Current Projects

Fields of Green? Sport as a Communications Platform for Environmental Issues and Sustainability

This project investigates the range of environmental and sustainability messages communicated by sport media, and how these messages negotiate the dilemma of promoting environmental awareness through events and activities that also generate adverse ecological impacts. By engaging sport media professionals, environmental claims-makers, policy-makers and journalists, this project seeks to deliver valuable knowledge that informs industry decision-making, policy formulation and environmental awareness. The intended societal benefit is a new understanding of how environmental issues are communicated through popular media to large-scale publics, including how tensions in the communication of environmental change are negotiated.

Funded by: Australian Research Council
Scheme: Discovery Projects 2020
Grant ID: DP200103360

Monash University: Brett Hutchins
University of Tasmania: Elizabeth Lester

Remaking the Australian environment through documentary film and television

This project aims to investigate how documentary film, television and online media have transformed our sense of the Australian environment since the 1950s. The project will produce a historicised account of how media has fashioned contemporary environmental consciousness. Expected outcomes include environmental knowledge and social action, collaborations between media producers, scientists and educators, and attention to the role of Indigenous knowledge practices in relation to the environment. The project will enhance understanding of the significance of environmental documentaries in shaping practical and imaginative responses to a world undergoing transformation.

See more information at https://australianenvironmentsonscreen.org/

Funded by: Australian Research Council
Scheme: Discovery Projects 2018
Grant ID: DP190101178

Monash University: Belinda Smaill
Swinburne University: Therese Davis 
Melbourne University: Chris Healy