University of Adelaide

Faculty Member, Centre for Australian Indigenous Research and Studies

About

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/elizabeth.grant

http://theexpertguide.com/profile.aspx?id=8105

Dr Elizabeth Grant is a tenured academic at Wilto Yerlo, the Centre for Australian Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Adelaide. The University of Adelaide is within the Australian Group of Eight (Go8) Universities, a coalition of leading Australian universities intensive in research and comprehensive in general and professional education. She is the Program Coordinator of the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation Program at the University of Adelaide, a program designed to prepare Indigenous students to study at tertiary level. She also guest lectures in the School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design.

She is a researcher of Aboriginal architecture in the discipline of people environments, which overlays architecture onto other disciplines to understand the environment from interdisciplinary perspectives. In particular, her work overlays the disciplines of architecture, and Aboriginal studies. Elizabeth has wide experience in the Indigenous arena over three decades, in urban, rural and remote settings, ranging from consulting communities to achieve outcomes in the built environment, to advocacy roles acting for Aboriginal communities. Her current consultancy practice focuses on consulting on Indigenous issues in master planning, siting and design specific to outcomes in the built environment and increasing social justice outcomes.

Her work is underpinned by two ethical philosophies. Firstly, she wishes to assist in improving the quality of outcomes of Australian Aboriginal peoples. Secondly, she has set out to educate non-Aboriginal Australians concerning the value of ‘culture’ as a social asset and unique functional part of human heritage, and further to understand, appreciate and accommodate cultural differences in our society.

Her pioneering work in teaching and esearching Aboriginal architecture within the School of Architecture, Landscape rchitecture and Urban Design  was awarded a learning and teaching award by the niversity of Adelaide in 2002. Elizabeth Grant has been focussing on the design of custodial and court environments for Indigenous peoples and is a leading scholar in the area. Her doctoral research was the first empirical study of Aboriginal prisoners’ preferences of prison environments and took her into every prison in Australia and many internationally, viewing conditions and interviewing Indigenous prisoners about their experiences. Within her research, she aims to provide evidence based research to increase positive outcomes such as the creation of safe environments that don't contribute to suicide and facilities that treat, rather than punish, the psychiatrically or psychologically ill. She has worked with many international and national design firms to provide expert design advice on the needs of Aboriginal peoples in the built environment and in 2008, she was awarded a prestigious Winston Churchill Fellowship.

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