ARC Grants

Funding Scheme	Title	Chief Investigator/s (CI)	Summary
Discovery Project (DP210100931)	‘Criminal deportation’: Analysing interactions between migration control and criminal justice systems in Australia	Professor Leanne Weber and Professor Alison Gerard	This project investigates the convergence of migration control and criminal justice by analysing pathways to what we call ‘criminal deportation’ i.e. deportation following cancellation of a visa on character grounds, generally following a criminal conviction. Our emphasis will be on processes leading to the deportation of non-citizens who are longstanding residents and members of Australian communities. Little is known about how criminal justice institutions such as police, courts and prisons have been affected by the increasing focus on the criminal offending and character of these non-citizens. Conceptualising the criminal deportation system as a crimmigration assemblage, we will map and examine interactions between federal migration control and state criminal justice agencies in Australia at multiple points along the pathway towards criminal deportation, demonstrating the many possibilities for interactions between these crimmigration partners along the way. We will identify how each of these agencies contributes to, and/or inhibits, the ultimate outcome of criminal deportation, and consider whether involvement in this system is transforming their day-to-day practice.
Discovery Project (DP210102436)	Democratic Resilience: The Public Sphere and Extremist Attacks.	Associate Professor Selen Ercan	The project aims to explain responses to extremist attacks intended to sow division, and why some democracies prove fragile, succumbing to polarisation or exclusion of key groups, while others prove resilient by sustaining integrative, tolerant discourse. The project develops new knowledge through an innovative synthesis of cultural sociology and deliberative democracy to analyse nine cases of responses in the public realm to attacks. Expected outcomes include a new account of the democratic public sphere, and identification of how meaningful, civil communication whose health is vital to democracy, especially in a multicultural society, can be maintained. Benefits include identification of measures to counter extremist political disruption.
Discovery Project (DP210101643)	Problem Gambling: effects on families, children and spouses.	Associate Professor Ben Freyens and Dr Xiaodong Gong	This project aims to produce evidence that can be used to address problem gambling in Australia. Problem gambling is a major issue, costing Australians over $4.7 billion per year. Better understanding of problem gambling and better policy coming from our project have the potential to significantly improve the lives of Australians--their labour market performance, their mental health and the quality of their relationships. This project will generate new knowledge by using a novel approach where problem gamblers are considered in the context of their families. Using quantitative data over more than 10 years, this project seeks to produce new evidence about how problem gamblers affect their families and how families help or harm gamblers.
Discovery Project (DP200100219)	Emotions and Employee Turnover: New Methods for Complex Dynamic Systems.	Professor Jinjing Li	This project aims to vastly improve the data-analytic capabilities of social and health researchers, while increasing knowledge about emotion dynamics and their link to employee turnover. By drawing on and advancing methods from ecology and applied physics, this project plans to investigate the role that individual emotions play in employee turnover with new quantitative methods for characterising and testing causality in complex dynamic systems. The expected outcomes include an improved capacity for researchers, managers, and policy makers to understand complex organisational, economic, and health systems. This will provide immediate societal benefits by informing the development and deployment of targeted interventions in such systems.
Discovery Project (DP200100726)	Assessing the national productivity impacts of chronic ill health.	Professor Rob Tanton	The projects aims to estimate the economic impacts of early retirement due to chronic conditions both to individuals and the community. Population ageing, premature retirement due to poor health and the need for increased labour force participation are perennial issues that have confronted successive governments and will continue to do so. The project will link datasets from a wide range of sources to create a large microsimulation model. This model will fill substantial gaps in the Australian evidence about chronic health issues that affect the workforce. The findings will inform planning of health care resources to enable maximum labour force participation to benefit both the individual and the government.
Discovery Project (DP190101584)	Non-urban water governance: rethinking compliance and enforcement.	Professor Darren Sinclair	This project aims to critically evaluate the practices and strategies of non-urban water compliance and enforcement in Australia and internationally, to identify and develop innovations for water governance. New law and policy knowledge is expected from its fusion of empirical data and regulatory theory. The project expects to advance applied regulatory theory by identifying improvements in compliance and enforcement to help solve environmental issues. It will also lead to policy reforms for delivering more effective, efficient and politically-acceptable compliance outcomes for non-urban water management that will benefit water regulators and the sustainability and productivity of Australia's agricultural industry.
Discovery Project (DP170101997)	Government web portals as government actors.	Professor John Halligan	This project aims to examine the architectures, rationales, effectiveness and power effects of government web portals, which are conceptualised as spaces of administrative, policy and power contestation. They are the formal public face of online government, but their effectiveness and contribution to government is largely unknown. The project uses digital research methods (hyperlink network analysis and web experiments) to comparatively assess 10 hi-tech countries. It expects to contribute to understanding the structure and governance of the state in the 21st century, and provide foundational knowledge to underpin the next generation of government online service strategy.
Special Research Initiatives (SR200200739)	Monitoring Deliberative Integrity in Australia	Associate Professor Nicole Curato, Professor John Dryzek, Associate Professor Selen Ercan and Dr Simon Niemeyer	The project aims to develop and apply the concept of deliberative integrity as a counterpart to more familiar ideas about electoral integrity in the evaluation of democratic processes. The project develops significant new knowledge about the ethical conduct of Australian citizen engagement processes through conceptual and methodological innovation to produce a Deliberative Integrity Monitoring Tool that will be applied to the expanding range of deliberative democratic innovations in Australia. Expected outcomes include a better understanding of how such innovations can and should be designed. Benefits include a set of standards for best practice in democratic innovation that will in turn help improve the quality of Australian democracy.
Linkage Projects (LP190101198)	Deliberative Documentary for a Global Citizens' Assembly on Genome Editing	Associate Professor Nicole Curato, Professor John Dryzek and Dr Simon Niemeyer.	The project will enact and film the world’s first truly global citizens’ deliberation, a global citizens’ assembly (GCA) on genome editing, and proceed to analyse the impact of the ‘deliberative documentary’ film on public understanding of complex, fast-evolving science and technology. It will investigate the cross-cultural capacity of citizens to deliberate complex value-laden issues, and so ascertain prospects for an informed global public response to challenges posed by genome editing. Research will test the effects of the deliberative documentary on viewers, examining benefits of communicating complex issues via the work of the GCA. Other benefits include improving public trust in governance and advancing the Australian film industry.
Linkage Projects (LP170101136)	Transformative human mobilities in a changing climate.	Associate Professor Fanny Thornton	This project aims to investigate the potential for diverse forms of human mobility, particularly relocation and migration, with climate change adaptation across the Pacific Islands region. The project aims to utilise policy analysis and in-depth case study research, conducted across five countries, to inform the creation of a conceptual framework that integrates mobility with climate change adaptation and development goals, policy and practice. The project expects to enhance the overall adaptive capacity and resilience for Pacific Island populations by uncovering pathways by which vulnerable populations can use.
ARC Future Fellowships (FT140101044)	Globalisation and the policing of internal borders.	Professor Leanne Weber	This project aims to examine processes of social inclusion and exclusion under conditions of globalisation. It investigates the enforcement of immigration law and related policies that divide populations according to hierarchies of effective citizenship. The aim is to identify more inclusive approaches to governance suitable for a globally connected world. The project aims to identify and promulgate positive examples of community and organisational practices that maximise social inclusiveness.