Hannah Tavares, associate professor in the College of Education Department of Educational Foundations (EDEF), has been selected to serve on an International Advisory Board as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant titled “Progressive education and race: A transnational history of Indigenous education in Australia and Oceania, 1920s-1950s.”
“I am always humbled when I am invited to participate in a research project with scholars whose work I both read and admire,” Tavares said. “On a personal level, it means that what I have to say and how I say it is important; on a collective level, it means developing new relationships and collaborations.”
Tavares has collaborated with Julie McLeod, University of Melbourne Graduate School of Education Professor and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Capability), for more than a decade. At McLeod’s invitation, Tavares has contributed to numerous scholarly publications, including Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods, and Practices, a volume in the 2018 World Yearbook of Education Series with Routledge Publishers.
As part of her role on the ARC grant, Tavares will host Professor McLeod’s research visit next year and submit a proposal to the international journal, History of Education. The title of Tavares’s submission is Visualizing Race: Technologies of Assessment and Sentiment in Territorial Hawaiʻi, written for a special issue on the “Ambivalent Histories of Progressive Education and Colonialism.”
The primary focus of her work, Tavares explained, is to “eventalize” what was being said about race and mixed races in the early 20th century to draw out the political and practical consequences.
EDEF Chair Xu Di said, “With this grant, Hannah leads us in partnering with strategic international colleagues and institutions in the history of indigenous education, an area essential for education development globally. I know EDEF-COE faculty and students as well as our community will benefit from her work.”
