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31st August 2023
Three impactful, community-focused Western Sydney University research projects will be supported through the Vice-Chancellor’s Centre for Western Sydney Fellowship Fund in 2023.
The funded projects in 2023 are:
- Understanding the power of place: Creative expression and belonging in Western Sydney – Dr Katrina Sandbach, School of Humanities and Communication Arts
- Creative collaborations for new visions of extreme heat – Dr Rachael Jacobs, School of Education
- Exploring digital learning with recently arrived culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) parents in Western Sydney – Dr Lynde Tan and Professor Loshini Naidoo, School of Education.
A total of $30,000 in seed funding was available in 2023, to support projects led by early- and mid-career researchers of diverse backgrounds whose research promotes a thriving and valued Western Sydney.
Dr Sandbach’s project will result in the development of a new digital tool that captures how creative places make people feel and develop a rich evidence-base of how, where, and why people in Western Sydney engage with the arts.
Dr Jacobs' project, in partnership with Sweltering Cities, will use innovative dance and video mediums to investigate and share the experiences of Western Sydney residents as they navigate the region’s rising temperatures.
Dr Tan and Professor Naidoo’s project will investigate the impact of digital inclusion/ exclusion on CALD parents and ways in which they use technology to attend to the learning needs of their children in Western Sydney.
(L-R) 2023 Fellows Professor Loshini Naidoo, Dr Rachael Jacobs, Dr Katrina Sandbach and Dr Lynde Tan, with 2022 Fellows Professor Azadeh Dastyari and Dr Rhonda Itaoui.
Director of the Centre for Western Sydney and a 2022 Fellow, Dr Rhonda Itaoui, said the Centre is excited to collaborate with these innovative researchers, whose projects were noted for their unique, solutions-oriented approaches to addressing issues of critical importance in Western Sydney.
"A diverse range of high calibre applications were considered for the Fellowship, and those selected were noted for their strong synergies with the Centre for Western Sydney’s work and their ability to complement and enhance our impact in the region," said Dr Itaoui.
Dr Itaoui said Dr Sandbach and Dr Jacob’s projects are seen as exciting opportunities to build on the Centre’s ground-breaking 2023 report 'State of the Arts in Western Sydney' and further explore modes of creative expression in our region.
Dr Tan and Professor Naidoo’s work will be an important complement to the Centre’s Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) funded project, 'First Nations Digital Inclusion in Western Sydney,' with Associate Professor Corrinne Sullivan from the School of Social Sciences and 2022 Fellow, Professor Azadeh Dastyari from the School of Law.
As Centre for Western Sydney Research Fellows, Dr Sandbach, Dr Jacobs, Dr Tan and Professor Naidoo will receive allocations of internal funding to support their projects and will be offered assistance with their community and industry outreach initiatives.
The Vice-Chancellor’s Centre for Western Sydney Fellowship Fund was established by Professor Andy Marks in 2022 with the support of Western Sydney University Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Barney Glover AO.
About the researchers
Dr Katrina Sandbach is a Senior Lecturer, Design (Visual Communication), at Western Sydney University. Her research draws from her experience as a designer and design educator, employing visual and digital methods to study place, identity, and community, with an emphasis on practice-led approaches and non-traditional outcomes. Katrina is the co-designer of Mapimo and leads the Creative West project that maps 1000+ sites of creative practice and cultural production in Western Sydney. Her research on creative industries has driven major curriculum reforms at Western Sydney University and contributed to industry research projects including State of the Arts in Western Sydney.
Dr Rachael Jacobs is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts Education at Western Sydney University and is a former secondary arts teacher (Dance, Drama and Music). Her research focuses on language acquisition through the arts and arts for creative and social justice. Rachael has facilitated art projects in community settings all over Australia, including refugee communities, prisons and women’s refuges and currently works with migrant and refugee communities. She has contributed as a consulting researcher to the OECD in the development of the Sustainable Development Goals and to UNESCO’s International Commission on Futures of Learning. She is also a community activist, aerial artist, South Asian choreographer and runs her own intercultural dance company. Rachael was a founding member of Teachers for Refugees, is on the boards of climate action organisation, Sweltering Cities, and youth theatre company, PYT Fairfield. She is a teaching-artist and consultant to numerous arts organisations including Collective Impact Arts, the Sydney Opera House and the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA).
Dr Lynde Tan is a multi-award winning educator with expertise in teacher education, language and literacy education, educational technology, and digital learning. Lynde’s research scholarship examines pedagogical issues pertinent to redefining education using digital technologies. She has undertaken several research projects that investigated teachers’ technology acceptance and knowledge in integrating digital technologies. Her work follows the lead of scholars who are keen to advance learning in both formal and informal contexts. Her international standing is evidenced by her highly-quality and widely-cited publications in Q1 journals. Her extensive engagement with Indonesian teacher educators has recently earned her the appointment of Adjunct Professor at Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS) in Surakarta, Indonesia.
Professor Loshini Naidoo is a multi-award winning academic with expertise in qualitative, narrative, and case study methodologies. She is an advocate for human rights and is particularly focused on educational activism for refugees. She is a co-leader of the Education Social Justice and Inclusion research group in the Centre for Educational Research. She has conducted research on the aspirations of school and university students; CALD parent engagement in schools; experiences of CALD migrant and refugee young people transitioning within mainstream schooling and her recent co-authored book publication examines the transition of refugee background students from secondary school into higher education. Her recent project in collaboration with the Refugee Special Interest group focused on CALD migrant refugee students’ experiences of higher education during the pandemic. Currently, she is collaborating with colleagues from the Education, Social Justice, and Inclusion group to investigate the challenges that parents, educators, and students encountered in NSW schools due to COVID-19. She will bring her expertise in CALD parent participation, community engagement, social justice and equity, and access to this research program. examines the transition of refugee background students from secondary school into higher education.
About the projects
The State of the Arts in Western Sydney report found that Western Sydney has received significantly less funding for the arts than Eastern Sydney. For example, from 2015 to 2022, Western Sydney received only 36.6% of cultural infrastructure funding, and in 2021-2022, Western Sydney institutions received just over 12% of Sydney-based grants awarded by Create NSW. This lack of funding has restricted the growth and success of the arts economy in Western Sydney. The report also highlighted the importance of the arts in every aspect of life, and the vast benefits of arts and culture for communities, businesses, and places. The arts can contribute to jobs and economic growth, and they can also significantly impact social cohesion, liveability, and vibrancy of an area.
This project will build on the findings of State of the Arts in Western Sydney by providing a rich evidence-base of how, where, and why people in Western Sydney engage with the arts. This evidence can be used to inform strategies, plans, and targeted investments for the arts in Western Sydney. The funding will be used to commence a new research project centred on a digital tool called “Creative Place” and participatory workshops that capture how creative places make people feel, and what kinds of places inspire people in Western Sydney. Creative Place will collect qualitative data that can be used by organisations, institutions, place developers, and local government to gain insights that can inform future programming/ funding/ infrastructure/ spaces as needed in direct response to their communities and audiences.
Most of west and south-western Sydney is a large urban heat island that can be 10° or more hotter than suburbs closer to the eastern seaboard (Sweltering Cities, 2022). This means that the effects of global warming are exacerbated and experienced through hot homes, sweltering workplaces and classrooms.
Heat in west and south-western Sydney has been found to profoundly affect quality of life, from higher electricity bills in a cost-of-living crisis, to disruption of sleep. Heat has negative effects on productivity at work and people’s abilities to safely travel to work, school and to leisure activities. In 2023 Sweltering Cities is focussing on changing the way that heat is portrayed in the media and represented in public consciousness.
This project is a partnership between WSU and non-government organisation, Sweltering Cities, investigating ways to communicate new visions of heat and the threat of rising surface temperatures in Western Sydney.
Data gathered by Sweltering Cities found that during heatwaves and extreme heat events, the media uses images of people swimming or enjoying a day at the beach. Those images don't reflect the severe impacts of deadly heat on communities in hot suburbs and homes and they don’t represent the lived experience of residents of west and south-western Sydney. This project aims to create new images of the lived experience of heat by Western Sydney artists who are impacted by heat.
Using dance and video mediums, shared on social media, it aims to tell local stories of living through baking hot summers in creative ways that connect with new audiences.
Despite Australia’s success in supporting the resettlement of people from CALD backgrounds and providing for their specific needs, the evidence of digital exclusion highlights gaps in the system. It is important to recognise this interplay of factors to address the unique and often complex challenges of the recently arrived Western Sydney CALD community and to facilitate successful integration in Western Sydney. As digital environments become more important in contemporary society, the extent to which individuals can participate in digital life will shape access to opportunities and benefits, including full participation in civic life.
The funding will be used to build on an ongoing research project entitled ‘Human Rights and Digital Inclusion in Western Sydney.’ This project addresses digital inclusion with a specific focus on recently arrived CALD communities in Western Sydney. The project will involve qualitative interviews with approximately 20 CALD parents of primary and high school children in Western Sydney. Our interview questions delve into the digital access available for supporting home learning in a post-COVID world. The objective is to determine how effective this access is in ensuring that CALD students can continue to learn with support from their parents. The evidence from the proposed project has the potential to transform education and work through multipoint collaboration such as with non-profit government organizations and other community groups.
