ISR 2008 seminar series

All seminars commence at 12.30pm and run for approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes. Unless indicated otherwise, they are held in Room SPW226 (second floor, Swinburne West, Wakefield Street, Hawthorn)

Contact: For more information about the series contact Denise Meredyth via email or on 03 9214 5738.

28th February: Assoc Prof Rebecca Chiu (Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong) – Urban Policy, Housing and the Sustainability of High-Density Asian Cities (Room BA912)

13th March: Dr Linde Apel, Institute for Contemporary History in Hamburg – The Invention of a Taboo: Speaking About Area Bombings in Hamburg (Room BA912)

27th March:  Dr John Chesterman, University of Melbourne – Do We Need Another ATSIC? National Policy-Making in Indigenous Affairs

10th April: Prof Brian Costar – Kevin 07: Electoral Law and Election Results 

24th April: Prof Michael Gilding – ‘The Tyranny of Distance’: Biotechnology Networks and Clusters in the Antipodes’

Regional governments around the world hope to become significant players in the world biotechnology industry through their support for local clusters. This presentation explores whether or not this is a realistic ambition. It does so through network analysis of biotechnology firms located in Melbourne, Australia, the leading biotechnology cluster in the Asia-Pacific. It is argued that the Melbourne cluster is characterized by both intensive regionalism and precocious internationalism, fuelled by (using Blainey's famous expression) “the tyranny of distance”. The regional ties are partial; the international ties are precarious. Support from venture capital and deals with “big pharma” (multinational pharmaceutical corporations) are especially problematic. “The tyranny of distance” is exacerbated by cultural dynamics, favouring ties with the US and UK rather than, say, Japan and Korea. In this context, making the cluster viable is an immense challenge, calling for imaginative and detailed public policy measures.

8th May: Dr Maria Turmarkin – From Dirty War to Dirty Peace: Thinking About the Aftermath of Political Violence

The aftermath of political violence, be it civic conflict, ethnic cleansing or totalitarian repressions, is often imagined as a time of reckoning, rebuilding and psychic repair - a radical departure from the violence and trauma that preceded it. Yet stories from Africa to the former Yugoslavia, from Latin America to the former Soviet Union challenge such a simplistic and comforting view of the aftermath and transition. In these and other contexts, reconciliation more often than not is recognised as political fiction, the process of rebuilding is marred by rampant corruption and individual and collectively experienced trauma is intensified not lessened in the wake of violence. What can we learn from this far more unsettling picture of the ‘toxic’ aftermath? What are some of the broader implications of confronting the growing awareness that peace can be dirtier than war?

15th May: Dr Paul Strangio – ‘Transitional Leadership: The Retiring Premiers’

22nd May: Dr Margaret Simons – ‘Getting to Know Malcolm’

19th June: Penny Duckworth, University of Melbourne – Constructing Community: The State in Everyday Life

17th July: Chris Wilson – Youthworx and Youth Radio

31st July: Prof Terry Burke – Experiencing the Housing Affordability Problem

14th August: Nicola Brackertz – Social Inclusion in Local Governance: Can Public Participation Deliver?

Social inclusion, local governance and public participation are buzzwords for local government in Victoria. However, the ideas embodied by these terms are problematic because of the inherent theoretical and practical tensions. This talk unpacks some of the underlying themes and assumptions and addresses the questions: What does social inclusion in local government planning and decision making mean? What is local governance and why is it seen to be important? What promises does public participation hold? In assessing whether public participation is suited as a mechanism by which councils can facilitate social inclusion and local governance, the discussion will draw on findings from the Community consultation and the ‘hard to reach’: local government, social profiling and civic infrastructure project – an ARC funded three year collaboration between eight Victorian local councils, the VLGA (Victorian Local Governance Association) and Swinburne University.

28th August: Dr David Corlett – The Challenge of Climate Change-induced Displacement

25th September: Dr Ellie Rennie – Indigenous Community Media

Since joining the ISR in 2006, Ellie has investigated two segments of the Australian media: youth radio and remote Indigenous television. The events encountered by these groups are symptomatic of a broader crisis in grassroots media. Firstly, the identity and visibility of traditional community broadcasting has been seriously challenged in a sea of participatory media activities. Secondly, media convergence is being felt at the broadcasting policy level, in terms of resource and spectrum allocation. Meanwhile, issues of ownership and control have been overshadowed by user-participation. Ellie Rennie argues that the crisis in community broadcasting stems not from the capacity of these organisations to enter the converged media landscape, but from the way we use and consume media generally. How do existing community media groups maintain visibility and credibility? How do we extend the same guarantees into the online environment? What defines community media today? This seminar proposes a new approach, based on Celia Lury’s work on new media brands and considers what a ‘new media ethics’ might look like.

16th October: Ian McShane – Is There a Distinctive Australian Take on the Idea of the Commons?

Scholars of the commons are now active in many areas of the social sciences. Analysis of ‘new’ commons such as information and the internet has supplemented the conventional focus of this area on physical resources. Awareness of the limits of markets and the state has brought renewed attention to communal management regimes. Commons historians have drawn attention to effective and enduring examples of local-level stewardship, and governance theorists see a role for commons institutions in dealing with future complexity and uncertainty. Australian scholarly output in this field is relatively modest and limited in scope. Most of the 200 or so Australian-focussed citations in an international commons literature database are concerned with physical resource management. In this paper I argue that more adventurous, vernacular and inter-disciplinary approaches to the subject are constrained by limited critical overview of the field. The paper contributes a historical perspective to this task, tracing the rise, fall and rise of interest in the commons in Australia.

23rd October: Dr Paula Geldens – ‘I Tell them I am a Paper Stainer’: The evolution of a trade

6th November: Prof Michael Gilding – Paternity Uncertainty and Evolutionary Psychology: How a seemingly capricious occurrence fails to follow laws of greater generality

Evolutionary psychologists aspire to show how - contrary to “ soft” social sciences such as sociology – “seemingly capricious” occurrences in the realm of human behaviour follow biologistic “ laws of greater generality” (Pinker 2005: xii). This article is a case study of the “ seemingly capricious occurrence” of paternity uncertainty. According to evolutionary psychologists, paternity uncertainty arises from the fact that men are “ hard wired” to seek as many sexual partners as they can, and women to seek men of superior genetic quality. This account is said to be demonstrable through independent biological evidence of widespread discrepancy between putative and actual biological paternity in human populations. Yet close scrutiny of biological evidence and new evidence from representative sex surveys indicates that evolutionary psychologists consistently inflate estimates of paternal discrepancy. Evolutionary psychologists’ account of paternity uncertainty highlights their overattachment to biologistic laws at the expense of understanding the social dimensions of human behaviour.

20th November: Dr Vivienne Waller – The Relationship Between Public Libraries and Google: Too much information

This seminar will explore the implications of a shift from public to private provision of information by means of a focus on the relationship between Google and libraries. While librarians embrace Google as a reference tool and try to emulate Google’s simple interface in their catalogues, Google is digitizing the collections of major libraries. This seminar will draw on the insights of theorists of information to
look critically at this relationship between public libraries and Google. It is shown that although Google and libraries both aim to provide access to information, the word ‘information’ conceals irreconcilable differences. It concludes with some principles necessary for the survival of public libraries and their contribution to a robust democracy in a rapidly expanding Googleverse.

4th December: Prof Klaus Neuman – Kärnten, Koroška, and Jörg Haider

Klaus Neumann will talk about memories and historical justice in Kärnten/Koroška (Carinthia), and about encountering Jörg Haider, former partisans, and old and new Nazis during his recent visits to Austria.