Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Professor Barry McGaw
The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia has enormous potential. From a diverse range of social science disciplines, it brings together experts who, for the most part, have strong connections with professional associations in their own disciplines. What the Academy can add is a significant opportunity for Fellows to work across disciplinary boundaries to address important research and policy questions.
Multidisciplinary engagement can be achieved through active collaboration in projects that the Academy organises or is commissioned to undertake, but it can also be achieved in less structured and more informal ways. Discussions in Academy workshops, roundtables and symposia expose individuals to advanced ways of thinking about issues from the perspectives of other disciplines; thinking that they might not readily encounter in their own work settings. Where policy makers are also involved, the mix can be even more powerful. The discussions can be subjected to the double discipline, on the one hand, of addressing the complexities and realities of the policy context and, on the other, of eschewing simplifying assumptions that might more readily be adopted in a single disciplinary framework than a genuinely multidisciplinary one.
The early part of 2010 will provide an opportunity for reflection on how the Academy might better capitalise on its strength and diversity. The Executive commissioned an independent review of the Academy that will be completed by the end of 2009 and will then provide the basis for strategic planning of the Academy's future program.
This will provide an opportunity to think again about broad questions of purpose for the Academy, as well as the kind of program that it might most productively pursue. It will raise important issues about connections between research and policy and provoke consideration of how the relationship might be enriched for mutual benefit. It will invite reflection on the advocacy role of the Academy, not only for the role of the social sciences per se, but for policy positions that are supported by the scholarship of the Academy's Fellows and their collective work through the Academy.
The reflection will also enable the Academy to address some internal issues that are also important for its work. One is the manner in which it organises itself around discipline-based panels. This will allow consideration of the place of new disciplines or sub-disciplines that are not congenially accommodated within the disciplinary structures of the existing panels. It will also allow consideration of the place of domains such as management and education that are not disciplines but rather fields in which work is undertaken from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Barry McGaw
2009
Professor Barry McGaw was elected president of the Academy at the AGM in November. He is half-time Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne where he is Executive Director of the Cisco-Intel-Microsoft Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project. He is Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority.
Last modified: 17 December 2009.