Global Australia
Our research theme, ‘Global Australia’, reflects the dynamic nature of contemporary Australia and highlights connections between Australia and the world.
The Australia Studies Institute currently hosts three major research projects:
Actually Existing Development: Twentieth Century International Development and the Global South
Led by Prof Agnieszka Sobocinska, this is a five-year project funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (DEVHIST, 101170121).
Actually Existing Development examines the encounters between individuals, groups and worldviews that attended and often reshaped international development at points of implementation across the Global South, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Uncovering the complex negotiations that remade international development projects at the point of implementation, this project aims to reveal the viewpoints, agency and impacts of aid workers and Global South communities on the international system.
Actually Existing Development employs a multiscalar historical methodology that traces international development programmes through every stage of their lifecycle, and draws upon a previously neglected source base including Project Files and Global South-produced accounts. It applies this approach to programmes and projects implemented by a range of development actors, including state development agencies such as Australia’s ADAB/AusAID, multilateral development banks, international organisations, and development NGOs.
Placing Australian Childhoods
Led by Dr Simon Sleight, this ongoing project explores the history of urban place-making, the evolution of youth cultures and public history, with a particular focus on children’s oral histories.
Key publications from this research include A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2023), History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present (Routledge, 2018), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave, 2016) and Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 (Routledge, 2013; republished 2016).
Globalising sisterhood: Global South feminism at the United Nations 1975-2000
Led by Dr Rosa Campbell, this is a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship).
Between 1975 and 1995, four United Nations World Conferences on Women took place in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995). At these conferences, thousands of very different women – from Soviet astronauts to Islamic feminists – pursued three key goals: equality, development and peace. This project investigates how Global South feminism developed at these conferences, how it impacted feminism locally and globally, across national borders and at the level of the UN.
I focus on how Global South feminism developed through and across these four conferences. I study coherence, friction and conflict within Global South feminism around politics, strategy and identity. I explore how feminists balanced local and national priorities at the UN. To excavate this rich and varied feminism, I structure the project around Global South feminist efforts toward the conference goals of equality, development and peace, and how they developed networks across borders to address each goal. I explore how feminists’ work toward these goals was entangled with changing geopolitics, including decolonisation, the end of the Cold War, the transformation of the ‘Third World’ into the ‘Global South,’ and the rise of neoliberalism.
Key publications from this research so far include:
- Rosa Campbell and Ana Stevenson, ‘From ‘white slavery’ to ‘female sexual slavery’: the UN and global radical feminism against sex work. Third World Quarterly, 47, no. 2 (2026): 361–378.
- Rosa Campbell ‘How International was Australia’s International Women’s Year, 1975’ Australian Historical Studies (in press)
Read more about our research below on our School Substack.
