Research Grant: 'Transformative Utopianism'

Four Australian IRSCL members, Clare Bradford, Robyn McCallum, Kerry Mallan and John Stephens, were successful in gaining an Australian Research Council (ARC) Grant of $A259,000 for their project 'Transformative Utopianism: Contemporary Children's Literature Responding to Changing World Orders from Glasnost to 11 September, 2001'.

The project has commenced this year and will continue until 2005. It is based on the premise that political and cultural instabilities and conflicts from 1990 to the present have profoundly affected children's literature, and that works of fiction in particular have deployed utopian and dystopian tropes to project possible futures to their implied readers. The project uses the concept of 'transformative utopianism' to suggest that these tropes do important social, cultural and political work by challenging and reformulating ideas about power and identity, community, the body, spatio-temporal change, and ecology. In this way the project draws together multiple theoretical interpretations of texts to demonstrate the responsiveness of children's literature to broader ideological, social, theoretical and pedagogical contexts.

Outcomes will include conference presentations, a book on utopian and dystopian tropes in children's literature, journal articles and a hypertext intended for teachers and students, which will provide information about utopian/dystopian literature through an interactive site offering multiple reading pathways. In addition to the four main scholars, who are located at three universities (Deakin, Macquarie and Queensland University of Technology), the project employs a number of Research Assistants who will be encouraged to produce publications arising from their work.