which explores the intersections of ethnicity, national identity, tolerance and cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius - one of the places she sometimes calls 'home'. Her research interests include issues of ethnicity and identity, cosmopolitanism, migration, 'home' and autoethnography. She is one of the co-editors of After Sprawl: Post-Suburban Sydney. E-Proceedings of the 2005 'Post-Suburban Sydney: The City in Transformation' Conference (2006).

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Carol Farbotko

Carol Farbotko is a research assistant working with Dr Fiona Cameron, Professor Bob Hodge and Dr Juan Salazar on the ARC Linkage project, Hot Science, Global Citizens: The Agency of the Museum Sector in the Climate Change Debates.  She submitted her PhD, Representing Climate Change Space: Islographs of Tuvalu, in the School of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmanai in mid-2008.  Her research interests include island studies and cultural geographies of climate change.

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Callum Gilmour

Callum Gilmour is a research assistant working with Professor David Rowe on his ARC Discovery project, Handling the 'Battering Ram': Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation and the Global Contest for Dominance in Sports Television, which focuses on the increasingly dominant position of News Corporation within the global media sports cultural complex and the subsequent shift of televised sport content from free-to-air television to subscription-based platforms. Previously Callum was based at the Cultural Industries and Practices Research Centre (CIPS) at the University of Newcastle where he was on both, the teaching and research staff.

Callum is in the final stages of his doctoral thesis on the role of global media conglomorates in the international flow of television programming at the Creative Industries Research and Application Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. Callum's research interests revolve around geo-regional, geo-linguistic and geo-cultural television markets, global media corporations, media genres and global portability, and the media sports cultural complex. He is the co-author of the article 'The Future Role of Professional Sport and the Media in the Asia Pacific Societies' in the 2006 edition of Asia-Pacific Yearbook.

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Michelle Kelly

Michelle Kelly is a Research Assistant with the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. She is working on the ARC Linkage project, The Art of Engagement: Exploring C3 West, A Contemporary Arts Project Around Western Sydney. She is nearing completion of her PhD thesis Library Scenarios: Textuality and the Institution with the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Michelle graduated with a BA (Hons) and a University Medal in 2003. She was a co-editor of The Politics and Aesthetics of Refusal, published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2007, and a co-founder and senior editor of postgraduate journal Philament from 2003-2007. Her work has appeared in M/C Journal, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Australian Book Review, API Review of Books and Colloquy.

» Contact Michelle Kelly

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Phillip Mar

Phillip Mar is a Research Associate with the Centre for Cultural Research working on the ARC Linkage project, The Art of Engagement: Exploring C3 West, A Contemporary Arts Project Around Western Sydney. He completed a doctorate in social anthropology in 2002, and has lectured in cultural sociology and anthropology at the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales and Macquarie University. His research interests include transnational migration and culture, contemporary Hong Kong and Chinese society and culture, urban space, and changing forms of nationalism and multiculturalism. He has also collaborated with various artists and cultural projects in a creative and research capacity, including Robert Lolini (Impermanence - 1996, City In Between - 1997, The Hong Kong Agent - 2007), Big hART (Northcott Project - 2005, Junk Theory - 2007) and Weizen Ho (Chinese Whispers - in development).

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Ingrid Matthews

Ingrid Matthews is a research assistant working with Professor Bob Hodge on the three-year ARC Discovery project, Putting Humanities to Work in a Chaotic World: Dynamic Interdisciplinarity and Community Engagement. Ingrid joined CCR in September 2007 after five years with the School of Environment and Agriculture at Hawkesbury campus, where she coordinated an Aboriginal student recruitment project called Caring for Country with UWS.  Ingrid and Chris Tobin, a Darug Aboriginal Educator, presented the project findings at the National Indigenous Education Conference (Newcastle, 2006) and at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Conference (ANU, 2007). Ingrid holds a Bachelor of Economics (UNE, 1992) and is due to graduate in law later this year.  Ingrid was recently awarded the NSW Bar Association Human Rights Law Prize for 2007.

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Kieryn McKay

Kieryn McKay is a research assistant working with Professors Deborah Stevenson and David Rowe on the ARC Discovery Project, Culture Circuits: Exploring the International Networks and Institutions Shaping Contemporary Cultural Policy, and with Professor Kay Anderson on the UWS Urban Research Initiative-funded project, Law and the City: The Parramatta Justice Precinct as Civic Culture. She is also working with Associate Professor Hart Cohen on the ARC Linkage project, The Visual Mediation of a Complex Narrative: TGH Strehlow's 'Journey to Horseshoe Bend'.  Kieryn is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, where she is writing her (increasingly self-reflexive) doctoral thesis on cult literature and film, focusing on theories of contagion, obsession and insanity. Kieryn is a co-founder of Philament: A Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts in 2003 and was its senior editor from 2003-2006.

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Dr Nayantara Pothen

Nayantara Pothen is a research officer working with Professor Ien Ang on the ARC Discovery project, Cultural Research for the 21st Century: Building Cultural Intelligence for a Complex World, and the diverCities: A Global Collaboration Space for the Intercultural Dialogue project.  She completed her PhD, Precedence and Protocol: Profiles of Privilege in New Delhi Society, 1931-50, in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney in 2007.  Her research interests include the study of identity in and the connections between colonial and post-colonial urban spaces, and the developing place of new digital technologies in the humanities.

» Contact Dr Nayantara Pothen 

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