Monash-WIE Partnership
Monash-WIE Partnership
Towards Permeability: WIE's engagement-focussed with the Arts Faculties of Warwick and Monash
The Universities of Warwick and Monash have been working closely together since 2009 - a relationship which was affirmed through the launch of the Monash Warwick Alliance back in 2012. At it's core, the Alliance has been about the pursuit of "effective research and education outcomes" and in today's world this means global collaboration.
Building on well over a decade of such work and the mutual learning, enrichment, and collaboration it has brought, in 2024 WIE began to identify a fresh set of common challenges and opportunities centring on the two Arts Faculties and the nature and role of 'engagement' in renewing, sharing and articulating the value of our work in these areas.
The multi-phased ‘Towards Permeability’ project has already seen us survey the differing cultural, political and institutional understandings of the role of higher education in the UK in Australia, particularly the differing frameworks within which universities demonstrate and report on the effectiveness and reach of their work: whilst ‘impact’ and more recently ‘engagement’ are part of the DNA of UK’s REF, and very much part of what we strive towards in Warwick, Australia has yet to formalise its post-COVID framework for the evaluation of research and its public value.
Yet Australian academia has its own ‘permeabilities’ already: as we found out, there is much, excellent public-facing work being undertaken at Monash, which models superbly how to centre indigenous scholars, communities and culture in higher education and also delivers engaged research across international campuses. The opportunities for mutual learning are thus plentiful and timely.
‘Towards Permeability’ began at the intersection between the arts and the broader family of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) disciplines – an area that has come under pressure to demonstrate its ongoing value in recent times in both national contexts. Whilst resident in Melbourne in 2025, WIE’s Faculty Public Engagement Lead (arts) Dr James Hodkinson helped organize a visit by Prof. Helen Wheatley’s Monash (WIE Annual Report, p.10). Hosted by Professors Brett Hutchins (Arts) and Jo Winning (LLCL), we followed a week-long programme of presentations, workshops, roundtable discussions designed to explore areas from learning and collaboration.
A successful bid to the Alliance’s Research Activation Fund in 2025 will allow Professors Jo Winning and Catherine Mills to undertake a return visit, planned for UK autumn 2026. This will be marked by a similar series of encounters and exchanges, though will also lay the groundwork for new engagement-focussed publications and collaborations and prepare a larger scale bid which, if successful, will allow more sustained work between the two faculties.
That work would not only make possible greater permeability between Warwick and Monash, but also between traditionally siloed disciplines within both universities, and extend the many ways in which institutions reach into the world, locally and globally.
For further information or to express an interest in the project, please contact Dr James Hodkinson.