Statement of Research Example
Example statement (from La Trobe University)
"Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote" is a one-hour television documentary that refigures the timeline of the Australian women's suffrage movement.
Research background
Current Australian and international research largely identifies the women's suffrage movement as a phenomenon of late 19th century political activism. For the first time, this research ties the Australian suffrage campaign back to the 1850s mass democratic political protests on the Victorian goldfields, including the iconic Eureka Stockade.
Research contribution
Apart from reconfiguring the timeline of the Australian women's suffrage movement, Utopia Girls demonstrates the little known fact of Australia's global innovation in becoming the first country in the world where women won full political equality with men. As a one-hour television documentary, it brings this narrative, and the five key female characters depicted, to a wide mainstream audience, thus including women as significant protagonists in the making of the "Australian story," hitherto framed in an exclusively masculinist context.
Research significance
The significance of this research, apart from its inherent intellectual innovation, is the medium of its dissemination: a television history documentary screened in prime time on a mainstream network (Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC1). Since its first broadcast in June 2012, Utopia Girls has since been screened on three subsequent occasions. Accompanied by program notes created by a specialist educational provider, it is regularly used as a teaching device; in 2015 it will appear in the National History Curriculum. It was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's History Prize for Multimedia and has been screened at international film festivals.
"Research Statements for Non Traditional Research Outputs: a guide." La Trobe University. https://www.latrobe.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/995954/NTRO-Research-Statement-Guide.pdf.