Dorothy Pyatt Postgraduate Research Grants 2026

Spiritual Relationaship to Country and Place: Collaborative Mapping as a Relational Practice

Collaborative mapping provides a method for Aboriginal and settler participants to come together and layer their experiences, stories, and relationships with Country. This practice is not only data collection, but a relational process—one that creates a dialogical space where different worldviews are placed side by side, respected, and made visible. For Aboriginal participants, it offers an avenue for cultural knowledge, spiritual connections, and Lawful relationships with Country to be expressed in ways that Western cartography alone cannot capture. For settler participants, it provides an opportunity to reflect on and negotiate their sense of belonging within a contested landscape. Deep mapping extends beyond physical geography. It incorporates story, memory, spirituality, art, and emotion into representations of place. By combining visual, oral, and experiential knowledge, deep mapping produces outputs that are textured, multi-layered, and representative of the living relationships to Country that both communities hold. This is essential for a project located at the intersection of Indigenous and settler geographies, where complexity cannot be reduced to single narratives. The outcomes of collaborative deep mapping will generate high-quality, publishable materials that exemplify decolonial, place-based research. They will provide new insights into how educators might approach relational pedagogy with Country/place, and will serve as tangible outputs (maps, artworks, narratives) that can be shared with community, schools, and scholarly audiences alike. 

The Dorothy Pyatt Award will cover costs of conducting interviews with Adnyamathanha community members and residents of the Flinders Ranges and Thura Yura region to better understand how settlers might ethically negotiate belonging and how identity and bonds to place are formed respectfully. These insights will then be applied to ongoing work with teachers, aiming to support place-responsive pedagogy and relational engagement with Country/place in South Australian classrooms.

Rebecca Hicks

Examining flood-risk governance and transformative pathways for climate adaptation in the Global South, with an empirical focus on Pakistan 

This research examines flood risk governance and transformative climate adaptation in Pakistan, with a focus on why devastating floods continue to cause widespread impacts despite decades of exposure and recurring disasters. Using the Indus River System as a case study, the project explores how climate change, infrastructure, governance systems, and socio-political inequalities interact to produce flood vulnerability. The research combines socio-ecological and hydro-social frameworks to investigate governance challenges across three provinces in Pakistan — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh — through fieldwork, policy analysis, and interviews with disaster management authorities, policymakers, community leaders, and civil society actors. The project also examines how Global South countries can strengthen climate adaptation through South-South cooperation and shared governance learning. Ultimately, the research aims to contribute practical and policy-relevant insights for more equitable, locally grounded, and transformative flood adaptation strategies in climate-vulnerable regions.'

Amna Javed

Contested agricultures: Power dynamics, resilience and missed opportunities among smallholder rice farmers in Assam 

The research examines how agricultural transformation shapes smallholder farmer agency and opportunities for rice farmers in Assam, India, along the Brahmaputra River Valley. Assam is home to culturally and linguistically diverse agrarian communities, including indigenous farming communities whose livelihoods remain closely tied to subsistence agriculture, especially rice cultivation. Rice is not only central to food security in the region but is deeply embedded in cultural identity, ritual life, and intergenerational and indigenous knowledge systems. 

The study examines opportunities for farmers amid agricultural development processes to critically analyse how smallholder farmers from Assam negotiate change under conditions of national policies, economic uncertainties, production risks, and agricultural transformation. Assam has historically been distanced from the regions undergoing the Green Revolution in India. In that sense, Assam represents one of India’s most overlooked agrarian frontiers: geographically distant from national centres of power, historically shaped by colonial extraction, plantation capitalism, political identity and separatist conflicts and movements, and ecological precarity. Most of Assam lies in the Brahmaputra and Barak River Basins. Despite its rich biodiversity and strong traditional agrarian knowledge systems, agricultural policy in the region remains largely top-down and insufficiently responsive to local contexts. Furthermore, by foregrounding women farmers’ experiences due to their central role in agriculture and household food security, the research highlights implications of gendered power relations. Building on regional research such as Vandana Shiva’s work on seed sovereignty and epistemic justice and Bina Agarwal’s contributions on women’s resource rights and food security, the study situates agricultural knowledge as a contested terrain where gender, power, and epistemic hierarchies intersect. Such an understanding of local agro-ecosystems opens up possibilities for more grounded, sustainable, and equitable opportunities to farmers.

Pragya Timsina