Monash-WIE Partnership
Monash-WIE Partnership
Towards Permeability: WIE's engagement-focussed project 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 public engagement in higher education in the UK and Australia, particularly the differing ways universities in these countries demonstrate and report on the effectiveness and reach of their work.
Whilst ‘impact’ and more recently ‘engagement’ are deeply embedded within the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the UK’s formalised reporting and evaluation framework for higher education research, Australia has yet to renew its own equivalent structures and processes in the post-COVID context. Yet Australian academia boasts its own ‘permeabilities’ already: as the project has begun to discover, 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 delivers engaged research across international campuses. The opportunities for strategically relevant, mutual learning are thus both 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 to Monash (WIE Annual Report, p.10). Hosted by Professors Brett Hutchins (Arts) and Jo Winning (LLCL), we undertook 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 week of encounters and exchanges. In the short-term, this time will see us work towards a new, engagement-focussed publication, which will be co-authored with Monash colleagues and will reflect on the gains to be made by conceiving and practising engagement in transnational contexts. We will also connect senior researchers from both institutions in strategic discussions on the future of the engagement-focussed university and work on larger-scale funding bids which, if successful, will allow more sustained work between the two faculties, both on smaller projects and larger scale collaborations
including conferences and public-facing work. Our learning in these areas will help us in our endeavour to ensure the HASS disciplines remain visible and relevant, not least by delivering benefits beyond the academy. This dialogical, learning-centred approach will allow us to achieve one key strategic goal in particular, as we reflect upon and refine our methods for capturing the longer-term impact of our work and this will, in turn, also help inform WIE’s mission of promoting best practice in engagement across Warwick, ensuring our insights reflect global perspectives and experiences even when realised at more local and regional levels.
The phases of this project thus 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 both our institutions reach into the world. We would be particularly interested in hearing from our off-campus partners and from academics of all career stages who might want to find out more, to begin new or rekindle previous collaborative work with Monash and its non-academic partners – especially if you are interested in furthering the role of engagement and working within the HASS disciplines.
On these matters, please express your interest by contacting: Dr James Hodkinson.