Hawke Research Institute
Emotional
Geographies conference
Sara AhmedThis paper will consider how happiness is distributed, giving shape to bodies and worlds. In particular, it will consider how the idea that happiness is contagious can be used in the self-regulation of feeling worlds: subjects refuse proximity to the unhappy (to what or who is deemed to cause unhappiness) as a way of protecting their happiness. The political freedom to be happy thus translates very quickly into a freedom to look away from whatever compromises one's happiness. A political freedom in turn becomes a social or moral duty: you must be happy in order to promote the happiness of others, especially the happiness of those who 'come first'.
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths
College, University of London. Her books include the forthcoming The
promise of happiness; Queer phenomenology: orientations,
objects, others (2006); The cultural politics of emotion
(2004); Strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality
(2000) and Differences that matter: feminist theory and
postmodernism (1998).
Sara's
homepage
Jennifer BiddleAs Brian Massumi identifies, a new era of affect predominates in key moments of modern nation building, in which an 'if, then' of fear and anxiety serve to supplant the role that reason, proof or evidence have traditionally played. As he demonstrates in relation to the anthrax crises in the US, the issue is no longer a matter of providing evidence to the contrary. Rather, as this paper argues, the issue is how to respond to affect with affect. That is, what can art, film, aesthetics do to incite circuits of proximity, contagion, infestation even in order to intervene? This paper explores recent Aboriginal art in relation to the NT intervention and 'Closing the Gap' national policies; policies that are not only in violation of UN human rights charters, but that were instigated on as yet unsubstantiated claims and grounds ('if, then'). Rather than a politics of proof, this paper provides an analysis that locates fear, anxiety and the ultimately abject response to Aboriginal ways of being and doing as the so-called 'real' crisis of the intervention. In this economy, the role of art is critical. From Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah (2009) to recent works from the Central and Western Desert, the 'real' of Aboriginal life worlds are re-considered, belying the so called 'gap' and the assimilatory assault of contemporary policy and programs. Do images exist that can subvert the function they are expected to provide?
Dr Jennifer L Biddle is a visual anthropologist and Senior Research
Fellow in the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics (CCAP) at the
University of New South Wales. Her publications include breasts,
bodies canvas: Central Desert art as experience (UNSW Press, 2007)
and forthcoming Aboriginal art: a guide (Berg and UNSW Press,
2010).
Stephanie Hemelryk DonaldLiu Dahong is a visual artist and art professor living and working in Shanghai. His practice as an artist has been devoted over several years to redeploying images from the past in order to capture the attention of the present. Whereas the Red past – and particularly the years 1966–1976 – was visually saturated with the colour, sound and fury of Maoism, the present reform era is full of the visual paraphernalia of consumption, albeit managed within a rhetorically ordered and spatially confident state apparatus. Since the 1990s, the state has shown itself to be 'shameless' in its refusal to acknowledge unpalatable histories, whilst encouraging a willing population to divest itself of memory in favour of consumption, stability and pleasure. The argument of the state is that memory will unpin the tautly strung solidity of China's rise to pre-eminence as a G2 nation-state. Liu's work queries this claim as a false dichotomy. True strength, he infers, is built on contradiction and the courageous embrace of past errors. Forgetfulness is a shaming of the human capacity to remember, and memory is an imaginative and affective declaration of the grounds of the past. Liu's critical strategies are located in the affective power of revolutionary iconography and on the destabilisation of such icons and imaginary structures. His approaches range from broad humour to irony, to a pedagogic engagement with his students' imperfect access to historical memory. In 2008–2009 he ran the student project 'Old Friends' (Liang you) to teach young artists the art of making history. Liu's personal work includes the making of textbooks, and calendars, and video pieces, which play with the minute details and repetition of structures of expression and behaviour drawn from folk art and everyday existence. Liu's works suggest how humour produces an affect of dissonance and release, and how the intimacy of friendship also produces a release of emotional confidence, giving courage to the artist's historical imagination. This paper draws theoretical impetus from the works on shame by Rose and Probyn, and from Stewart's and Muecke's ficto-critical approach to defining affect as a political process. The paper is based on research carried out as part of the ARC project Posters of the Cultural Revolution: Contemporary Chinese Perspectives on an Era of Propaganda. An exhibition based on the project and including Liu's work will open in the University of Sydney gallery from August 2010.
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is a scholar of culture and society, with a
specific focus on childhood, China and film. She was educated in the UK
and in Singapore, and worked in the 1980s and early 1990s as an actor
and production assistant in the UK. In recent years Stephi has worked on
urban branding, intra-regional perspectives on cosmopolitanism and
migration, and the idea of class in China. Her current projects look at
contemporary responses to posters of the Cultural Revolution, and
children and migration in visual culture. She is
Dean of Media and Communications at RMIT, Melbourne. She is also
honorary professor of Chinese Media Studies at the University of Sydney.
Stephanie's homepage
Irene WatsonThe colonial space is a container for the emotions of both coloniser and colonised, but different perspectives arise in relation to the characterisation of the colonial project. Aboriginal world views reflect connections and relationships to country, while the colonial settler society speaks of areas founded by colonial law, alienated and owned by individuals, the power vesting ultimately with the crown. Aboriginal connections to country are now determined by continuing connections or concepts of extinguishment, but in all cases the advancement of the colonial project upon traditional lands. Non-Aboriginal ownership of land is dependent on the continuity of the colonial project, a project that is carried by the ideal of 'progress' towards an end-point. This paper will examine what if any connection can be made between the idea of an end-point and what I call the death wish of colonialism.
I belong to the Tanganekald and Meintangk peoples and in colonial
times our languages, peoples and lands became more commonly known as
Ngarrindjeri. Our country lies across the Coorong and the southeast of
South Australia. I have worked as a legal practitioner and also been a
member of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement SA from 1973 to 2005. As
an academic I have taught in all three South Australian universities
from 1989 until now. I have worked internationally at the UN Working
Group on Indigenous Populations and have extensive experience working on
questions of international law and Aboriginal peoples. I am currently an
associate professor at the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education
and Research at the University of South
Australia. Prior to taking up this position I was a research fellow with
the University of Sydney Law School.
Irene's homepage
Through a number of ethnographies of public spaces in London, both visible and invisible, this paper explores how emotions work to open up or close down possibilities of encounter, engagement and interaction in the city. Paying particular attention to encounters between different others in multicultural spaces, the paper aims to show how there can be no grand narratives of the multicultural city, rather, different affects are mobilised in different ways at different times, with productive and unproductive effects. The task for the urban analyst thus becomes that of uncovering the ways in which different contexts and histories of place produce a diversity of emotions among local populations, and how these make possible, or not, encounters of civility rather than incivility in the city. The more these processes can be understood, the more possible it will be for urban policy makers and planners to engage in local regeneration and regional policy action to produce vibrant and engaged local spaces.
Sophie Watson is Professor of Sociology, Open University, and former
Professor of Urban Cultures, University of East London, Professor of
Social Policy in School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol and
Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Sydney. She is a
Special Advisor to the Department of Communities and Local Government
Inquiry into Traditional Retail Markets 2008–2009. Books include The
new Blackwell companion to the city and the Blackwell city reader
(forthcoming with Gary Bridge); City publics: the (dis)enchantments
of urban encounters (Routledge, 2006) and Markets as sites of
social interaction: spaces of diversity (Joseph Rowntree Foundation
and Policy Press, 2006).
Sophie's homepage
