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Launch of the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable SocietiesPast events
 


2012
 

Ilana Snyder'We all have models in our mind': the importance of models in social science research

Prof Ilana Snyder, Faculty of Education, Monash University. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 28 September 2012, Magill Campus. Researchers across the social science disciplines are interested in the development of new theoretical models to explain and interpret their findings. They may believe that the dominant models are in a way deficient or that they lack flexibility and explanatory power. Alternatively, they may wish to disrupt an existing conceptual model, while others may identify lacunae that render a model obsolete. Whatever the catalyst, the emergence of new models within a particular field is intimately bound up with disciplinary developments, social conditions, the creation of new knowledge and the researchers themselves, who have their own interests, backgrounds and agendas. Most importantly, models are always situated within their own time and context. The focus of the presentation was the role of models in social science research with particular attention to literacy education. It took as its starting point Brian Street's dictum that 'we all have models in our mind'.

Ilana Snyder is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Her diverse interests are represented in many publications on issues ranging through hypertext and technoliteracies, to equity in educational outcomes in the global south, to her retort to populist debates in The literacy wars, which was published in 2008. Her books that explore these themes include: Hypertext (1996), Page to screen (1997), Teachers and technoliteracy (2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear and Bill Green and Silicon literacies (2002). Most recently her research has looked at the education of marginalised peoples and communities in southern world societies in Closing the gap in education (2010) and the complexities of international education in globalising times in A home away from home? (2011). Both collections of essays were co-edited with John Niewenhuysen.
 

Mattias StrandhUnemployment and long-term mental health scarring

Dr Mattias Strandh, Umeå University, Sweden. Hawke Research Institute Seminar, Friday 14 September 2012, Magill Campus. Over the last thirty years a great number of high quality longitudinal studies have followed individuals into or out of unemployment, showing the strong negative effects of unemployment on mental health. Most of this research has focused on relatively direct effects of unemployment, with the assumption that re-employment restores mental health to pre-unemployment levels. This relatively short-term perspective contrasts with investigations into other aspects of unemployment. Research into the socioeconomic consequences of unemployment has long focused not only on the direct effects of unemployment such as duration of dependence or economic problems but also on long-term negative effects on labour market participation. These long-term labour market consequences of unemployment are described as unemployment scarring, a term that highlights the longer lasting impacts of unemployment.

Using a life course epidemiological perspective, where individuals' exposure to certain living conditions is related to future health outcomes, such scarring effects on mental health seem quite possible. This means we typically underestimate the mental health costs of unemployment, and the true costs of the current unemployment situation facing Europe and North America. In this talk I looked at some recent and ongoing analyses of long-term mental health effects of different kinds of unemployment experiences in youth and later in life. The analyses were based on a long-term study of school leavers in northern Sweden, following them through five survey waves from age 16 to age 42.

Mattias Strandh is reader of sociology at Umeå University and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Applied Psychological Research, University of South Australia. He has extensive experience of both comparative and longitudinal research on inequality, the labour market and health issues and has led research projects financed by the European Union framework 7, the European Science Foundation and the Swedish Science Council. His work has focused on longitudinal evaluations of the impact of labour market events on mental health as well as the micro-level impact of policy configurations in relation to gender, family and the labour market. He is currently working on a project investigating the long-term impact of unemployment experiences over the life course.
 

Learning life from illness storiesBook launch: Learning life from illness stories

Learning life from illness stories, edited by Peter Willis and Kate Leeson, was launched by Dr Lynn Arnold AO, former state premier, humanitarian and now student of theological studies on Friday 14 September 2012, at Magill Campus.

Learning life from illness stories brings together the stories of people who have lived with serious illness, either their own or that of a loved one. The authors share their experiences of pain, grief and despair, and of love, hope, seeking happiness, writing poetry, practising yoga, praying and protesting. This is a book about courage, and finding strength and joy in hard times. It will inspire anyone seeking meaning in the chaos of their own difficult circumstances.

 

ReOrienting Diaspora Symposium

The UNESCO Chair in Transnational Diasporas and Reconciliation Studies and the Hawke Research Institute with the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding (MnM) presented a joint symposium about ReOrienting Diaspora. Tuesday 4 September – Wednesday 5 September 2012, City West Campus. This symposium was an important opportunity for delegates to network with colleagues to explore the field of diaspora studies.

Symposium program (PDF 588 kb)

Presenters included:

Symposium content

Empirical arguments suggest that diasporas have proliferated as a consequence of globalisation, which has apparently weakened links between places and peoples. Over the decades 'diaspora' has been used to refer to migrant communities of all kinds. These might include transnational communities with longstanding historical roots, such as those created during the colonial period or even older periods of globalisation, whose members may identify only in the loosest terms with a common point of origin 'overseas'. Alternatively, these might include newer communities, created by new pressures for displacement and dislocation, and often compelled to move by new processes embedded within the conditions of contemporary, globalised coloniality. Yet the presence of such communities, and the resulting crisis of liberal politics in responding to this presence, also raises new scholarly opportunities; namely for reorienting scholarship around the large-scale migrations associated with modernity, from the colonial period to the conditions of contemporary coloniality.

The field of diaspora studies is not exhausted by the enumeration of an ever-expanding list of the communities that are considered to be diasporic. This is because underlying this empirical expansion is the possibility that we are in a new post-national terrain, which means not only a loosening of links between place and people, but also a condition marked out by a deterritorialisation of political subjectivities. In other words, diaspora refers not just to some groups who no longer have 'homelands' but to a generalised condition of 'homelessness'.
 

Amrita MalhiLaw and politics in the 'benighted lands': frontiers of colonialism on the Malay Peninsula

Dr Amrita Malhi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Hawke Research Institute. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 24 August 2012, Magill Campus. This paper addressed the location of the British colonial boundary, and the politics of location in the space beyond the boundary, on the Malay Peninsula during the 1890s. In 1895 Hugh Clifford, a colonial administrator, travelled to Terengganu and Kelantan, two independent Malay states that remained outside both Malaya and Siam. In his later writing, Clifford referred to these states as the 'Benighted Lands'. This label assisted Clifford in mapping liberal colonial notions of law, government and politics on to the peninsula's geospatial surface. The Benighted Lands lay beyond the reach of projects of colonial governmentality, and Clifford found them to be sites of a conduct of public life whose rules he found corrupt and malign. Indeed, these lands represented a space beyond the political as Clifford understood it: they formed a region of refuge for insolent rebels driven by corruption, venality and 'Muhammadan fanaticism'. Clifford could find no political explanation for why such rebels would be feted in these lands as anti-colonial holy warriors. Clifford's writing reveals that he recalled this space as benighted precisely because it remained unenclosed and ungoverned by the global liberal geo-culture. As such, it hosted a Muslim subjectivity that was imagined in ways that remained beyond Clifford's comprehension.

Dr Amrita Malhi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hawke Research Institute. She is interested in the global and local processes of enclosure and circulation that have shaped subaltern subjectivities under colonial rule. Her doctoral research focused on the production of 'Muslim' as a planetary solidarity in colonial Malaya. Amrita is also interested in forests and borderlands, locations beyond the urban and agrarian sites in which processes of colonial and national identity-production have been concentrated. Amrita's PhD thesis was awarded the 2010 JG Crawford Prize for best graduate work in the humanities and social sciences at the Australian National University.
 

Public governance regimes in welfare and work: interpretations, intersections and interchanges

A seminar presented by the Centre for Work + Life and the Hawke Research Institute, 23 August 2012, City West Campus.
Seminar keynote: Prof Mitchell Dean, University of Newcastle
Presentors: Dr Amanda Howard, University of Newcastle; Dr Debra King, Flinders University; Sally Cowling, UnitingCare Burnside; and Assoc Prof Sara Charlesworth, University of South Australia
Post-presentation discussion led by Professor Barbara Pocock and Dr Angelique Bletsas, University of South Australia

Recent years have seen the reconstruction of public governance models, with 'deregulation' and 'individual responsibility' key motifs of policy reforms. In the field of welfare the emphasis on 'individual responsibility' has led to policies aimed at tightening eligibility requirements and increasing compliance measures. In the field of work, 'deregulation' has dramatically recast the relationship between individual workers, business as enterprise, and the state. Though often treated as distinct, governance in the field of welfare impacts and intersects with governance developments in the field of work, not least in relation to those who work in the delivery of welfare services.

This public seminar brought together scholars investigating labour regulation with scholars investigating welfare reform in order to initiate a unique cross-disciplinary discussion of the analytic and policy problematics that arise from the new public governance regimes in these two distinct, but often overlapping, fields of welfare and work. The seminar raised the question: what are the consequences of current transformations in the practice of governance for the people on whom they have an impact? Leading Australian authority in the fields of political sociology and governmentality studies, Prof Mitchell Dean, opened the seminar. Professor Dean's keynote address 'Three paradigms of public governance: governmentality, sovereignty and economic theology' furnished a theoretical investigation of approaches to public governance. Then a panel of four researchers each discussed issues arising from studies carried out in their respective fields of welfare reform and labour regulation.
 

Diane ElsonFinancial crisis, austerity and gender equality in the UK

Emeritus Professor Diane Elson, University of Essex, UK. A seminar presented by the Hawke Research Institute in collaboration with the Centre for Work + Life and the Research Centre for Gender Studies. 22 August 2012, City West Campus. The financial crisis of 2008 led to a recession in the UK in 2009 that was described by some as a 'mancession', as male unemployment rose faster than female unemployment. However, by spring 2012 male unemployment had begun to decline, and female unemployment was growing fast and had reached its highest level for 25 years. Leading UK women's rights campaigners, like the Fawcett Society, talk of the clock being put back on gender equality. Journalist Polly Toynbee wrote that 'This marks the first era in living memory that British women's freedoms have gone into reverse.' Why and how has this happened ? Is it linked to the Euro crisis? UK is not a member of the Eurozone. What can be done to reverse this trend?

Diane Elson is Emeritus Professor in Sociology at the University of Essex, UK. Her academic degrees include a BA in philosophy, politics and economics from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in economics from the University of Manchester. She has acted as advisor to UNIFEM, UNDP, Oxfam and other development agencies; and is a past Vice President of the International Association for Feminist Economics. She has been a visiting researcher/professor at the following universities: Carleton (Ottawa), University of South Australia (Adelaide), the Ruhr (Bochum) and Rutgers (New Brunswick). In 2006 she was honoured by the inclusion of a chapter on her research in D Simon (ed) Fifty key thinkers in development, Routledge. She is Chair of the UK Women's Budget Group, a network that monitors the impact of UK government budgets on gender equality, and is an internationally recognised expert on gender-responsive budgeting.
 

Lisa GortonRelationships between poetry and visual art, and how art and poetry can be brought into the public arena

Lisa Gorton, poet, critic and novelist. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 3 August 2012, City West Campus. 'Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians but always near poets, and out emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of the poetry that was lost' (Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of space). In this seminar, Lisa Gorton combined a poetry reading with illustrations and essays upon the relationship between images, memory and place. She considered the work of Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, Roger Hiorns, Diena Georgetti and Frances Yates – through these, exploring the idea that images take their power from no trick of language but of memory: from its trick of possession, which remakes rooms as facts of consciousness, and from its trick of scale, which stores lost years in a small fact.

Lisa Gorton is a poet, critic and novelist. A Rhodes Scholar, at Oxford she completed her doctorate on John Donne's poetry and prose and her essay, 'Space in Donne', received the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her children's novel, Cloudland, was one of The Age Critics' Choice Books of the Year. Her first poetry collection, Press release, was shortlisted for the Mary Gilmore Prize and the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award, and received the Victorian Premier's Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. Her poetry collection Hotel Hyperion is forthcoming from Giramondo later this year, and her novel Establishment is forthcoming from Scribe in 2014.
 

Sherko KirmanjIraq: federalism and the question of ethnic and sectarian conflict

Dr Sherko Kirmanj. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 27 July 2012, Magill Campus. Following the US invasion of Iraq many scholars have focused on federalism as a suitable model for restructuring Iraq. However, there has been no consensus, either among Iraqi politicians or western scholars or diplomats on the most effective configuration for a federal system. While one group sees the Iraqi problem as an administrative issue, proposing eighteen regions corresponding to eighteen provinces prior to US invasion, another group, in response to recent Sunni–Shi'i violence suggests a 'three-state solution'. Others suggest another configuration based on five broad 'pluri-national' regions. This suggestion stems from an ideal of egalitarian distribution of power and wealth among the five regions. I argue that these suggestions fail to consider that Iraq's predicament is deeply rooted in unresolved ethno-national and sectarian problems. I examine the evolution of the discourse on federation in Iraq and highlight the varying motives behind the demands of each ethnic and sectarian group in their quest for a federal Iraq. I conclude that restructuring Iraq should be based on the will of its constituents and in keeping with the Iraqi constitution. I conclude that any solution prescribed to resolve the Iraqi dilemma that does not take the question of identity seriously is doomed to fail.

Sherko Kirmanj is currently a Visiting Academic at the University of South Australia and serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Ministry of Higher Education, Kurdistan Region, Iraq. Sherko earned his PhD in International Studies at the University of South Australia. He is the author of Politicisation of Islam: the phenomenon of Islamism (Sulaimani: Sardam House for Publishing and Printing, 2005). His forthcoming book titled Iraq: conflict of identities will be published soon. Sherko was the Director of the Human Capacity Development Program at the Ministry of Higher Education in Kurdistan. He has also lectured at the College of Law and Politics at the University of Salahaddin.
 

John SwellerCognitive load theory: what do we learn – and
how do we learn?

Emeritus Professor John Sweller. 20 July 2012, Magill Campus. Our rapidly progressing knowledge of human cognitive architecture has considerable implications for instructional design. Two categories of knowledge important to instructional design are biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge. We have evolved to acquire primary knowledge over many generations while secondary knowledge is cultural knowledge that humans have not evolved to acquire. Human cognition when dealing with secondary knowledge constitutes a natural information processing system that has evolved to mimic the architecture of biological evolution. Cognitive load theory uses this architecture to generate a large range of instructional effects concerned with procedures for reducing extraneous working memory load in order to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge in long-term memory. This talk reviewed the theory, summarised some of the effects generated and indicated the instructional implications that flow from the theory.

John Sweller is an Australian educational psychologist from the School of Education, University of New South Wales. He studies cognitive processes and instructional design with specific emphasis on working memory limitations and their consequences for instructional procedures. He is best known for formulating an influential theory of cognitive load. Professor Sweller has a PhD from the University of Adelaide's Department of Psychology and has authored over 135 academic publications, mainly reporting research on cognitive factors in instructional design, with specific emphasis on the instructional implications of working memory limitations and their consequences for instructional procedures. According to the Web of Science, that work has been cited on over 6000 occasions.
  

Carol JohnsonSocial democracy in uncertain times: governing the politics and economics of emotion

Prof Carol Johnson, University of Adelaide. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 22 June 2012, Magill Campus. This paper argues that economic governance involves not just governing the domestic economy and, increasingly, the impact of international markets on it, but also governing the political economy of affect. Indeed, contemporary western governments face particular challenges as they negotiate turmoil in global markets, the rise of Asia and the relative decline of the West, with implications for feelings of security, uncertainty and fear of the 'Other'. This paper draws on examples from a range of countries, including Britain and the US, although with particular emphasis on Australia. Australian social democratic governments, like their international counterparts, have not just been concerned with governing the economy and society. They have also been concerned with governing the politics and political economy of emotion, particularly in regard to feelings of economic and social security and the politics of fear. Nonetheless, Australian social democracy's embrace of aspects of neo-liberalism has had unintended implications for their ability to construct an alternative emotional regime to that of their opponents. The implications for comparative studies of social democracy, and for the increasing literature on the economics and politics of emotion are also identified.

Carol Johnson is a Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide. She has written extensively on Australian Labor governments, including in her sole-authored books The Labor legacy: Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke and Governing change: from Keating to Howard. Her most recently published work on Labor, in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, is on the relationship between the Gillard government and Labor tradition. She has also written on comparative social democracy and has a particular interest in issues of ideology, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and their implications for the politics of emotion.
 

Alterity, urban densities, India

Anand Bhatt. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 14 June, City West Campus. This seminar focused on questions that arise in urban situations, taking as examples ersatz Indian cities such as Gurgaon, which have been extruded from the landscape since 1990 in response to India's new liberal policies encouraging international trade and investment. The first part of this seminar inspected the imagining of such cities, with Gurgaon as an example. While Indian cities since the 1800s can be described using the metaphor of a chessboard, with artefacts of an autochthonous and an essentially colonial extraction creating an alterity Indian architects have become familiar with, a visual 'screen survey' of cities such as Gurgaon, and analysis of professional discourse, media and architectural gossip, evidence 'pataphorical' imagining. The second part of this seminar used extensive documentation created by the Master Planning Implementation Support Group, and research into discontinuities, moments of rapid transformation and ruptures evidenced since the 1800s in India, to place this imagining in context. In the final part of this seminar we began to discuss the methodology and future directions of a joint research program.

Anand Bhatt is an architect specialising in architectural theory and computational research. He is the owner of ABA-NET, a private organisation based in New Delhi, India involved in architectural research, design and software services. It is producing 'Architexturez', a very large knowledgebase for the architecture, engineering and construction industries in South Asia. Anand taught at several colleges in India from 1992 to 2006, where he focused on teaching design, architectural history and theories of architecture.
  

Ross GibsonChangescapes

Prof Ross Gibson, University of Sydney. A seminar presented by the Hawke Research Institute and the School of Art, Architecture and Design, 1 June 2012, City West Campus. In 'Transforming Mirrors', an influential essay from 1996, the Canadian artist David Rokeby observed that when contemporary artists make interactive and emergent artworks, they are not especially interested in producing a finished object. Instead they are looking to make relationships that are always in process. Rokeby thinks of such artworks as 'very nervous systems'. I have come to understand them as 'changescapes'. In my presentation I would like to examine some changescapes in order to understand how some aesthetic, technological or ethical creations from recent times have emerged to help us address the experiences of mutability, near chaos and complexity that surround us everywhere now and seem intractable to traditional, critically distanced analysis. Particularly, I would like to examine the role of narrative in the experience of changescapes, to understand better how stories grant access to knowledge in a very particular and pertinent manner. I will use some examples from my own art practices, as well as from more celebrated practitioners, in order to grasp some of the knowledge-production that can occur as a consequence of the 'emergent' and 'participant' aesthetics that prevail in many interactive/emergent artworks nowadays.

Ross Gibson is Professor of Contemporary Arts at the University of Sydney and a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in Australia. As part of his research he makes books, films and art installations and he encourages postgraduate students in similar pursuits. His recent works include the books The summer exercises (2009) and 26 views of the starburst world (2012), the video installation Street X-Rays (2005), the interactive audiovisual environment BYSTANDER (a collaboration with Kate Richards) (2007), and the durational work Conversations II for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney.
 

Dinesh WadiwelFood in the Northern Territory Emergency Response: untangling biopolitics and pleasure

Dr Dinesh Wadiwel, University of Sydney and Deirdre Tedmanson, UniSA. Hawke Research Institute Seminar Series, 25 May 2012, City West Campus. In this paper we examine the role of food in the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), arguing that there is a correlation between new governmentalised bureaucratic regimes of race war and a moralising national public discourse about the rationale for the NTER. A focus of our paper will be the regulation of alcohol as part of the NTER, whereby it is currently an offence to drink, possess, supply or transport liquor in a prescribed area, and the Australian government has declared that alcohol abuse 'lies at the heart of the continuing dysfunction in some Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory'. Alcohol restrictions will remain in place under the Australian government's new 'Stronger Futures' policies. The NTER intervention reveals both the political economy of neo-colonial power and the ways in which 'race power' is embedded in the discursive environment. We suggest that not only violence but also pleasure, including in relation to sexuality and food, are central to the modalities of power in neo-colonial domination.

Dinesh Wadiwel lectures in socio-legal studies and human rights in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney. His research interests include sovereignty, rights, violence and critical animal studies. Dinesh has taught in politics and sociology at the University of Notre Dame Australia and the University of Western Sydney, and has worked extensively in nongovernment social justice organisations over the past 15 years. Deirdre Tedmanson lectures in the School of Psychology, Social Work & Social Policy. Her research interests include social policy; critical theory; postcolonial and globalisation studies; Indigenous enterprise development, governance and rights; child protection, community development and social emotional well-being. She's currently working collaboratively with 'remote' Aboriginal communities on two participatory action research projects.
 

Making feminist politicsBook launch: Making feminist politics

Making feminist politics by Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow was launched by Janet Giles, SA Unions Secretary, on 23 April 2012 at Imprints Booksellers, Adelaide. Making feminist politics explores how feminist politics within organised labour movements is helping to shape transnational forms of labour activism. Suzanne Franzway and Mary Margaret Fonow draw on interviews with union women, observations of international labour events and activities, and historical documents of international labour organisations. By analysing the sexual politics of trade unions, families and transnational labour activism, the book shows why unions and the feminists within them are important transnational actors who are building alliances to secure social and economic justice for all workers.
 

'Our spirit rises from the ashes': Mapoon Festival and history's shadow

Lisa SlaterDr Lisa Slater. Hawke Research Institute seminar series, 13 April 2012, City West Campus. In 1963 the Queensland police forcibly removed Aboriginal people from Mapoon mission, on Western Cape York in the far north of Australia, and then burned their houses to the ground to prevent their return. Forty-four years later, on 18 November 2007, the rebuilt town held the inaugural Mapoon Day Festival. I came to the Mapoon Festival accidentally, after sitting next to the principal of Mapoon Primary School on a local airline flight, who invited me to their festival, where they were hoping Midnight Oil – an iconic Australian rock band known for their stance on Indigenous rights – would play 'Beds are Burning' (a song about Aboriginal land rights, which many in Mapoon felt referred literally to the burning of their town in 1963). My interest in this event lies not only with what, at least for me, is a fascinating and heroic local history, which tells too much about Australia's race relations, and the too-often forgotten violence of capitalism, but also in taking Isabelle Stengers' advice to 'take your time to open your imagination and consider this particular occasion'. In this paper I discuss the recent history of Mapoon, the Mapoon Day Festival, and my experience encountering people and their stories at this event. What might a humble event such as the Mapoon Festival illuminate about belonging in and to our unruly time? Dr Lisa Slater is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia. Dr Slater works primarily in the disciplines of Indigenous, postcolonial and cultural studies, with a research and teaching portfolio that is strongly interdisciplinary.
 

Book launch: Youth, music and creative cultures

Youth, music and creative cultures by Geraldine Bloustien and Margaret Peters was launched by Assoc Prof Catherine Driscoll, from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney on 13 March 2012 at City West Campus. Youth, music and creative cultures demonstrates the power of music in the lives of many disadvantaged youth. It offers an evocative cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives and music practices of young people from seven very different urban locales in Australia, the UK, the US and Europe. They document their passion for music from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives, using their own video and camera footage to reflect their learning processes and music activities. These narratives, alongside the views and observations of their peers and mentors, are presented in a dialogic format that both supports and challenges the views and analysis of the authors.


Changing the paradigmBook launch: Changing the paradigm: education as the key to a socially inclusive future

Changing the paradigm: education as the key to a socially inclusive future, edited by Tom Stehlik and Jan Patterson, was launched by Emeritus Professor Alan Reid AM on 1 March 2012 at City West Campus. Changing the paradigm is about changing the paradigm of the established system of schooling in Australia. Education has long been recognised as the key to addressing intergenerational and social disadvantage, but the notion of a socially inclusive future is the particular concern of this book. Contributors from academic, policy and practice settings include: Peter Bishop, Marie Brennan, Helen Dolan, Phillipa Duigan, Robert Hattam, Katherine Hodgetts, Susanne Koen, Alison Mackinnon, Jillian Miller, Patrick O'Leary and Simon Robb. Tom Stehlik is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at UniSA. Jan Patterson led the evaluation and research work of the SA Social Inclusion Initiative.


Chintamani YogiActivism for peace: transforming lives with lessons from Nepal 

A seminar by Dr Chintamani Yogi presented by the Centre for Research in Education and the Hawke Research Institute in partnership with Global Communities for Peace. 24 February 2012, Magill Campus. Dr Yogi described his work in educational and youth programs in Nepal and elaborated on his humanitarian vision and goals. Dr Yogi is the founding chairperson of the Peace Service Centre Nepal, the founder of Values Education in Nepal and the founding principal of Hindu Vidyapeeth school in Kathmandu.
 


2011


Launch of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

The University of South Australia has built a new laboratory to investigate the relationships between the brain and mind. The Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (run by Drs Hannah Keage, Mark Kohler and Owen Churches) houses equipment for examining electrical and hemodynamic changes in the brain. The Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory was officially opened on Wednesday 7 December at the Magill Campus of UniSA. Training and demonstrations of brain imaging methods were held in the morning and seminars on current cognitive neuroscience research at UniSA in the afternoon. The day closed with a reception and tours of the laboratory. Further details about the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UniSA


CSAA Annual Conference 2011: Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities

22–24 November, City West Campus, Adelaide. The International Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding (the MnM Centre) was proud to host the CSAA Annual Conference with the theme 'Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities'. A pre-conference postgraduate and early career research day was held on 21 November for all postgraduate or ECR delegates.

Theme: 'Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities'
Over the last three decades Australasian cultural studies has established a vibrant, intellectual community committed to exposing the political threads that bind everyday culture. Yet despite several critiques of the Euro-American hegemony over cultural studies, Australian and New Zealand cultural studies continues to turn towards the West as the primary source of inspiration thus reinforcing the East–West, North–South global divide. This provocation is not to deny the efforts to incorporate Indigenous knowledges in Australian and, arguably more successfully, in New Zealand cultural studies, but it does ask us to consider posing these endeavours in new frameworks of transnational engagement. 'Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities' is a call to reorient cultural studies beyond the confines of America and Western Europe. It is a call to consider what it means for cultural studies to be oriented, disoriented and reoriented in order to see what other theoretical inspirations and political alliances are available to us at a moment when racism and racist violence resurfaces in our multicultural, globalised modernities.

Keynote speakers

Consciousness curtailed: imaginative insights and lapses during the First Fleet's occupation of Eora country, 1788–1791

Prof Ross Gibson, Professor of Contemporary Arts, University of Sydney. 11 November, City West Campus. When British forces took possession of Port Jackson, at least two of the marines – Watkin Tench and William Dawes – had inklings that they were encountering aspects of human experience that could expand their ways of understanding themselves and the world. Then, as the colony dug in, mistakes and refusals took over. In hindsight, we can feel and see what was missed and, although we will never get that experience back again, we can use the marines' journals – particularly language notes gathered by Dawes – to propose experimental models of consciousness for our own times.
 

Youth as knowledge producers and video diary making

A seminar presented by the Hawke Research Institute and the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages. 9 November, Magill Campus.

Dr Jean Stuart, School of Language, Literacies, Media and Drama Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Youth as knowledge producers: towards changing gendered patterns in rural schools with participatory arts-based approaches to HIV and AIDS

Drawing on work with participatory arts-based approaches and research employed in the NRF-funded Youth as Knowledge Producers Project (2007), in the rural area of Vulindlela, KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, I consider how, by paying attention to youth constructions of gender and sexuality, pre-service teachers' interaction with rural learners in the era of HIV and AIDS can be transformed, and arts-based participatory approaches can be used to move towards greater equality of rights for young people in rural areas. Our research findings to date show that arts-based approaches are effective in drawing forward known social expectations, but suggest that finding how to change or broaden these requires deeper thought. I consider how collage and image theatre can be used to explore HIV and AIDS issues and gender and identity construction with pre-service teachers and with learners in rural contexts. I also discuss some of the challenges to using these methods, and how critical thinking around gender construction and its impact on sexual violence can be enhanced for pre-service teachers and learners in the context of rural schools.

Dr Jean Stuart is a lecturer in Media and Literacies and co-founder, former director and active member of the Centre for Visual Methodologies for Social Change, in the Faculty of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her research interests include using participatory and arts-based approaches that position participants as cultural producers to address socio-cultural aspects of health issues. She is project leader of Youth as Knowledge Producers: Arts-Based Approaches to HIV and AIDS Prevention and Education in Rural KwaZulu-Natal (NRF funded) and has published on innovative teaching approaches in the age of HIV and AIDS.

Dr Tony Dowmunt, Senior Lecturer, Communication, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Video diary making and documentary 'truth'

Documentary's central project has always involved 'claiming the real', and asserting its relationship with recording, and interpreting, 'reality' or the 'truth'. So it would seem that, for documentary to continue to exist and develop, we need to insist on and argue for its relationship to the 'real world', and to think through the continuing relevance of its 'truth claim', which forms the basis of this relationship. This presentation is based on the experience of making my video diary film A whited sepulchre, an hour-long autobiographical film based on the stories of two journeys: my great-grandfather's account of his posting to Sierra Leone in his diary in the 1880s, and my own 'video diary' of a trip that I made in December/January 2004–05, following in his footsteps, but seeking a different vision of Africa, and of myself as a white Englishman.

Tony Dowmunt is the Course Convenor for MA Screen Documentary and has main responsibility for practice-based doctoral research in the department (AVPhDs). He was a Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, funded by the AHRC, from 2003–06, doing a project investigating autobiographical documentary and the video diary form, in both theory and practice, which he then converted into a practice-based PhD awarded in 2010. Previously, as well as teaching, he worked as a television producer/director for twenty-five years, and as a community media activist. His more recent work involved innovative arts documentaries. His other research interests have included 'alternative media' and the growing field of practice research in the moving image. He was a founder member of the steering group of AVPhD, a training organisation for all those involved in audio-visual practice/research doctorates.
 

Is seeing believing?

Hawke Research Institute seminar with Dr Myra Thiessen and Dr Owen Churches. 28 October, City West Campus. Seeing is believing, so the saying goes. But are we right to believe what we see, or do we see what we believe? In these two papers, Drs Myra Thiessen and Owen Churches presented research showing that the story of seeing is far more complex than we could possibly believe. Dr Thiessen studies the design of reading materials for children and presented her work on visual literacy. Dr Churches is a cognitive neuroscientist and presented his work on the neural basis of pareidolia, the tendency to 'see' faces in the arrangement of other objects. Dr Myra Thiessen is a lecturer in the School of Art, Architecture and Design, UniSA. Dr Owen Churches is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hawke Research Institute.
 

Can the subaltern speak within international law? Women's rights activism, international legal institutions and the power of 'strategic misunderstanding'

Dr Kiran Grewal, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney. 14 October, City West Campus. Since the 1990s there has been a well-documented proliferation of international legal institutions as well as 'rule of law' projects established in a variety of post-conflict settings. Advocates of this development argue that, aside from assisting to build economically and politically stable regimes, these interventions hold an emancipatory potential for marginalised populations. Meanwhile critics point to the elitism and inefficacy of international institutions and law and the potential for these interventions to reproduce cultural, political and economic domination. In this paper I outlined my new project which explores the sites of interaction between international legal interventions and women's activism in three post-conflict societies: Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Nepal. In particular, I am interested in investigating the strategic ways in which women engage (or disengage) with international institutions and discourses as a means of framing their rights claims. In doing this I hope to contribute to Rajagopal's (2003) call for the development of a resistance theory in international law and to Ilan Kapoor's (2004) exhortation to engage unrelentingly with 'imperialistic' international organisations to try and make them more accountable to the subaltern.
 

Marianne BerryChild abuse and neglect: developing an Australian solution

Professorial lecture by Prof Marianne Berry. Presented by the Hawke Research Institute and Knowledge Works. 11 October, City West Campus. In Australia today, child abuse and neglect remain serious problems. Abuse and neglect often cause long-term, devastating impacts on children including developmental delay; relationship, physical health, behavioural and educational difficulties; and serious lifelong mental health problems. One response is to remove children from dangerous homes and place them into foster care, but this can also create lifelong difficulties in a person's self-esteem, trust, and coping abilities. Obviously, the prevention and reduction of maltreatment is not simple; solutions require a skilled workforce of service professionals. These individuals and organisations want to know what works, for whom, and under what circumstances. In seeking to be optimally effective, the Australian child protection sector has often imported treatment strategies from the US and the UK, based on the effectiveness found in large, controlled evaluations there. Implementation of these models can fail, however, if cultural and social factors in any given state or location are not recognised and incorporated into practice. From a 30-year career of research on international programs to prevent and treat child maltreatment, Professor Marianne Berry distilled knowledge about the essential elements of effective programs in child protection. In wanting to keep and make the nation's children safe, it is imperative that our responses are appropriate to Australia.
 

Family accounts

A seminar presented by the Hawke Research Institute in conjunction with the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender, Adelaide University, and Flinders University Women's Studies, 26 August, City West Campus. 

Assoc Prof Barbara Baird, 'Writing in relation to a white father'
This paper starts with an article about my father, which will appear shortly in the Critical Race and Whiteness Studies e-journal. The article is an attempt to locate my father, and so myself, in relation to colonial white Australia. It does this by locating him, us, in a history of colonial relations of Gippsland, where my family lived for ten years and where I was born. It also draws on theory, memories, anecdote and family archives. It attempts to move me towards a relationship with Indigenous sovereignty that is not mediated by the protection of the white father. The paper that I will deliver draws on the double meaning of its title: it is a reflection on writing that article about my father, and it is a reflection on how, by virtue of my location in an institution of authority, and by virtue of my relatively privileged background, I am always, unavoidably, writing in relation to a white father. This paper will thus continue the work of offering an account of myself. It is both history and ethics.

Barbara Baird teaches in women's studies at the School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University. Her research focuses on cultural politics and histories of sexuality and reproduction in Australia; abortion; representations of children and 'the child'; critical race and whiteness theories in Australian contexts; memory and representations of the past.

Dr Catherine Kevin, '"Jedda fever" in a segregated town: a family account of the making of Jedda (1955)'
Jedda (Chauvel 1955), a milestone in cinema representations of Aboriginal Australia, had been a feature of my training and teaching in Australian history for half a decade when I discovered a connection between it and the place of my grandmother's birth. Bogolong, a homestead near the rural NSW town of Yass, has been inhabited by my ancestors since the 1850s. Its history has had a strong hold on my imagination since I was a child visiting there for afternoon teas, birthday parties and wakes that were true celebrations of life. The relished family stories through which I constructed the homestead's imagined past incorporated notable figures of national(ist) histories such as Lady Jane Franklin, Ben Hall and Mary Gilmore. It was not until my undergraduate degree was well underway that questions about Bogolong as a site of colonial violence – questions that I am yet to answer in any detail – effectively left suspicious stains on my romantic impressions of early life at the homestead. More recently, revelations about my family's role in financing the film Jedda have both rendered my learned memories of life there in the 1950s more vivid, while compelling me to seek answers to new questions about conceptualisations of race and belonging, and the lived relationships between the white farmers I have known and loved and the Gnunnawal people with whom they shared the land unequally. This paper offers a history, which began as a family account, to explore some of the intricacies of race relations in 1950s rural Australia, while addressing my various roles in coming to this history.

Catherine Kevin lectures in history at the School of International Studies, Flinders University. Her research interests include histories of pregnancy and miscarriage in Australia, reproductive politics, Australian feminism and postcolonial perspectives on Australian film.

Dr Anna Szorenyi, 'No-one at home: narrating vacated responsibility'
This paper considers the issues raised by attempting to narrate intergenerational responsibility for atrocity. Through telling anecdotes about my family's implication in hitherto untold stories of both Holocaust collaboration and Australian colonial violence, I conclude that both can be characterised by a refusal to inhabit a narrative space of accountability. Attempting to narrate such stories requires not only reconstructing events that I was not there to witness, but speaking from a narrative position from which my ancestors absented themselves (even as they occupied the associated physical space). Unlike the revelation of a private secret, attempting such a narration dismantles the 'self' as autonomous individual, but perhaps contingently opens a space where violence is visible and ethics can emerge.

Anna Szorenyi lectures in Gender, Work and Social Inquiry at Adelaide University. Her research examines discourses of migration, displacement and suffering in transnational contexts, drawing on feminist theory and critical race and whiteness studies to elaborate an ethics of responsibility. She also writes stories about her family, which turns out to be much the same project.

Dr Katrina Jaworski, 'Standing on the edge of the abyss: a work in progress'
Judith Butler argues that vulnerability conditions our lives. It composes who and what we are, regardless of our own choosing. I do not disagree with Butler's stance. Yet I wonder how I can live with vulnerability, especially when it literally stares me in the face. And how do I live with vulnerability, when something about it wounds me? In response to these questions, I offer an account of the relationship I have with my alcoholic father. Part narrative, part analysis, this account canvasses what feels like standing on the edge of the abyss. Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Emmanual Levinas and Judith Butler, I consider the degree to which I am wounded, and whether there is hope in interdependence I would rather disavow and forget.

Katrina Jaworski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia. Her research focuses on suicide and gender in particular, and death and dying more broadly. Other research interests include: violent extremism; older men and urban sheds; loneliness and older people; and sexuality and ageing.
 

Masterclass with Lemn Sissay

Something dark: the writing, the rehearsing and the performance
Presented by the Hawke Research Institute and the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages. 22 August, Magill Campus. Lemn Sissay is an award-winning British author, performer and broadcaster. He was awarded the MBE in the 2010 New Year Honours and is the first commissioned poet for the 2012 London Olympics. He has appeared on The South Bank Show and the BBC's hit series Grumpy Old Men, where he remains the youngest contributor; he is the presenter of One Love, the BBC World Service documentary on Bob Marley, and is an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre in London. Lemn makes regular appearances on BBC Radio Four's Saturday Live in the UK which in 2008 was nominated for two Sony Awards; he is also appearing at the world's first Literature Festival of the Sea at Southend on Sea in the UK. 
 

Lemn SissayIn Conversation with Lemn Sissay and Michael Jacobs

Jointly presented by the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre and the Hawke Research Institute, 18 August 2011, City West Campus. Fusing the lyrical and the polemical, up-beat humour and deadly seriousness, Lemn Sissay's performances are notorious for their powerful energy and dynamism. Lemn has worked as a poet, writer, broadcaster, and performer since he published his first book of poetry at twenty-one years old. His work fuses the personal and the political through both his own unique life experiences and his response to wider social issues. As one of Southbank Centre's artists in residence, his work includes publications Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist, Rebel Without Applause and Listener; published by Canongate. He has created several theatre projects: Chaos By Design, Storm, Something Dark and recently Why I Don't Hate White People. He also travels the world performing his poems.

He has created a range of major public art projects under the title Poems as Landmarks, many of them in his hometown of Manchester and more recently a commission for the City of London to celebrate the anniversary of the abolition of slavery, entitled The Gilt Of Cain. He also works frequently on radio both as a writer and presenter, ranging from regular appearances on Radio 4 Saturday live responding to current news events, to a recent documentary-style in-depth interview with Gil Scott Heron, to adaptations of his theatre projects for radio drama.

Interlocutor: Michael Jacobs, journalist and writer
Michael Jacobs is an Adelaide journalist, writer and lawyer. He began working as a journalist in 1969, and has written about politics, public policy issues and legal subjects since he first reported on Australian federal politics in 1971. He provided material for David Solomon's and Laurie Oakes's study of the 1972 election, The Making of an Australian Prime Minister. At various times he has written for The Canberra Times, Nation Review, The Advertiser, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and The Adelaide Review as well as doing news commentaries and talks for the ABC.

Michael has interviewed renowned ethicist Dr Margaret Somerville and controversial author Blanche D'Alpuget for past Hawke Centre conversation events. He brings to the interlocutor's task a wealth of insights into literary and contemporary affairs. A recent visitor to arts festivals in Avignon and Aix-en-Provence, he also has a longstanding interest in the art of the stage and the challenges for the playwright. He is currently writing for the local online InDaily where he offers considered perspectives on everything from public space savoir-faire, gleaned on assignment in Europe, to local reflections on Adelaide's cultural and political life.
 

Lemn Sissay performs Something dark

Jointly presented by the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre and the Hawke Research Institute, 17 August 2011, Nexus Cabaret, Lion Art Centre. Shot through with lyrical beauty and sharp humour, Something dark is a blast of light. Lots of laughs. Lots of tears. The drama follows an incredible journey of one man through the trials and tribulations of a dark past. Lemn Sissay was a child of the state. The government was his parent. And after years of institutions he found himself at 18, alone. Something dark is a triumph of spirit over adversity and a lesson to us all about the nature of society, of family and of love. The play stretches over thirty-two years and three continents from the moment his pregnant mother steps on British soil in 1968 to 1990. It is a quest for his family his past and his home. Something dark is a solo performance of searing honesty, laced with secrets, lies and truths too terrible to mention and artistically influenced by Lemn's background in poetry. Written and performed by Lemn Sissay. Directed by John E McGrath.

Lemn Sissay is an award-winning British author, performer and broadcaster. He was awarded the MBE in the 2010 New Year Honours and is the first commissioned poet for the 2012 London Olympics. He has appeared on The South Bank Show and the BBC's hit series Grumpy Old Men, where he remains the youngest contributor; he is the presenter of One Love, the BBC World Service documentary on Bob Marley, and is an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre in London. Lemn makes regular appearances on BBC Radio Four's Saturday Live in the UK which in 2008 was nominated for two Sony Awards; he is also appearing at the world's first Literature Festival of the Sea at Southend on Sea in the UK.
 

Material whiteness: thinking through the Captain Cook Bunnykins

Dr Katrina Schlunke. A seminar presented by the Hawke Research Institute. 28 July 2011, City West Campus. As this language would suggest, Royal Doulton's Captain Cook Bunnykins sits between popular and 'collectible' cultures as something that can be easily passed from hand to hand but its fragility renders it vulnerable and designed to be looked at. This is a complex category of the material Cook. It is neither monumental nor entirely popular but makes Cook an object of sentimentality, ignores the order of trauma he instigated within the space of Australia and silences Indigenous law. It is indicative of an order of mundane whiteness but what does it produce?

Dr Katrina Schlunke teaches cultural studies at the University of Technology Sydney. Her books include Bluff rock: autobiography of a massacre (2005) and Cultural theory in everyday practice (with Nicole Anderson 2008) and she is an editor of the now online journal Cultural Studies Review. Her research is concerned with the ways in which the past and queerness and whiteness disturb and confirm one and other. This has given rise to an interest in how we write the past, material archives and artefacts, and the deep thoughtfulness of cultural studies methodologies.
 

Early Career Researchers' Colloquium

Zero Waste SA Research Centre for Sustainable Design and Behaviour. 19 May 2011, City West Campus. The Early Career Researchers' Colloquium was a networking opportunity for young researchers at the University of South Australia who are working in the areas of climate change, sustainable cities and other topics around the built environment. The colloquium offered an intriguing snapshot of the diversity of research currently underway at UniSA, while giving 19 early career researchers the opportunity to present and discuss their interests and studies.

Further information
 

Zero Waste SA Research Centre for Sustainable Design and Behaviour Annual Symposium
'Solutions for a Low-to-No Carbon Urban Future'

19 May, City West Campus. The Zero Waste SA Research Centre for Sustainable Design and Behaviour presented a forum for architects, designers and urban planners to envisage our urban future. Guest presentations were given by:

Further information
 

Margaret SeversonMeet the researcher: Margaret Severson

The School of Psychology, Social Work & Social Policy, Hawke Research Institute and Australian Centre for Child Protection presented this opportunity to meet the researcher Margaret Severson MSW, JD, Associate Professor, School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas. 4 May, Magill Campus. Professor Severson discussed the issues raised in her public lecture on incarcerated mothers, then discussed career opportunities, planning and trajectories.

Margaret Severson, MSW, JD, is Associate Professor, School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas. She is an international visiting fellow with the Australian Centre for Child Protection. Professor Severson's research occurs largely within the context of social and criminal justice systems and includes an exploration of the life trajectories of women with child and adulthood histories of maltreatment and victimisation. With a focus on disenfranchised persons including women, persons of colour, indigenous populations and those with mental disabilities, Professor Severson serves as the principal investigator on several federal- and state-funded prisoner re-entry projects. The impact of incarceration on these persons and their dependents is of special concern, particularly in light of the probable influence on their children of certain behaviours.
 

The lives of others: incarcerated mothers, their histories of victimisation and the consequences for their children

Professor Margaret Severson, School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas. Presented by the Australian Centre for Child Protection, Hawke Research Institute and School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, UniSA. 3 May, City West Campus. Women who are arrested and incarcerated report significant histories of abuse and maltreatment as children and as adults. Many are in prison for behaviours that blur the pain of past and ongoing trauma, feed their addictions and economically support their families. That most women prisoners are mothers of children under age 18 complicates their and their children's lives. Once incarcerated, whatever social and economic supports they offered disappear, leaving them to rely on the often uncertain and frequently variable support of biological family or state-constructed guardians.A mother's release from prison is often accompanied by legal and social expectations that she resume her life as mother and economic engine, though she may be ill-equipped to do so. At the same time, she is expected to be law-abiding, avoiding past mistakes even though the conditions that gave rise to them still exist. Professor Severson reviewed what is known about the relationship between women's histories of child and adulthood maltreatment and victimisation and their later arrest and incarceration. She discussed the probable impact of these histories on their children, many of whom follow in their footsteps, and provided suggestions for managing the complex needs of these mothers and their children.
 

Ashis NandyIntimacy and precariousness in contemporary times: a masterclass with Ashis Nandy

29 March 2011, Hawke Research Institute, Underdale. We live in uncertain times. This uncertainty is rendered visible by political conflicts, wars and environmental disasters. Life seems precarious not only because the line between life and death is very fine, but also because the conditions through which life is recognised as 'life' are themselves precarious. Ashis Nandy's work provides a way of thinking through what it means to live in uncertain times by drawing attention to the relationship between intimacy and precariousness. Nandy points out that 'venom comes from splintered, ambivalent proximity, not distance' (2002: 15). What this suggests is that often it is nearness and intimacy that render life precarious. Considering nearness in broader personal, cultural, social and political terms, the masterclass focused on whether intimacy can implode into unforgivable behaviour, and what precisely conditions this imploding. Furthermore, the discussion explored whether people can live side by side despite religious, political and cultural differences. This was approached through the prisms of trauma, violence, food, architecture and politicised sub-dividing of territories following conflict and war. Nandy emphasised the need to recognise collective histories and memories as platforms for political intervention.

Professor Ashis Nandy is presently a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi; Chairperson of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures at the Centre for Environment and Food Security; and Distinguished Fellow, Institute for Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne, Australia. Previously he has been the Director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies; a Member of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library; and the Research Advisory Committee, Transparency International. He is the author of many publications, including At the edge of psychology: essays in politics and culture; The intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism; The savage Freud and other essays on possible and retrievable selves and Time treks: the uncertain future of old and new despotisms.
 

ReOrienting the world: decolonial horizons

22–3 March 2011, City West Campus. The International Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding (MnM) hosted its first international symposium as part of its commitment to improving understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim communities and the elaboration of critical Muslim studies. The world that we live in continues to be haunted by the histories, economies and cultures inaugurated by Europe's framing of the globe. For almost half a millennium the non-West was impossible to name except as a lack. It was a residual category, reflecting its subaltern position in the world order. Giving the non-West a name opens up a decolonising horizon and is a way of re-orienting the world. This re-orientation is a way of framing the erosion of western hegemony. It points to the possibility of imagining a different configuration of the planet. Decolonial horizons was the first symposium in the series and primarily focused on the epistemological and methodological implications of the de-centring of the West. International and national academics who presented at the symposium included:

Program (PDF 399 kb)
 

When more means less: cumulative risks and their impact on children's and families' outcomes

Judith J Carta, University of Kansas. Presented by the Australian Centre for Child Protection and the Hawke Research Institute. 17 March 2011, City West Campus. Poverty exerts its negative influence on children in many ways. Children who grow up in low-income environments are often exposed to a wide range of biological risks (such as poor nutrition and inadequate health care) and psychosocial risks (such as harsh parenting, maternal depression and exposure to violence). These numerous factors are known to prevent over 200 million children in the developing countries from attaining their developmental potential. What compounds these effects, however, is that these risks often co-occur, exposing children to the more serious effects of cumulative risk factors. Dr Carta provided an overview of the ways in which multiple risks can affect children and families and offered potential solutions for ways in which practitioners can cut through the layers of risks to enhance children's and families' outcomes.

Judith J Carta, PhD, is Director of Early Childhood Research at the Juniper Gardens Children's Project, a Senior Scientist in the Institute for Life Span Studies, and Professor of Special Education at the University of Kansas. She is currently a Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on several research projects funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The focus of her work is evidence-based intervention practices for children's language, literacy and social-emotional outcomes; parenting interventions focused on vulnerable populations and their effects on young children; and tools for monitoring progress of young children. She is responsible for over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals including research syntheses, intervention research studies and conceptual papers. She was the Editor-in-Chief of Topics in Early Childhood Special Education and has held editorial positions for many major journals. She is currently the Co-Director of the IES-funded Center for Response to Intervention in Early Childhood.
 

School choice and student mobility: what does this mean for our concept of the 'school community'?

Jacinta Poskey. Presented by the Hawke Research Institute, CREEW and the School of Education. 7 March 2011, City West Campus. Jacinta discussed her spatial demographic research of education provision and participation based on measures of people, place and time. She uses representational spatio-temporal observation of student and household school enrolment behaviours to identify and name education mobility as systemic, interzonal and international. This research specifically explores the concept of school choice within metropolitan Adelaide zoned government secondary schools by bringing together spatial demographic perspectives from the 2006 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census of Population and Housing with Department of Education and Children's Services administrative data (46 schools, approx n=32, 000). The construction of this timely secondary school market information potentially provides new longitudinal perspectives of education space with implications for all educators and policy makers alike. Following the presentation a panel discussed the current practices and implications of 'school community' measurement for learners, schools and providers. Guest speakers were:

Publishing workshop

Cuan Webster, Journal Development Manager for Taylor and Francis (Routledge). 1 March 2011, Hawke Research Institute, Underdale. Cuan Webster Spoke on how to get your article published, read and cited in an academic journal. The discussion centred upon: how to choose the best journal for your research; what common pitfalls bar publication; how to prepare your manuscript; how to resubmit following initial rejection; and once published what you can do to bring more readers to your work. Mr Webster has worked for Taylor and Francis (Routledge) in the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He's particularly interested in the interaction of 'regional' reading, authoring and editing journal communities and how they connect or fail to connect with more 'centralised' groups.

Cuan's PowerPoint presentation 'Publishing in academic journals: tips to help you succeed' (members' log in required) (PowerPoint 2.5 MB)
 

Julian AgyemanJust sustainabilities: re-imagining (e)quality, living within limits

Julian Agyeman, Chair of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University, Boston, USA. 17 February 2001, Hawke Research Institute, Underdale. Prof Julian Agyeman led this dynamic masterclass, exploring the possibilities we have to re-imagine the way we could live. The dialogue included the topics 'just' and environmental sustainability; food '(in)security'; redefining notions of 'progress' and 'success'; communicating and re-framing 'sustainability'; the role of well-being and happiness in just sustainability; potential synergies between intercultural and sustainability strategic approaches; and the potential in climate, food and spatial justice.

Professor Julian Agyeman is Professor and Chair of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in Boston, USA. He is the originator of the concept of 'just sustainability', the full integration of social justice and sustainability and defined as 'the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems'. He is co-founder and co-editor of the international journal Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability ranked 'A' in the 2010 ERA Australia Ranked Journal List. His expertise and current research interests critically explore some aspects of the complex and embedded relations between humans and the environment, whether mediated by institutions or social movement organisations, and the effects of this on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity. With over 145 publications, his books include Just sustainabilities: development in an unequal world (MIT Press 2003); Sustainable communities and the challenge of environmental justice (NYU Press 2005); The new countryside? Ethnicity, nation and exclusion in contemporary rural Britain (Policy Press 2009); Speaking for ourselves: environmental justice in Canada (University of British Columbia Press 2009) and Environmental justice and sustainability in the former Soviet Union (MIT Press 2009). His forthcoming books (2011) include Environmental injustice across borders: local perspectives on global inequities (MIT Press) and Cultivating food justice : race, class and sustainability (MIT Press).

Julian's presentation (PDF 10 MB)
 

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