Research Grand Challenges
Our research aligns with cross-university strengths, contributing to answering some of the world’s ‘grand opportunities’ and supporting our transformational public engagement and industry partnerships.
Grand Challenge: Health and society
Healthy societies and cultures require strong socio-cultural systems, robust polities and economies, and a deep knowledge of human behaviours, motivations, and emotions. Supporting well-being involves recognising the place of art, culture, and identity to belonging and health. Humanities research at Adelaide has particular concentrations of expertise in:
- Contested narratives, difficult histories, memory studies, and responding to historical trauma.
- Media, information-management, and strong democracies.
- Masculinity and femininity, persona studies, childhood and youth.
- History of emotions, medical humanities, cognition, and mental wellbeing.
- Ethics, epistemology, and knowledge-making.
Grand Challenge: Sustainability
A key contemporary challenge is developing equitable, just, and resilient solutions that will ensure a sustainable future for everyone. Humanities research at Adelaide is working towards answers, with key strengths that include:
- Eco-criticism, food cultures, and sustainable agriculture.
- Promoting equality and inclusion, especially in relation to gender, race and class.
- Sustaining and championing Indigenous knowledges and cultures, with particular expertise in language reclamation, Aboriginal art forms and material culture, and Aboriginal history and culture.
- Preserving and ethically managing our tangible and intangible heritage and culture for future generations.
Grand Challenge: Creativity and culture
Creativity is central to what makes us human and the formation of cultures and allocation of meanings, purpose and value to the world around us determines how we live and make decisions. Creativity and culture also provide a critical opportunity for impact and engagement and Adelaide scholars use their research to connect with industry partners and transform the world around us. Our impact is underpinned by critical approaches, including
- Poetics, aesthetics, and literary forms
- Visual methodologies, including film, art, and comics and graphic narratives
- Material culture studies, including archaeology, print culture, dress, and landscape.
- Philology, linguistics and language development.
- Historical and sociological analysis.
Our methods and approaches support engagement and industry partnerships, particularly in the performing arts, creative industries, heritage sector, and third sector.
Grand Challenge: People and technology
Technological change has radically transformed almost every aspect of our work, politics, society, and entertainment industries, raising critical questions about power, representation, ethics, and inclusion. Through interdisciplinary, traditional and creative practice research, researchers in the School intervene in key debates about the cultural impacts, histories and futures of (new and old) technologies, and how these futures can be best imagined, enacted, and interrogated. Our areas of strength include:
- Ethics and AI
- Virtual and augmented realities, immersive experiences
- Misinformation and disinformation
- Living and working with technology
- Gamification and gambling
- Inclusive design