Cassandra Atherton:	Poetic Portraits of Australian Elders, funded by a Creative Victoria Grant and an Australia Council Grant, with RMIT Bowen St Press
Gilbert Caluya:	joint ARC-funded project on harnessing diasporic youth’s digital practices for teaching global digital citizenship
Daniel Marshall:	Chief Investigator on the ARC-funded Discovery Project “Queer Generations”
Lyn McCredden:	Sacred and Secular in Australia: A collaborative project (8 participants) between the University of Divinity, Deakin University, UNSW, University of Melbourne. Lead Researcher Professor Katherine Massam, U of D
Emily Potter:	ARC Special Research Initiative Project, ‘Reading in the Mallee: The Literary Past and Future of an Australian Region’ with CIs Brigid Magner and Torika Bolatagici. Check out the website here: https://www.malleereads.com/
Emily Potter:	Co-convenor (with Fiona Miller and Eva Lovbrand) of international “The Shadow Places Network: A collaboration to re-imagine and co-produce connections for justice in an era of climate change”, funded by the Mistra Formas Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Sweden
Leonie Rutherford:	ARC project Discovering a good book: Pathways to reading for Australian teens with co-chief investigators Katya Johanson and Andrew Singleton
Paul Venzo	Professor Seaweed picture storybook is a collaboration with Prue Francis in Marine Science, as well as part of the broader DeakinSeaEd project, partly funded by the Gwen and Edna Jones and Ray and Joyce Uebergang Foundations, to be published by CSIRO.

Deakin Motion Lab-funded projects 2021-22

Accelerationist Fictions

Geoff Boucher and Helen Young

This project looks at so-called “accelerationism,” a violent and extremist form of rightwing authoritarian politics that intends to accelerate the disintegration of society using terrorist actions, so as to make possible guerrilla insurgency, civil war and finally a neo-fascist dictatorship. Accelerationist politics is mainly presented to the public through literary fictions, because these can evade censorship and recruit members, so the project aims to grasp the narrative structures of accelerationist culture, in literature and games, and to clarify their relation to the recruitment strategies and political project of the radical Right.

Self-Publishing Across the Literary Field

Emmett Stinson and Jodi McAlister

Over the last decade, self-publishing has come to play a huge role within the commercial publishing industry; Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn noted that self-published works already comprised 22% of the UK ebook market by 2016. While previous scholarship has examined various self-publishing practices and specific markets, very little thought has been given to the way that self-publishing has moved across the literary field. The project seeks to examine the way the self-publishing processes traverse different genres and traditions and to consider the ways in which it simultaneously undermines and reinforces traditional hierarchies and divisions within the literary field by creating new modes of bookish circulation and a more direct movement from author to reader.

This project analyses two significant but still underexamined ‘ecosystems’ of self-published fiction: romance fiction and experimental literature. While these traditions sit across traditionally ‘opposed’ areas of the literary field, both have employed self-publishing technologies as a means of servicing readers often excluded from mainstream, conglomerate publishing.

Self-publishing has presented a new method of enabling text to circulate among the reading public. Through a carefully selected case study of texts in both traditions, this project will examine how self-publishing practices are inflected by genre and readership.