Centre for Heritage and Culture

The Comparative Multicultural Futures (CMF) lab, a joint initiative of the University of Southern Queensland and Singapore University of Social Sciences, is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research initiative that examines how multiculturalism is lived, governed, and sustained across different social, cultural, and spatial contexts.

Using Toowoomba and Singapore as comparative sites, the lab leverages their contrasting yet complementary characteristics: Toowoomba as a large regional Australian city shaped by migration, refugee settlement, faith-based institutions, and regional governance; and Singapore as a global city-state with a long history of state-managed multiculturalism, dense urban planning, and explicit governance of ethnic and religious diversity. This comparison enables the project to explore how different scales, histories, and governance models shape social cohesion, inclusion, and belonging.

Religion is a central dimension of multicultural life in both contexts, with attention to faith institutions, religious identities, and everyday religious practices as key sites of support, encounter, and sometimes exclusion.

Through mixed methods and cross-contextual analysis, the lab aims to generate theoretically robust and policy-relevant insights into more inclusive multicultural futures in both regional and urban settings.

Key Research Pillars

• Educating for Multicultural Futures
• Inclusive Spaces, Shared Futures
• Spiritual Lives and Social Belonging
• Shaping Multicultural Lives and Communities

Current Projects

• Educating for Good Multicultural Citizenship: This project seeks to understand how “good multicultural citizenship” is imagined and enacted in educational institutions. It examines how multiculturalism, citizenship, and cohesion are conceptualised in educational literature and policy, and how the good multicultural citizen is conceived of and taught at varying levels of study and from various denominational perspectives.

• An Affective Map of Toowoomba: This project aims to develop a map of affect documenting sites of affective significance – both positive and negative – of Toowoomba residents. The map will be an interactive and iterative tool that can be used to document, visualise, and supplement the research of other pillars, and utilises both GIS and citizen science approaches.

• Religion and Healthcare: Using a local Toowoomba hospital as a case study, this project explores the role of religion and spirituality in staff and patient experiences of the healthcare environment.

• Multiculturalism: Between State and Practice: This project examines how state policies and priorities regarding multiculturalism and social cohesion differ from citizens’ lived experiences.

Leader: Assoc Prof Melissa Forbes
Project Team: Assoc Prof Melissa Forbes | Prof Celmara Pocock | Dr Jeanette Kennelly | Dr Mark Scholtes 
Project Partners: Richmond Fellowship Queensland
Funding Body: Richmond Fellowship Queensland

Mental health and community support workers face persistent occupational challenges—including burnout, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue—that threaten both workforce sustainability and the quality of care they provide. In collaboration with Richmond Fellowship Queensland (RFQ), this pilot project investigates the use of participatory music workshops to build wellbeing literacy, foster social connection, and equip support workers with practical self-care tools they can integrate into daily life. The project delivers four experiential workshop sessions—group singing, music listening and mindfulness, interactive music-making, and collaborative songwriting—facilitated by a registered music therapist and community musician. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the project aims to generate evidence for the effectiveness of musical care as a workplace wellbeing intervention.

Leader: Professor Celmara Pocock
Project Team: Dr Malcolm Connolly (CSIRO) | Professor Simon Young | Associate Professor Zahra Gharineiat | Professor Raj Gururajan 
Project Partners: CSIRO 
Funding Body: CSIRO  

Cultural water plays a vital role in ensuring water security within the Murray Darling Basin. In collaboration with the CSIRO and First Nations communities, this pilot project uses spatial technologies to effectively model, test, and map important cultural assets of First Nations near river channels and swamps. The project aims to compile spatial datasets, model cultural assets, and develop innovative tools to generate valuable data. This data will serve to document significant cultural water assets and assist First Nations people in the preservation and maintenance of riverine systems. 

Leader: Dr Emerson Zerafa-Payne
Project Team: Dr Emerson Zerafa-Payne | Prof Celmara Pocock
Project Partners: Anglicare Southern Queensland
Funding Body: Anglicare Southern Queensland

Supporting First Nations people to move away from justice system involvement requires approaches grounded in cultural knowledge, lived experience, and community voice. In collaboration with Anglicare Southern Queensland, this project uses yarning and storying to document and amplify the experiences of First Nations people who have had contact with the youth justice system and have since ceased offending. The project aims to identify the cultural, social, and personal factors that support this transition, record insights that can inform future advocacy and service design and advance a model for conducting First Nations-led research. Findings will contribute to more culturally responsive policy, rehabilitation programs, and community education across the sector.

Project Team: A/Prof Matthew Leavesley | Prof Bryce Barker | Prof Lara Lamb | Prof Maxime Aubert | Prof Andrew Fairbairn
Project Partners: University of Southern Queensland, University of Papua New Guinea, Griffith University, The University of Queensland
Funding Body: Australian Research Council

This project aims to investigate the peopling of the Great Papuan Plateau (GPP), a large karst system situated between Australia and Southeast Asia. Recent discoveries suggest that humans arrived in northern Australia by 65,000 years ago and were in southeast Asia by at least 80,000 years ago. Dating the timing and movement of the human colonisation of the GPP has the potential to reveal evidence of the earliest eastward movement of peoples into Sahul (now Australia and New Guinea). Through archaeological excavations of limestone caves with rock art and deep cultural floor deposit recorded across the plateau, this project will provide answers to fundamental questions about the early occupation of Sahul by early modern humans. 

Archaeological excavations at Barrow Island, Cape York Peninsula with Professor Bryce Barker, PhD student Tony Pagels and Bambiilmugu-warra Aboriginal Rangers and Traditional Owners, Jaccan Hart and Rianna Hart.

Project Team: Prof Martin Gibbs | Prof David Roberts | Dr Richard Tuffin | Prof Celmara Pocock
Project Partners: University of New England, University of Queensland, Kingston and Arthur Vale Historic Site Authority
Funding Body: Australian Research Council

The first settlement at Norfolk Island (1788-1814) is included in the Australian Convict World Heritage Listing. Yet Australia’s earliest colony has received little archaeological attention and is largely invisible in public imagining of our past. This project will deploy cutting-edge historical and archaeological techniques to generate novel insights into the socio-economic dynamics of this isolated outpost, revealing how its free, convict, and military settlers negotiated a unique environment and relations with mainland settlements and the British Empire. This new knowledge will inform conservation of first settlement sites, provide tools for interpretation, and enhance public appreciation of this pivotal period in Australia's history.