March 9, 2015
QandA with Sarah Miller
Professor Sarah Miller, Head of the School of the Arts, English and Media, shares some insight into what makes her tick.
Why do I do what I do?
My education was in the humanities, but most of my working life has been in the arts, and I've experienced firsthand the difference that the humanities and the arts can make to people's lives whether as artists, spectators, readers, or audience members, and no matter what their cultural or socio-economic background. It's all about the opportunities.
What am I passionate about?
Many many things: respect for and recognition of Aboriginal rights, feminism and rights for all women, environmental protection (particularly marine conservation), real food grown sustainably, social responsibility, the role of education, and the importance of the contemporary arts, particularly the emerging and the experimental.
The arts link society to its past, a people to its inherited store of ideas, images and words; yet the arts challenge those links in order to find ways of exploring new paths and ventures. The arts are evolutionary and revolutionary; they listen, recall and lead. They resist the homogeneous, strengthen the individual and are independent in the face of the pressures of the mass, the bland, the undifferentiated. In a postmodern world, in which individual creativity has never mattered more, the arts provide the opportunity for developing this characteristic. The investment in the arts is so small, the actual return so large, that it represents value as research into ideas. (Recommended reading - .)
What's your interpretation or measurement of success?
People who work to benefit society, the planet we live on and the species we share it with, and do it with generosity, kindness and wit.
What do you value about higher education?
Being part of a community that enables people to grow and extend themselves creatively, critically, conceptually and practically; the multifaceted opportunities for solving problems and making progress.
Who inspires you and why
Artists, activists and researchers – the people who make things, or make things happen, or think new possibilities into being. I have a special place in my heart for the arts workers who run youth arts organisations like Shopfront, PACT and Power Youth Theatre, who provide children and young people from diverse backgrounds – often young people at risk - with life-changing skills and transformative opportunities; who are paid a pittance, and do it all on the smell of an oily rag.