About
Professor Catherine Manathunga is the Co-Director of the UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre and Professor of Education Research in the School of Education and Tertiary Access at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She is an Irish-Australian, non-Indigenous-ally researcher and proud transcultural mother and grandmother of Sri-Lankan-Irish-Australian children and grandchildren. Catherine Manathunga is an historian who draws together expertise in historical, sociological and cultural studies research to bring an innovative perspective to educational research, particularly focusing on the higher education sector. She has worked for more than 35 years in universities throughout Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Her research interests include doctoral education, especially focusing on intercultural supervision pedagogies; transnational histories of universities in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland; academic work and identities; the history of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand international student programs, especially the Colombo Plan and supervising African doctoral students. Her recent books include Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision: Reimagining time, place and knowledge (Routledge, 2014) and, with Dorothy Bottrell, a co-edited collection entitled Resisting neoliberalism in higher education: seeing through the cracks (Vol. 1) and Prising open the cracks (Vol. 2) (Palgrave Macmillan, Critical University Studies Series, 2019).
Catherine has also co-authored a monograph on educational history, A class of its own: a history of Queensland University of Technology; co-edited an oral history monograph, Making a place: an oral history of academic development in Australia; and has published extensively in international, Australian, Irish, American and British journals.
Her research has been funded by the Australian Research Council, DFAT Australia China Council, Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Ako Aotearoa (NZ Centre for Tertiary Education), Higher Education Research & Development Society of Australasia, Nagoya University Japan, Hiroshima University Japan and industry partners.
Professor Manathunga has had lengthy experience working in respectful partnership with culturally diverse and Indigenous peoples in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, China and South Africa. She also has emerging connections with First Nations and culturally diverse communities in South America. She has acted as an educational consultant to many other universities in Australia and internationally. She is a research assessor for the ARC, ERA, OLT and National Research Foundation in South Africa.
From 2018 to May 2024, she was Associate Dean Research (or equivalent) of the UniSC School of Education and Tertiary Access. She has held research leadership roles in Education since 2011. From 2021 to 2024, she was the Chair of the Community of Associate Deans of Research in Education (cADRE), a network of the Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE).
In 2004, she was part of the team who won an Australian National AAUT Award for Enhancing Student Learning and in 2006 she led a team winning an Australian National Carrick Institute Award for Programs that Enhance Student Learning.
Organisational Affiliations
Highlights - Outputs
Journal article
Published 2021
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42, 2, 215 - 233
In this article, we introduce a time mapping methodology to chart the impact of transcultural and First Nations' histories, geographies and cultural knowledges on doctoral education. Drawing upon a 'Southern', postcolonial-decolonial theoretical framing and extending textual life history methodologies, we argue that time mapping is a visual methodology that has the power to disrupt managerial, auditing discourses that have come to dominate present understandings of doctoral education. We present the time maps of migrant, international candidates and Australian First Nations candidates and supervisors, creating spaces for narratives of migration, war, discrimination, destruction, colonisation, change, survival, faith, energy, language and cultural revival, growth, inspiration and the power of Country. We seek to re-humanise discourses about doctoral education.
Editorial
The timescapes of teaching in Higher Education
Published 2020
Teaching in Higher Education, 25, 6, 663 - 668
No abstract available.
Journal article
‘Timescapes’ in doctoral education: the politics of temporal equity in higher education
Published 2019
Higher Education Research & Development, 38, 6, 1227 - 1239
In the twenty-first century, the politics of higher education in Australia and around the globe have become dominated by neoliberal agendas of efficiency, profitability and managerialism. This has fundamentally altered the 'timescapes' of higher education. In the case of doctoral education, doctoral candidates and supervisors are subjected to increasing time pressures and required to produce a wide variety of outcomes in very short timeframes. These managerial agendas of efficiency and speed impact upon all doctoral candidates and supervisors but present particular practical and epistemic difficulties for Indigenous, migrant, refugee and international students. In this article, I illustrate how fast doctoral timescapes encourage assimilationist pedagogies that have been shown to be especially detrimental for Indigenous, migrant, refugee and international doctoral candidates. Drawing upon a complex array of theoretical resources that investigate Lefebvre's rhythm analysis and other authors' notions of epistemic time and the ethics of time, this article argues for a reconceptualization of doctoral timescapes in order to promote a politics of temporal equity in doctoral education. This especially involves making space for epistemic, lived and eternal temporal rhythms in doctoral education policy and practice.
Edited book
Resisting neoliberalism in higher education Volume I: seeing through the cracks
Published 2019
In light of the overwhelming presence of neoliberalism within academia, this book examines how academics resist and manage these changes. The first of two volumes, this diptych of critical academic work investigates generative spaces, or 'cracks' in neoliberal managerialism that can be exposed, negotiated, exploited and energised with renewed collegiality, subversion and creativity. The editors and contributors explore how academics continue to find space to work in collegial ways; defying the neoliberal logic of 'brands' and 'cost centres'. Part I of this diptych illuminates the lived experiences of changing academic roles; portraying institutional life without the glossy filter of marketing campaigns and brochures, and revealing generative spaces through critical testimony, fiction, arts-based projects, feminist and Indigenous critical scholarship. It will be of interest and value to anyone concerned with neoliberalism in academia, as well as higher education more generally.
Edited book
Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education Volume II: Prising Open the Cracks
Published 2019
This book outlines the creative responses academics are using to subvert powerful market forces that restrict university work to a neoliberal, economic focus. The second volume in a diptych of critical academic work on the changing landscape of neoliberal universities, the editors and contributors examine how academics 'prise open the cracks' in neoliberal logic to find space for resistance, collegiality, democracy and hope. Adopting a distinctly postcolonial positioning, the volume interrogates the link between neoliberalism and the ongoing privileging of Euro-American theorising in universities. The contributors move from accounts of unmitigated managerialism and toxic workplaces, to the need to decolonise the academy to, finally, illustrating the various creative and counter-hegemonic practices academics use to resist, subvert and reinscribe dominant neoliberal discourses. This hopeful volume will appeal to students and scholars interested in the role of universities in advancing cultural democracy, as well as university staff, academics and students.