2020 & 2021: there were no recipients as no in-person conference due to the pandemic

2019

• Elaine Pratley – University of Melbourne
• Catriona Stevens - University of Western Australia
• Laura Gobey - Deakin University
• Heidi Hetz - University of South Australia
• Xuyang Sun - Tianjin University (University of South Australia)

• Naama Blatman-Thomas –James Cook University
• Claire Parfitt – University of Sydney
• Daile Lynn Rung - Charles Darwin University
• Tania Searle (Jerzy) - Flinders University
• Marika Franklin - La Trobe University

• Ashleigh Haw – University of Western Australia (based in Melbourne)
• Lata Lutfun Nahar – University of Queensland
• Kate Vincent – University of Tasmania

• Cassie Curriyer – University of Newcastle
• Yangtao Huang – University of Queensland
• Elly Leung – University of Western Australia
• Aniqa Farwa  – University of Queensland
• Aqua Hastings – University of Newcastle

• Claire Baker
• Thao Dang
• Ly Phan
• Michelle Dyer
• Leanne Stevenson

2013

2013-2014 TASA president, Jo Lindsay with Amy MacMahon, one of the 2013 postgraduate scholarship recipients.

Andrew Gilbert was also awarded a postgraduate scholarship.

Chivoin Peou (The University of Melbourne)

Handun Athukorala (Monash University)

Jeremy Simpson (University of Sydney)

2011

Julia Coffey – University of Melbourne: I was thrilled and honoured to be a recipient of TASA’s 2011 Postgraduate Conference Scholarship. The paper I presented was based on my PhD thesis, exploring the ways in which Deleuzian and Spinozan conceptual models can be used in an effort to understand the body in contemporary social theory. In the paper and the thesis more broadly, these theoretical insights are also used in an empirical context, in exploring body work practices and the significance of gender in the ways that bodies are lived through a small sample of young people in Melbourne. In my experience, the annual TASA conferences are a wonderful opportunity to share ideas and to be inspired by others working in the many different areas of sociology.

Jaleh McCormack – University of Otago: As a mother of two young children, a PhD student studying in New Zealand but currently living in Washington DC, and the wife of a constantly travelling diplomat, life is certainly a juggling act. Being awarded a TASA Conference scholarship was a wonderful confidence boost and made it financially feasible to travel to Australia. Unfortunately my juggling talents were tested and found wanting. I trust you had a stimulating conference and hope to be a fleshy part of it in the future.

My paper was a little quirky. It was a tale about Norma and Norm Right, two fictional, self-governing poster parents who operated a totally bio-pedagogised family wherein every moment, event and interaction was taken up as an opportunity for teaching the art of obesity-preventing living. Norm and Norma’s practices were attuned to ‘truths’ avowedly discovered by obesity scientists claiming to know how parents can produce un-fat children. Some practices were nonsensical, like Norma role modeling physical activity by playing in her 15-year-old son’s rugby team. Clearly I was taking literary liberties but then some of the ‘truths’ promulgated by obesity scientists are also ludicrous – we are all playing ‘games of truth’.

The purpose of this narrative was to provide an account of what life might be like for parents attempting to attain ‘normal’ parent status as constituted by obesity scientists. It highlighted the potential local effects of a global discourse and tested the efficacy of narrative to demonstrate the constitutive and governmental nature of obesity scientists’ work. My broader thesis examines a selection of work produced by obesity scientists affiliated to New Zealand. A poststructural perspective supports my analysis of two discourses (re)produced by obesity scientists, namely, capability and deficiency. This analysis works to make visible the productive nature of obesity scientists avowedly objective and impartial truths. That is, the way obesity scientists make parents capable and problematic subjects and in doing so render them governable.

Edwin Sayes – University of Melbourne: I am honoured to receive one of the 2011 TASA Postgraduate Conference Scholarships and would like to thank TASA for their support.

I presented two papers at the TASA Conference. The first was related to my Masters research at the University of Melbourne. This research is concerned with mapping both the economic and social determinants of productivity. At its simplest, productivity can be understood as the efficiency by which the inputs of a production process are transformed into outputs. At the theoretical level, my paper explored the possibility of combining economic and social explanations. In my thesis, I aim to go on and consider the most appropriate methodologies for such a task. Specifically, I take as a starting point existing economic theories of productivity and critically evaluate them. I ask what is lacking in these explanations and, also, what a sociological perspective might add.

My second paper, for which I received the scholarship, spoke to my broader research interests: social theory and methodology. In particular, I explored the importance of rejuvenating a notion of social totality. I attempted to do this in a rather unusual manner, by imagining the manner in which Karl Marx might provide a critique of a contemporary social theory (Actor–Network Theory). In the paper, I argued that system building, when done properly, is more concrete than mere empirical description. The inverse is equally the case: if one wants to accuse system building of abstraction then this may be harder to do than is typically imagined.

This was my first TASA conference and I would like to thank everyone involved for making it an enjoyable and valuable experience.

Theresa Sauter – Queensland University of Technology: Receiving a postgraduate scholarship to attend the 2011 TASA conference enabled me to travel to beautiful Newcastle to experience a stimulating conference with a fantastic atmosphere. I enjoyed networking with other postgraduates from around the country to share experiences and hear about their exciting projects. It was also great to meet more established academics and benefit from some of their advice and feedback. The postgraduate day was particularly useful with the highlights of the day being Professor Raewyn Connell’s advice on establishing and maintaining a mentor relationship, and an open Q&A session with Professor Mitchell Dean that allowed attendees to raise issues such as problematic relations with supervisors and conflicts of ideas. At the end of the day we also had the opportunity to meet the entire TASA Executive team who were all very welcoming and helpful.

Presenting my paper on ‘Chatroulette: bodily transgression, sex and the care of the self’ in the Cultural Sociology stream was a highly rewarding experience. My paper conceptualised webcam chat on the social networking site Chatroulette as an example of the complex circular connection between three Foucauldian themes: the care of the self, the body as site of transgression and the sexualisation of society. I established that Chatroulette allows us to do more than simply chat with others or revel in narcissism: it represents a modern technique of self-formation. These assertions are in line with the topic of my thesis, which looks at online social networking sites in terms of the opportunities for subjectivation they offer to people today. I will be completing my thesis within the next few months. Attending the TASA conference was a great way of receiving feedback on ideas I have been grappling with and enabled me to consolidate these ideas in my thesis.

I want to express my sincere gratitude to TASA for providing me with the opportunity to attend this stimulating conference.

Shawna Tang – University of Sydney: I would like to thank TASA for awarding me a 2011 Postgraduate Conference Scholarship. For a student of queer studies oftentimes disheartened by the general indifference of academic centres towards queer research, this encouragement from TASA is certainly a welcome one.

My research interest is in the areas of sexuality, globalisation, queer identities, state and nationalisms. I engage with the scholarship on the globalisation of gay identities, which since the late 1990s has been continually concerned with the extent to which queer identities everywhere are becoming the same or different through global economic, social and cultural flows. My work builds on the domain of scholarship, problematising the notion of a universalising, homogeneous global gay identity created by the hegemonic West and exported to non-Western contexts. In my thesis, I address the specific question of how we might understand the sexual subjectivities of middle class lesbians in the postcolonial context of Singapore, located as a non-Western Asian culture by nationalist rhetoric at the same time as it is a modern, globalised ‘world city’. Are English-speaking, educated, economically independent and well-travelled lesbians who make up a large, visible part of the queer community in Singapore inevitable products of a universal global gay discourse? How do we theorise the lived experiences and meanings these women give to their sexual subjectivities within the historical specificity of postcolonial Singapore? Rather than presenting yet more evidence showing how non-Western Singaporean lesbians are different from Western sexual subjects, I turn to postcolonial theory and feminist critical sexuality studies for conceptual tools to move beyond the impasse of sameness and difference, which is part of the edifice of problematic binaries such as global/local and modern/traditional underpinning persistent postulations of same-sex subjectivities as originating from, and oriented to, the West. My aim is to resist the theoretical impulse to refer to antecedents in North America or Western Europe when thinking about same-sex sexualities in Singapore as this holds real-life implications for non-Western sexual subjects trying to live up to idealised images of what being gay means.

• Melissa Phillips – University of Melbourne
• Jamilla Rosdahl – University of Sunshine Coast
• Justin Iu – Australian National University
• Nicole Stirling – University of Queensland
• Trevor Lovett – University of South Australia

Melissa Phillips, University of Melbourne (m.phillips@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au) I was honoured to have been awarded a 2010 TASA Postgraduate Conference Scholarship and my thanks go to the TASA Executive for their support. As a postgraduate co-convenor for the Migration, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (MEM) thematic group, most of my time at the conference was spent at MEM sessions. However, the relevance of the work presented in many other thematic groups for migration, ethnicity and multicultural scholarship was observed by MEM members, and a recommendation coming from our thematic group AGM was to arrange joint-thematic group session or panel discussion at the 2011 Conference. The full article is available in Nexus 23:1, February 2011

Jamilla Rosdahl – University of Sunshine Coast Poststructuralist feminist theorists in particular, have focused on how the female body is tied to complex networks of practices and institutions that sustain positions of dominance and subordination (Butler 1999; McNay 2000). Studies of female athletes in general and the body of muscular female bodybuilders in particular have generated a number of controversial discussions about the ‘nature’ of femininity, its complex relationship to muscularity and masculinity, and what it means to be a physically muscular and strong woman (Heywood 1998). The physicality of the female bodybuilder conflicts and challenges the assumption that men are strong and powerful and that women are weak, passive and dependent. It questions the inherent naturalness of men as masculine and women as feminine. In asking the question, ‘what is the relationship of femininity to the female muscular body?’ my research investigates the subject of embodied femininity and why femininity as a gender ‘identity’ has been considered central and unproblematic to the formation of the natural ‘woman’ (Bordo 1993). The full article is available in Nexus 23:1, February 2011

Nicole Stirling, University of Queensland
My thesis examines the outworking of religious identity and practice among women from two Muslim majority countries, Iran and Turkey, who have migrated to Brisbane, Australia. The research is based on in-depth interviews with 37 Iranian and 25 Turkish migrant women and follow-up interviews with nine of these women, seven years later. In the first round of interviews, women were asked about their religious and cultural attitudes: (a) before migration; (b) after migration; and (c) following significant political events such as 9/11, the Bali bombings and the Iraq war. After the first interviews it was found that many women had undergone changes in their religious and cultural identity and practice. Words such as ‘sifting’, ‘negotiating’ and ‘remaking’ described the process of meaning making which underlined the changes to their identities. From the initial interviews, it was revealed that many of the migrant Muslim women, now living in a multicultural Western society, were re-evaluating their lives on a number of different levels. The women described in several diverse ways the process of ‘sifting’ that was taking place in their religious and cultural lives. The full article is available in Nexus 23:1, February 2011

Trevor Lovett, University of South Australia
My personal experience of educational policies and practices suggested that certain individuals and groups in society are intent on maintaining political, social and educational orthodoxy. On the periphery of the educational decision-making process are individuals, like me, who feel they have limited influence on shaping education policy and practice. As a learner, I was cynical about many aspects of education that I believed did not really represent the interests of marginalised groups. I was curious to find out if working-class students, from my generation, were disaffected by the cultural practices of the schools they attended. The full article is available in Nexus 23:1, February 2011

• Fiona Brookes – Monash University
• Paula Wright – La Trobe University
• Nicola Pitt – Monash University
• Andrea North-Samardzic – University of New South Wales
• Anna Makrenoglou – Monash University

“I was awarded the TASA Postgraduate Scholarship for my research on Oprah Winfrey and Discourses of Intensive Mothering. As a first year PhD candidate, attending the conference at ANU in Canberra – with the funding from TASA – was not only a great surprise and satisfying achievement, it was also rewarding to discover the number of well-established academics in this prominent sociological field who are both interested in, and supportive of my (as well as other postgraduates’) work. An absolute highlight at the conference this year was the postgraduate writing workshop with Professor Raewyn Connell who gave all of us in attendance a wide variety of amazing, insightful, encouraging, and practical advice on how to improve our techniques in effective communication. I look forward to next year’s conference and building on the networks that this event has initiated for me. And I would definitely recommend TASA to all postgraduate students who are interested in social studies and the social world!” Nicola Pitt, PhD Candidate – Monash University.

“I attended the TASA conference for the first time in 2009, as I am in a business faculty, and I now strongly encourage anyone from other disciplines to expand their horizons by attending. If I didn’t receive the TASA conference scholarship in 2009, to put it simply, I wouldn’t have been able to attend nor present my paper (thereby basically wasting the time I spent on it). I had used up all my research funding so the financial support of TASA was tremendously helpful; even if you have funding, every cent helps. As a PhD student, presenting by oneself is an intimidating process but everyone in attendance was extremely supportive and encouraging. I received great feedback on my paper (despite a few gaffs) and attending my first TASA conference provided a new perspective for my research. Write something (anything), apply for the scholarship, hone your conference confidence and get your research out there.” Andrea North-Samardzic – University of New South Wales.

“I was both honoured and surprised to receive a TASA Postgraduate Scholarship for my paper analysing the initial findings of my ethnographic study of Grade 6 girls in a Melbourne Primary School. To receive the acknowledgement and encouragement of academics in the Sociological field in this manner is a valuable way to understand that others are both interested and supportive of Post Grad research. While I was unable to attend the TASA 2009 conference due to illness the preparation of this paper and the Scholarship selection process was a valuable and rewarding experience.” Fiona Brookes, PhD Candidate – Monash University.

• Marilyn Anderson
• Sue Kentlyn
• Kylie Sait
• Maria del Pilar
• Puerta Francos
• Theresa Petray

• Christopher Baker – Swinburne University of Technology
• Karina Butera – Deakin University
• Jane Chesher – University of Sydney
• Rebecca Coates – University of Queensland
• Riki Lane – La Trobe University
• Sapura Mohamad – Adelaide University
• Ruth Nicholls – University of Western Sydney
• Elizabeth Povey – University of Western Australia
• Arundina Pratiwi – Flinders University
• Karen Soldatic – University of Western Australia

“Last year I was honoured to receive a Postgraduate Scholarship, which reduced the financial pressure of attending the TASA/SAANZ conference. The scholarship, along with presenting my paper, gave me a sense of confidence about my place in the sociological community. If you’re considering submitting a paper and/or applying for a scholarship, GO FOR IT! It might seem overwhelming, but be assured that the TASA delegates are a wonderful bunch, they are incredibly generous to ‘newbies’ and the advice and encouragement you will receive will astound you. Go on, have a go!!”Karina J. Butera, PhD Candidate/Tutor: Sociology & Gender Studies, Deakin University, Melbourne

“In the first year of my research I attended the TASA conference in Perth and presented work-in-progress. For me as a PhD candidate in my second year the process of writing a paper, having it peer reviewed and then presenting it to fellow researchers at the TASA/AASR Conference in Auckland was as an important part of the learning process and it was as constructive as it was affirming. Writing the paper for the conference helped me to hone my thinking and advance my thesis. Presenting my contribution, testing it in a scholarly context and receiving peer feedback on the progress and quality of my work were each of particular and practical value to me. The Postgraduate Conference Scholarship provided welcome financial assistance and a fillip to both my confidence and my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend to postgraduate workshop, though the feedback I received from colleagues who did attend is that I missed out!” Christopher Baker, PhD Candidate, Swinburne University of Technology

“In 2007, I was one of the recipients of the TASA post-graduate conference award for a solo authored paper within Critical Disability Theory. Receiving the conference scholarship was a great confidence boost, particularly as I was in the depths of my thesis, which at times felt intimidating and isolating. I thoroughly enjoyed the conference and meet some really inspiring women academics, who provided rich critical feedback and in turn, encouraged me to continue with the directions of my work. As a result of their encouragement and with the support of others, I have gathered a small group of Critical Disability Scholars from across Australia together to form a Critical Disability Studies Thematic Group under the TASA umbrella, which will meet at the Melbourne conference for their first meeting.”Karen Soldatic, Phd Student, University of Western Australia

“As a postgraduate student, the preparation of a referred paper for the 2007 TASA Conference was an excellent way of developing a particular aspect of my thesis. I also benefited from the experience of delivering my paper and was encouraged by the feedback that I received from my spoken presentation. Writing for publication is a necessary part of the postgraduate experience and I would encourage all postgraduates to participate in the conference this year.”Elizabeth Povey, PhD Student, University of Western Australia

“I would encourage all post grads working in Sociology to participate in the TASA conference and to submit papers to be refereed and judged for the Postgraduate Scholarship. Writing a thesis is a long journey with many diversions. Often the eventual goal is so distant that the day to day words seem only like drafts – never a final product. Writing is different when you know it will be judged by experienced referees as with the TASA postgrad scholarship – it motivated me to make my paper as tightly argued as possible, with no wasted or irrelevant words.”Riki Lane, PhD Student, La Trobe University

“The highlight of attending the TASA/SAANZ conference last year was the opportunity to hear and meet Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the author of Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Her work has had a huge impact on my thinking and praxis as a researcher, and her plenary gave us all insights into the labelling of Maori iwi as terrorists, and the contentions around the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.I was really pleased to have the opportunity to present to well known scholars (and receive feedback on my ideas). And of course, the social aspect of meeting other post-grads and academics made all the theory of ‘networking’ seem less trite.Many thanks to TASA and SAANZ for the award, Ruth”Ruth Nicholls, PhD Candidate, University of Western Sydney

“The TASA postgraduate scholarship provided an excellent opportunity for me as a first-year PhD student to present a refereed paper in professional, yet encouraging environment. The whole conference experience was very positive, especially the postgraduate workshop where essential advice was passed from recently finished PhD students to current students. Presenting my paper at the conference gave me a great beginning to my postgraduate student career.” Rebecca Coates, PhD Candidate, University of Queensland

“By accepting TASA scholarship, I had the opportunity to attend TASA Conference and present my refereed paper, meet sociological scholars, and learn a few writing techniques from the postgraduate workshop. It certainly became a very rewarding experience for me to broaden my knowledge and expertise regarding the application of sociological theory in my research project.” Arundina Pratiwi, PhD Student, Flinders

• Ruth Bohill, Southern Cross
• Dina Bowman, PhD, Swinburne
• Perri Campbell, Honours, Monash
• Rebecca Conning, Master of Public Health, La Trobe
• Kate Sheeren, PhD, ANU
• Lyndal Sleep, PhD Griffith

• Angela Dwyer – Queensland University of Technology
• Louise Holdsworth – Southern Cross University
• Umaporn Muneenam – Griffith University
• Kirsten Harley – University of Sydney
• Rachael Kitchens – Murdoch University

• Jessica Gunson – University of Adelaide
• Wendy Hillman – James Cook University
• Shahadat Hossain – The University of New South Wales
• Kate Huppatz – The University of Sydney
• David Webb – Victoria University

• Jan Backhouse – Southern Cross University
• Meg Carter – Swinburne University of Technology
• Thomas Sinclair – Monash University
• Donna Turner – Murdoch University
• Katie Wright – La Trobe University
• Zuleyka Zevallos – Swinburne University of Technology