Project Title: Identity, Community and Social Participation: What do these have to do with the Art and Science of

Practicing Together? A study with Sci Curious Science Gallery Melbourne.

Team members:

UoM/SGM co-resarch custodians: Kathryn Coleman, Sarah Healy, Niels Wouters, Jenny Martin, Lea Campbell, Sam Peck, Amanda Belton and Rose Hiscock are an interdisciplinary team behind an ongoing University of Melbourne – Science Gallery Melbourne collaboration.

Sci Curious co-research team: Ana Ward-Davies, James Urlini, Emily Painter, Jack Chan, Brandon Iredale, Juetheng Soo, Jarrah Shubsmith, Catriona Nguyen-Robertson, Julia Both, Branislava Godic

Co-research partner (UoM): Social & Cultural Informatics Platform (SCIP)

Acknowledgments: This scicurious project acknowledges and pays respect to the Traditional Owners of the lands upon which our campuses are situated at The University of Melbourne. We acknowledge that Aboriginal sovereignty has not been ceded. We are grateful for trust and support from Science Gallery Melbourne and Science Gallery International. We would like to acknowledge seed funding from The Economic and Social Participation Hallmark Research Initiative (ESPRIt) to create interdisciplinary research partnerships both across and outside the University of Melbourne. 

We are the custodians of the Sci Curious Research Project which is an intergenerational research collective. Across our collective, we have collaborators who identify as artists, designers, engineers, scientists, coders, biologists, researchers and inter/trans/pre-disciplinarians who aren’t defined by disciplinary labels. What we are, is scicurious. This conceptual collaboratory offers us a space to explore scicurious, scicurious as method and scicurious as becoming.

This research was designed as a two-phase project, with each phase adopting different methods. Among other things, the first phase involved a University of Melbourne Qualtrics ethics approved survey ID:1955668.2 that sought to elicit responses from Sci Curious about their perceptions of being scicurious. It is a repeat measures survey in the sense that the 10x Sci Curious who self-selected into the research-creation event will repeat the same survey at the conclusion of the project, one year after doing the first survey. The first phase of the project is not discussed in this chapter. The first phase data do, however, inform the second phase co-research.