Dr Alison Barnes
IAS Residential Fellow
Western Sydney University
Dr Alison Barnes is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication and a member of the Institute of Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her research interests centre on the differing roles graphic design can play in the mediation, construction, and communication of everyday life, belonging and identity.
Alison is a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project The Collaborative Museum: Embedding Cultural Infrastructure in the City (LP 200301481) in partnership with the Powerhouse Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences. Her current research focuses specifically on ‘graphic heritage’, which can be defined as any object through which we experience or are informed about heritage in graphic form.
Alison is currently exploring graphic heritage in relation to ideas of food and migration; critical toponymy and placemaking; sports stadia and supporter rituals and identity; architecture and heritage listing; and, gentrification and design literacy, particularly in diverse urban contexts. The analysis of such graphic heritage offers a nuanced understanding of ways communities and places reflect their differing histories and heritages and in doing so, create everyday heritage spaces. Alison holds a PhD from the University of Arts London, is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and has published widely. Her research monograph Creative Representations of Place was published by Routledge in 2019.
During their IAS Residential Fellowship, Dr Barnes is collaborating with Dr Robert Harland from the School of Design and Creative Arts.