Monash Warwick Alliance Catalyst Fund – October 2019 Round

In today’s world, the modern concept of individual autonomy is increasingly at risk from a number of external factors including extremism, surveillance, big data and climate change. Yet a sense that we have been freed from past oppressions through the evolution of a government system in which law-abiding citizens are afforded a degree of freedom remains fundamental in shaping our individual and collective sense of who we are and what we wish to become, and to the collective identify of modern Western societies. As a result of these external pressures, we need to reconsider how we think about freedom.

To address this issue, researchers will bring together a cross-disciplinary group from the arts, humanities, social and economic sciences. The group will draw on expertise and knowledge from the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub, Global Terrorism Research Centre and Monash SoDa Labs, as well as from the Warwick Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, and Centre of Cultural & Media Policy Studies. The project is the first of its kind to address philosophically the unprecedented and interconnected social, scientific and technological factors that have created the contemporary crisis of freedom, and to develop new understandings of freedom better adapted to the contemporary world.

The project will host two interdisciplinary workshops and involve the development of a new framework that will understand how expectations of liberation shape experiences of, and attitudes to, freedom across interrelated social, technological and scientific domains. They will also develop a new account of freedom that will be better adjusted to the complex environmental, technological and social realities that increasingly characterise twenty-first century Western society. These workshops aim to provide a rare opportunity for a broad range of scholars to discuss a question that cannot be contained within any single disciplinary framework.

Principal Applicants:

Dr Christopher Watkin Senior Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Monash University	Dr Oliver Davis Reader, Faculty of Arts, School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Warwick

Co-Applicants:

Associate Professor Simon Angus Faculty of Business and Economics Monash University	Professor Jeremy Ahearne School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Warwick
Dr Ali Alizadeh Senior Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Monash University	Professor Nick Hewlett School of Modern Languages and Cultures University of Warwick
Dr Felicity Chaplin Lecturer, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Monash University	Dr Charlotte Heath-Kelly Reader, Department of Politics and International Studies University of Warwick

Visiting Fellow:

Professor John Coffey, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Leicester