Migration + Mobility + Art is an interdisciplinary research area within CAST, which examines various forms of migration and their critical impacts, and the challenges surrounding the complexities of mobility, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region, in the context of creative practices.

Led by Associate Professor Kristen Sharp, Dr Tammy Hulbert, Dr Pia Johnson, and Dr Clare McCracken, this initiative brings together diverse researchers, including artists, curators, designers, writers and educators toshare and develop ideas, initiatives, collaboration projects, exhibitions and publication around interrelated issues of diversity, nationalism, citizenship, borders, transnationalism, multiculturalism, diasporas, globalisation and belonging.

As a research area, we want to examine how creative and cultural practices can reimagine the social, political, environmental and ethical issues of mobility and migration in a globalising society.

Research Projects 

Dr Tammy Hulbert

Dr Tammy Wong Hulbert is an artist, curator and academic. Her current research engages both her curatorial and artistic interests and focuses on investigating how socially engaged art practices can encourage an inclusive city. Originally she studied Bachelor of Applied Art, ceramics and Art Administration at UNSWAD, Sydney. She has exhibited her work and had curatorial experience in Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai and Beijing. In Sydney, she was the manager of Newcontemporaries, a non-commercial corporate funded gallery and the manager of exhibitions at Customs House, City of Sydney. Her curatorial interests focus on cross-cultural dialogue between Australian and Chinese contemporary artists through projects such as Gone with the Panda – Zhao Bandi (2004) Meridians: Shanghai (2010) and Lumens Festival: Curating the Ancient City, Suzhou and Melbourne (2012). Her industry experience led to her PhD research on The City as a Curated Space (2012) at RMIT University, focused on proposing an alternative model of exhibition practices, considering the ways urban spaces are curated in global cities. She has also taught contemporary art history in Melbourne and Hong Kong. Tammy is currently a lecturer in the Arts Management program, specialising in curating contemporary art.
tammy.hulbert@rmit.edu.au 

Dr Clare McCracken

Dr Clare McCracken is a site-responsive artist, early-career researcher and the coordinator of Art History, Theory & Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University, Naarm/Melbourne. Her practice-led research sits at the intersection of art, cultural geography and urban theory. She employs innovative, performance methodologies to research how mobility systems coproduce space, place, and landscape across generations in Australia. In 2019 Clare won an RMIT University Research Award in the Higher Degree by research Impact category for her PhD research. 

Clare has created over 30 temporary public artworks for sites across Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney including Federation Square and Cockatoo Island and exhibited locally and internationally. Over the last couple of years Clare has been shortlisted for the Nillumbik Art Prize, the Darebin Art Prize, the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award and the Hardie Grant Spark Prize for Narrative Nonfiction Writing. Her work is in private collections, the State Library of Victoria’s rare book collection, the Wangaratta Art Gallery, City of Hume and City of Greater Dandenong collections. Resent publications include Lisbon Dreaming (2023), Liminality When Grounded: micro-mobilities in contemporary art practice during the COVID-19 pandemic (2023) Killing Snowmen: big things and rural Australia’s existential crises (2022) and Dystopias for discourse: the role of the artist in a rapidly reconfiguring city (2021). 

.