News
- Hawke postdoctoral fellow
- New appointments in research centres
- New Hawke director and deputy director
- Book chronicles the time troubles of Australians
- Australia Day honours 2012
- ARC successes
- CSAA Annual Conference 2011
- New PhD graduates
- Awards and recognition for Hawke researchers
Hawke postdoctoral fellow
We
welcome Dr Amrita Malhi as a postdoctoral research fellow
in the Hawke Research Institute, beginning in August 2012. Amrita's
overarching research interest is in the global and local processes of
enclosure and circulation that influence the production of political spaces
and subjectivities. Amrita's doctoral research focused on the production of
'Muslim' as a planetary subjectivity in colonial Malaya, and its interaction
with other sources of identity, such as race, empire, geo-body and nation.
Amrita was awarded the 2010 JG Crawford Prize for best PhD work in the
humanities and social sciences at the Australian National University.
Amrita is also interested in the forest as a site marginal to the
Malayan/Malaysian geo-body, and to urban and agrarian locations in which
processes of colonial and national identity production have been
concentrated. Amrita has a further interest in contemporary Malaysian
politics, on which she has regularly written for the national media,
including The Australian, Inside Story and New Mandala.
Amrita has also worked on consultancies and research projects with an
industry interface, including for Rio Tinto and Newcrest Mining. Before
joining UniSA, Amrita was the inaugural Minerals Council of Australia Fellow
at the National Library of Australia.
New appointments in research centres
Professor Fiona Arney has been appointed to the Chair of
Child Protection and to the position of Director of the Australian Centre
for Child Protection. Professor Arney was Deputy Director of the centre
until she moved to the Menzies School of Health Research in early 2010 to
establish and lead their Child Protection Research Program. She has built a
strong body of research, especially in relation to Aboriginal children and
families. This will continue to be a major priority in her new role at the
Australian Centre for Child Protection and will strengthen the centre's work
in this most critical area. Professor Arney has conducted pioneering
research in a broad range of areas, including families from refugee
backgrounds coming into contact with the child protection system; mothers of
Aboriginal infants receiving nurse home visiting; and the impact of placing
a mental health nurse in a statutory child protection office, which has
influenced both policy and practice.
The International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding will be welcoming Professor AbdouMaliq Simone in late 2012. Professor Simone is currently a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research centres on urbanism, critical geography, sociologies of religion, social organisations, development processes, African politics and popular urban cultures. AbdouMaliq will add to the centre's research goals of better understanding of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. His work will augment the centre's development of a distinct theoretical and analytical approach to the 'Muslim question' and will play a vital role in the centre's growth and development.
New Hawke director and deputy director
Professor Anthony Elliott will take up the position of Director of the Hawke Research Institute in the second half of 2012. Prof Elliott is currently Professor of Sociology at Flinders University, where he has been Head of Department and Assistant Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). Prof Elliot completed a BA (Honours) at the University of Melbourne, and a PhD at Cambridge University. He has worked at numerous universities in both Australia and England, and prior to his move to Flinders, he was Chair of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury (2004–06), and Foundation Director of the Centre for Critical Theory at the University of the West of England, UK (2000–04).
Anthony is a prolific publisher and is the author and editor of over 30 books (with six soon to be released in 2012/2013), published in 17 languages. His most recently published books are: On society, with Bryan S Turner (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2012), and The companion to contemporary Japanese social theory: from individualization to globalization in Japan today with Atsushi Sawai and Masataka Katagiri (Routledge, London, 2012). He is also the general editor of three Routledge series: Celebrities (12 titles to date), The New Sociology (12 titles to date) and Shortcuts (13 titles to date). Additionally, he has written numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters, and currently resides on nine international editorial boards.
Prof Elliott is a highly distinguished researcher in social theory, a field in which he is internationally recognised and acclaimed. Some of his other research interests include: the sociology of modern societies, globalisation, makeover industries and cosmetic surgery, and identity. His current research projects include: Global Elites, Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism; Social Theory and its Futures; Contemporary Japanese Social Theory; the history of the concept of society; and the concept of identity in the social sciences. He has attracted over $1 million in grants and applications from the Australian Research Council and related agencies, as well as over $700,000 in fellowship funding from other Australian sources.
In early 2013 Associate Professor Jennifer Rutherford will join the Hawke Research Institute as Deputy Director. Assoc Prof Rutherford is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Flinders University. She holds degrees in sociology, the sciences of language and social anthropology, and has trained as a psychoanalyst with the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, Paris. She was the Foundation Convener of the Australian Studies Program at ANU from 1994 to 1998 and has held research fellowships in English at the University of Sydney, and in cultural studies at Macquarie University.
Assoc Prof Rutherford's research interest is interdisciplinary in focus,
bringing together the humanities and social sciences coupled with writing
and visual representation. Her chief research fields involve social theory,
and psychoanalytic investigations of Australian social, cultural and
literary texts. Other research interests include the poetics of space,
nationalism and the politics of the far right, visual sociology, literary
theory and creative research. She has won Australian research grants
totalling over $600,000. Jennifer has written: three books and edited two
others, with two titles forthcoming (2012/2013); contributed 11 book
chapters; and produced a documentary film titled Ordinary people,
along with numerous journal articles and keynote addresses.
Book chronicles the time troubles of
Australians
Premier Jay Weatherill has launched a new book from UniSA's Centre for Work + Life which uncovers the 'time bomb' many Australians are living as they try to juggle work, home and community life. The book, Time bomb: work, rest and play in Australia today, by Professor Barbara Pocock, Dr Natalie Skinner and Dr Pip Williams, was launched on Monday 13 February 2012 at Imprints Bookstore in Hindley Street, Adelaide.
The book draws on five years' research from the Centre for Work + Life on how work affects the lives of Australian men, women and children. Prof Pocock says 'time bomb' reflects the two time worlds in which so many Australians live: the 'clock time' of work and the 'natural time' of care. 'Putting together these contradictory clocks is putting the squeeze on workers – almost half of whom are now women', Prof Pocock says. 'The rigid clock of work does not sit easily with the natural clock of children's needs, the requirements of our bodies for rest and recovery, and our human aspirations to give and receive care and love: these often pay no need to the timetables we try to impose on our lives. The result is time conflict, time pressure and harried individuals.'
Dr Skinner says this 'time bomb' has implications for how Australians respond to new challenges like climate change. 'Time pressures work against simple environmental actions like sorting rubbish, walking to the shops or catching the bus to work', Dr Skinner says. 'They also affect productivity and workplace management: tired people don't make effective workers or good managers. Much of the cost of workaholism or intensive job demands are hidden: in the health budget in the form of poor mental and physical health, or in errors we make at work when we are tired and in stretched relationships at home and at work.'
The book considers how the time bomb can be defused. Prof Pocock says the notion of 'work–life balance' is inadequate to the task. 'Individuals can do only so much in the face of greedy workplaces, poorly planned transport or inappropriate urban planning', Prof Pocock says. 'Some people are increasingly excluded by current arrangements and, in a rich, first-world country like Australia, there are many things that citizens, governments, employers, developers, unions and community service providers can do better. Taking control of the length of the working day, better managing technologies and workloads, increasing flexibility and providing more leave would be a good start.'
Order the book from
NewSouth
Books.
This is a slightly abridged version of an article that appeared in UniSA
News, February 2012.
Australia Day honours 2012
Congratulations to Prof Rhonda Sharp, affiliate member of the Hawke, who
has been awarded an AM 'for service to education as an academic and
researcher, to the study of economics, and to women'. Congratulations also
to Emeritus Professor Alan Reid, another of our affiliate members, for his
AM for 'service to education as an academic and researcher, particularly
through contributions to the development of state and national curriculum
policy, and to professional associations'.
ARC successes
Congratulations to these Hawke researchers who have won ARC grants, announced in November 2011.
- Prof Elspeth Probyn (with Dr Brenda Croft) 'Still in my mind: Gurindji experience, location and visuality', ARC Discovery Indigenous grant
- Assoc Prof Rob Hattam and Prof Barbara Comber (with Assoc Prof Debra Hayes), 'Educational leadership and turnaround literacy pedagogy', ARC Linkage grant, partner organisation: SA Department of Education and Children's Services
- Professor Ed Carson (and others, administered by Deakin University), 'A model of sex offender registration, monitoring and risk management', ARC Discovery grant.
These ARC Linkage grants were announced in May 2011:
- Professor Barbara Pocock, 'A study of flexibilities that enable workforce participation and skill development and use, and their implications for work-life outcomes in Australia'. Linkage grant 2011–2015. Partner organisations: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, NSW Department of Services, Technology and Administration, SafeWork SA.
- Dr Barbara Spears (and others, grant administered by
Queensland University of Technology), 'A legally informed
intervention for schools to prevent and intervene in cases
of cyberbullying'. Partner organisations: Australia and New
Zealand Education Law Association Queensland Chapter,
Brisbane Girls Grammar School, Emil Ford and Co, Macrossans
Lawyers, Queensland Guidance and Counselling Association,
Queensland Independent Education Union of Employees,
Queensland Teachers Union of Employees.
CSAA Annual Conference 2011: Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities
22–24 November, City West Campus, North Terrace, Adelaide
The International Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding (the MnM Centre) proudly hosted the CSAA Annual Conference on 22–24 November with the theme 'Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities'. A pre-conference postgraduate and early career research day were held on 21 November for all postgraduate or ECR delegates.
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.
- Cultural ReOrientations: How do we research non-western cultures without objectifying and petrifying them? How might non-western cultures shift from being simply objects of analysis to intellectual sources for re-Orienting cultural studies? How do we account for the rise of racism in everyday culture (particularly in the current context against Muslims globally)? How is 'culture' oriented in and by multiculturalism and what does this mean politically?
- ReOrienting Epistemologies: How do Orientalism and/or colonialism continue to structure cultural studies through its epistemological framings and methodologies? What might a post-Orientalist cultural studies look like? Given the current international political order, what would happen if we turned towards the South for new theories (South America, South Africa)?
- ReOrienting Colonialities: how are the transnational flows of bodies, commodities, ideas and media different from the expansionist project of European colonialism? Does the national framework of Australian and New Zealand cultural studies mimic the nationalism it critiques? Is New Zealand cultural studies more successful in incorporating Indigenous knowledges and what lessons might be drawn from this for Australian cultural studies? How might cultural research on Australian coloniality, postcoloniality and ethnic communities benefit from a wider comparative framework with Latin America, Africa or Asia?
- ReOrientating Cultural Studies: How is culture being re-oriented to respond to recent financial, security, environmental crises? How might the work of cultural studies be characterised by disorientation (spatial, temporal, political, intellectual)? How are new political and media technologies reorienting everyday epistemologies, ontologies and cultural practices? What does it mean to be sexually oriented and can desire disorient sexual subjects? What happens when Raymond Williams' conception of 'culture' is re-contextualised in the anthropological project from which it came? How is new media orienting new socio-political movements?
New PhD graduates
Congratulations to the following graduates who were conferred a PhD by University Council in 2012:
- Alison Wrench (supervisors Assoc Prof Robert Hattam and Dr Lew Zipin)
- Kerrie Anne Mackey-Smith (supervisors Assoc Prof Helen Nixon and Assoc Prof Robert Hattam)
- Angela Louise Valamanesh (supervisor Prof Kay Lawrence)
- Kirsty Hammet (supervisor Assoc Prof Robert Hattam)
- Trevor Murray Short (supervisor Assoc Prof Robert Hattam)
- Margaret Ruth Rowntree (supervisors Dr Lia Bryant and Dr Nicole Moulding)
- Naghmeh Nouri Esfahani (supervisor Adjunct Professor Victoria Carrington).
And to these who received their PhDs in 2011:
- Rosalina Mu-Lan Yuen (principal supervisor Assoc Prof Judith Gill)
- Pearl Panicker (principal supervisor Prof Rhonda Sharp and associate supervisors Jo Caust and Assoc Prof Suzanne Franzway)
- Sutida Ngonkum (principal supervisors Dr Jenny Barnett and Dr Zheng Lin)
- Ruth Hadlow (supervisor Prof Kay Lawrence)
- Jennifer Harvey (principal supervisor Prof Ed Carson)
- Tejaswini Patil Viswanath (principal supervisor Assoc Prof Adrian Vicary)
- Jacinta Marie Poskey (principal supervisor was Dr Tom Stehlik, and Assoc Prof Judy Gill supervised the early stages)
- Christopher Calvin Boulter (joint principal supervisors were Dr Sue Nichols and Prof Bruce Johnson).
- Lloydetta Ursula Quaicoe (principal supervisor Dr Jenny Barnett and associate supervisor Assoc Prof Judith Gill)
- Kirsty Darlaston (principal supervisor Prof Kay Lawrence and associate supervisor Dr Jean Duruz)
- Snjezana Bilic (co-supervisors Prof Elisabeth Porter and Assoc Prof Suzanne Franzway)
- Glenna Catherine Lear (co-supervisors Dr Tom Stehlik and Dr Peter Willis)
- Brenton Dean Fopp (principal supervisor Prof Bruce Johnson and associate supervisor Assoc Prof Michele Simons)
- Stephen Matthew Parker (co-supervisors Dr Rodney Fopp and Prof Elisabeth Porter)
- Elizabeth Mary Trickett (principal supervisor Dr Rodney Fopp and associate supervisor Dr Sarah Mott)
- Trevor Lovett (co-supervisors Dr Elspeth McInnes, Elaine
Butler and Margaret Freund)
And these graduates who were conferred a Doctor of Education:
- Roma Aloisi (principal supervisor Assoc Prof Suzanne Franzway and associate supervisor Elaine Butler)
- Tawatchi Chaisiri (principal supervisor Dr Jenny Barnett and associate supervisor Greg Restall)
- Sushita Gokool-Ramdoo (principal supervisor Assoc Prof
Dianne Bills and associate supervisor Dr Ruth Geer)
Awards and recognition for Hawke researchers
Prof Pal Ahluwalia, Pro Vice Chancellor: EASS, was made a Life Honorary Member of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, in December 2011, in recognition of his services to the organisation.
Prof Roger Harris has been awarded a lifetime Honorary Membership of Adult Learning Australia in recognition of his exceptional service to ALA since 1975. Roger has also been a national editor of the Australian Journal of Adult Learning (an 'A' rated journal) since 1990.
Assoc Prof Irene Watson (DUCIER) has joined the third Indigenous Higher Education Council, as a casual member. The council provides policy advice to the Australian government on improving participation, retention, study and employment outcomes in higher education for Indigenous students and staff.
Dr Angelique Edmonds joined the SA Australian Institute of Architects (SA AIA) Council, and will also chair the Sustainable Built Environment Committee of the SA AIA chapter. She has also been appointed as standing panellist for the National Visiting Panels by the AIA National Education Committee.
Assoc Prof Michele Simons has been elected to the Board of the Council for Humanities Arts and Social Sciences.
Assoc Prof Leah Bromfield (ACCP), was appointed as a member of the Department of Communities Queensland, Child Safety Officer and Child Safety Support Officer 'Vocational Education Pilot Review Panel'.
Prof Steffen Lehmann has been appointed a member of the Advisory Board for the Festival of Ideas, Adelaide. The festival is an international, bi-annual event. He has also been appointed by the Government of Singapore as the Chief Curator for 'Hub-to-Hub', an interdisciplinary exhibition and research project in the centre of Singapore (value $300,000), starting in May. The exhibition will run from October to November 2011, and a public symposium on 'Emerging types of public spaces' will be held on 16 October at the National Library in Singapore. Prof Lehmann has also been appointed to the Premier's Climate Change Council's Roundtable for the Built Environment.
Margaret Brown, Adjunct Research Fellow in the HRI, has been
appointed as a member of the new South Australian Health Practitioners
Tribunal.