CACHE Member ARC DP Success: Associate Professor Emily O’Gorman

CACHE is excited to kick off 2022 with the wonderful news of a successful ARC-DP! CACHE congratulates our centre member, Associate Professor Emily O'Gorman and colleagues on the successful award of an ARC Discovery Project (2022-2025), Narrative Ecologies of Warragamba Dam Project.

Our CACHE member A/Prof. Emily O’Gorman is a Chief Investigator on the Discovery Project led by The University of Sydney. The project team include Associate Professor Thom van Dooren (USYD); Dr Emily O'Gorman (MQU); Professor Stephen Muecke (UNSW); Professor Grace Karskens (UNSW); Professor Matthew Kearnes (USNW); Dr Natalie Osborne (Griffith University); Dr Peter Minter (USYD).

The Narrative Ecologies of Warragamba Dam Project is an interdisciplinary environmental humanities project that explores the role of narrative in understanding and addressing controversy over the proposed raising of the Warragamba Dam wall, in NSW. The project aims to utilise narrative to develop new resources for enhancing community understanding and involvement in complex issues of connection to place, livelihood and economic prosperity and of deep cultural relationships to Country.

Emily O’Gorman is an Associate Professor at the Macquarie University School of Social Sciences, in the Faculty of Arts. Emily’s research explores environmental history, more-than-human geography, and the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. Emily is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority, expertise, and landscapes.

A/Prof. O’Gorman will contribute to the Narrative Ecologies of Warragamba Dam Project with her world-class expertise in environmental history, geography and wider environmental humanities. She is continuing to build on her prior research relating to changing understandings of floods, and more recent work on engaging with peoples’ diverse relationships with water. This includes A/Prof. O’Gorman and collaborators’ successful 2020 CACHE research initiative grant, Enabling Healthier Gomeroi/Kamilaroi Country, which you can read about on page 17 of the 2020 CACHE Ezine. The CACHE funding for this project was leverage for a successful NSW Environment Trust Grant in 2021.

The project overall hopes to profile the success of environmental humanities as a discipline and shape Australia as a leading centre for this type of interdisciplinary research. Congratulations to Emily and the team, CACHE looks forward to following and supporting their continued success.

For more on Emily’s work, see her Macquarie University profile, and engage with her on Twitter.

Top right: Photograph of Associate Professor Emily O'Gorman.
Botton: Aerial view of Warragamba Dam, Silverdale and Wallacia. Image by Bidgee, CC BY-SA 3.0 AU, via Wikimedia Commons