Money politics in Southeast Asia, and preserving languages in the Himalayas are among 15 research projects at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific to win funding in the latest round of Australian Research Council grants.

The College won funding for 10 Discovery Projects, one Future Fellowship and three Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (DECRAs). In total, the grants are worth some $4 million.

Sango Mahanty from Crawford School, will use her prestigious Future Fellowship to examine the relationship between resources and politics on the Cambodia-Vietnam border. She obtained $683,676 for her project, Frontiers of change: resources, access and political agency on the Cambodia-Vietnam borderland.

Future Fellowships are awarded to exceptional scholars working in areas of national importance. They provide a four-year salary to recipients and aim to retain the best and brightest mid-career researchers in Australia, and further their careers and reputations as international leaders in their fields.

Ed Aspinall and Paul Hutchcroft, from the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies, will receive $430,000 over three years, for their Discovery Project on vote buying, pork barrelling and ‘related phenomena’ in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

Four School of Culture, History and Language scholars obtained Discovery grants to carry out five projects.

Gwendolyn Hyslop will put her linguistic skills to good use, after securing $294,000 to document the language and religious practices of Bhutan’s East-Bodish (Tibeto-Burman) speaking people.

Simon Haberle has been granted $365,000, to lead research into the effect of climate change and human activities on northern Australia.

Andrew Kipnis will lead two projects – the first focusing on weddings and funerals in China, the second on mid-sized factories in the East Asian nation.

Hyaeweol Choi, who is also director of the Korea Institute, will use her funding to look at how cross border movements in the early to mid-20th century helped shape modern Korea.

Crawford School’s Ippei Fujiwara will lead a study into optimal monetary and fiscal policy in the wake of the recent global financial crisis.

His colleague Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is concentrating on farming practice in rural India, while John McCarthy and Andrew McWilliam are looking at poverty in Indonesia.

Matthew Allen, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala and Haroro Ingram obtained the three DECRA awards.

Dr Allen, from the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia program, will look at violence in Melanesia. Dr Burgis-Kasthala, who is based in the UK after completing her PhD in the Regulatory Institutions Network, will examine international criminal justice after the Arab Spring.

Dr Ingram, a visiting fellow in the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies, is examining the link between information operations and counterinsurgency.

Article by Belinda Cranston