ISR 2009 Seminar and Public Lecture Series
Lunctime 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). For directions click here: Transport and Location Map. Members of the public are welcome to attend. For
more information about the series contact Denise Meredyth
via email or
on 03 9214 5738.
Public Lectures are held at a variety of times and locations across the university. Please check the details listed below carefully. A common location is the Australian Graduate School of Management lecture theatre AGSE 207. For directions to this theatre please click here: Transport and Location Map. Members of the public are welcome to attend. For
more information about the series contact the Institute
via email or
on 03 9214 8825..
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19 FEBRUARY
Venue: EW303
Dr Emily Potter (Deakin University) – Material Poetics: performance, place-making and environmental change
Our dominant approaches to the challenge of environmental sustainability regularly exclude the realm of creative practice, investing faith instead in the techno-sciences. But poetic work – the realm of story-telling, performance, art and design – is vital to environmental futures and on a more-than-symbolic or therapeutic level. Mallee is an ongoing creative research program and ephemeral art project that is a collaboration between artists, local community, and the Mallee environment of North-Western Victoria. This presentation will discuss this project as a speculative experiment in poetic practice motivated by the political urgency of a drying country.
26 FEBRUARY
Venue: TD120
Dr Lorenzo Veracini – The Population Economy of Settler Societies
Part of a project dedicated to the global analysis of settler colonial forms ( and to the establishment of settler colonial study a distinct scholarly field), this paper deals with settler colonialism's representational regimes. It interprets the settler colonial situation as fundamentally premised on the irruption into a specific locale of a sovereign collective of settlers: the first section sketches the ways in which relations are organised within this situation; the second section focuses on 'transfer' as a foundational trait of all settler colonial regimes. This paper outlines the ways in which settler colonial projects interpret and set out to manage the population economy of their respective domains.
12 MARCH
Venue: BA802
Note time: 12–1.30pm
Dr Richard Evans – ‘The ridge at the end of the world’: Flanders, 1917, as an Australian disaster
The Australian memory of the First World War is dominated by Gallipoli. By comparison, the two great military disasters of the 1917 Flanders campaign, and the three even bloodier "victories" in between, are familiar only to military history buffs - and even they don't really understand their significance. In the book I am writing about disasters in Australian history, I will explore the 1917 Flanders offensive, the peculiar combination of memory and denial which surround it, and the effects of these on Australian society.
Listen to the podcast
26 MARCH
Venue: SPW226
Dr Paula Geldens – ‘I Tell them I am a Paper Stainer’: The evolution of a trade
Serving essential social and political functions, the newspaper industry has offered a reliable career path for centuries. Significant technological advances, however, have seen the trade change substantially: printers have observed the dissolution of allied trades, including compositing, and it has been suggested that they have experienced ongoing deskilling of their own craft. Notably, most accounts of development and change within the industry focus at the organisational level, amongst these Boyce, Curran, and Wingates (1978) edited collection which takes stock of 300 years of newspapers in England, Cockburn’s (1983) analysis of the deskilling of compositors in England, and Marjoribanks (2000) account of the responses to technological developments within News Corporation in England, the United States and Australia. Each of these accounts fails, however, to fully account for the experiences of print workers. Three notable works that have explicitly explored the experiences on the print room floor are Cockburns (1983) study of printers in Britain, Cannons (1967) study in Britain with the now defunct compositor workforce and Lipset, Trow and Colemans (1956) study in the US. The material presented in this seminar provides insight into the ways in which members of the Australian printing workforce are undertaking their duties and deriving and managing occupational identities within an industry in perpetual evolution.
2 APRIL
Venue: TD 122
Dr Leanne Weber (UNSW) – Insecurity in a Mobile World
In what is often described as a world in motion, the freedom to move, particularly to cross borders, has been identified as a key signifier of social status. Much scholarly attention has been focused on efforts by states to selectively control who enters their territory. But we also see a trend towards close monitoring and filtering of those who are allowed to stay, through processes of immigration enforcement and visa cancellation. By targeting even those individuals who have had long periods of lawful residence, governments are making it clear to non-citizens that permission to stay is a privilege which is always conditional. This paper draws on some observations from an ARC funded project on migration policing networks to develop the concept of status insecurity. The term is intended to reflect the experience of uncertainty and vulnerability to expulsion or exploitation, associated with unclear or fragile immigration status. Some interpretations of the contested notion of human security will also be considered, in order to locate status insecurity within the many of sources of insecurity affecting human beings trying to negotiate a fluid and unpredictable world.
9 APRIL
Venue: SPW226
Assoc Prof Angelina Russo (SUT Design) –
Transformations In Scientific and Cultural Communication
Curiosity has, for a long time, driven the agenda of the cultural instituion sector. 19th century museum models in particular, were based on the idea of making the world visible and knowable to the masses - most of whom could never know first-hand, the treasures beyond their local environments. This curiosity drove research agendas, producing methods of investigation which were methodical, thorough and slow. This approach to investigation and dissemination was transferred to the exhibition environment where objects were often displayed with minimal interpretation. Over time, this form of research and exhibition created a collective memory of museum visitiation: museums ordered and classified cultural objects, actions which were by their nature, were expressions of social ordering. Exhibitions created an interplay of (just enough) communication and (not quite enough) audience engagement. Audiences visited the physical museum to discover objects but the stories which surrounded these were rarely part of the communication. Beginning with the advent of television and extending through the development of the internet, audience expectation of the social meaning of knowledge began to effect museum programs. Curiosity was no longer confined to discovery through taxonomic research but increasingly was defined by the ways in which objects/events had affected communities. Collective memory came to develop into a social consciousness, probably most often seen in social history museums, (such as war museums) but rarely extending into natrual science museums. As audiences came to regard their stories as relevant to the interpretation of cultural content, public, outreach and education programs developed: enabling audiences to situate themselves within the context of collections. These devices rarely impacted on exhibition design and the communication of authoratative knowledge continued to reflect the duality of institutionally defined collective memory and social consciousness. But all of that has now changed. Whether we like it or not, the internet has evolved to create a new spatiality, one that is built on communication and curiosity. Social media or web 2.0 technologies have extended this format to enbale audiences to connect to organisations and to each other, in their own time and on their own terms. No longer can we build towers to knowledge and expect that people will come. The social consciousness of the internet is now the mass participation of its audiences. This lecture will explore the impact of these changes and subsequent transformations in cultural and scientific communicaion in the cultural sector.
Listen to the podcast
23 APRIL
Venue: SPW226
Peter Mares –
Immigration Policy and the Shift Towards Temporary Rather than Permanent Migration
At the October 2005 Pacific Islands Forum, former Prime Minister John Howard rebuffed regional pressure to create a temporary seasonal labour program for Pacific Island workers with the following words: “We always have a preference for permanent settlement for migration….I think you either invite someone to come to your country to stay as a permanent citizen or you don’t”. In the post war decades, this bias towards permanent migration distinguished Australian policy from European-style Gastarbeiter programs that granted workers temporary entry on the basis that they would leave when their labour was no longer required. But even in 2005, John Howard's view of Australian migration policy was anachronistic. In his first months in office in 1996, the Coalition created the new ‘457’ visa and in the subsequent decade temporary labour migration under this category exploded (rising from around 30,000 visas issued in 1997/8 to 110 570 in 2007/8). In addition, a sharp increase in visas granted to overseas students and working holiday makers means that there are now more than half a million temporary foreign workers in Australia at any one time. Many of these workers are from countries in the Asia Pacific region, particularly China and India, and many occupy low status service jobs. Now the midst of an economic downturn, pressure is growing to reserve jobs for Australian citizens. This paper discusses the history of Australia's shift from permanent to temporary migration, and looks at the implications for social cohesion and Australia's relations with the region.
Listen to the podcast
7 MAY
Venue: SPW226
Professor Jock Given – Broadband in Australia: How big is the problem? And are we fixing it?
Kevin Rudd has likened it to the building of the Snowy Hydro and the Sydney Harbour Bridge as ‘an historic act of nation-building’. Announced on 7 April, Australia’s new $43 billion plan for broadband will deliver 100 Mbits/sec download speeds to 90% of Australian households within eight years via optical fibre lines running all the way to their homes, schools and workplaces. The network will be built and operated by a new company in which the Commonwealth will be the majority shareholder. Rudd’s new plan replaces the one Labor took to the 2007 election, promising to spend $4.7 billion on a network delivering 12 Mbits/sec to 98% of the population, which replaced the Coalition’s $1 billion plan for improved broadband in non-metropolitan areas. This talk considers the origins of the new plan and asks who will benefit and who will pay for it.
Listen to the podcast
14 MAY
Venue: SPW226
Sue Malta – Technophobic and Asexual? I Don't Think So! Older Adults and their Online Romantic Relationships
Whilst there is a substantial body of research detailing different kinds of online romantic relationships - including their frequency, their forms, and their development into and impact on offline relationships - studies regarding older adults in this context are scarce. Despite evidence to the contrary, older adults are often stereotyped as being technophobic and asexual; two qualities that appear to preclude their use as a suitable research population. This paper is drawn from a qualitative study involving 50 older adults (60 - 92 years of age) and their online and offline romantic relationships. This presentation details the results of the online romance group, consisting of 32 Australian participants. I discuss the development of these romantic relationships, including their transition from online to offline, their longevity and their progression to sexual intimacy. It is argued that the Internet provides a unique opportunity for older adults to connect with like-minded others - providing unprecedented access to far larger numbers of possible partners than in their offline lives. Some insight into participant behaviours and attitudes towards cyber-sex and cyber-cheating is also provided.
Listen to the podcast
29 MAY
Elliott Bledsoe (QUT) –
Introduction To Creative Commons, And Research Progress On Open Content Licensing In Australia
Elliott Bledsoe is a member of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) where he conducts research on issues related to the internet, digital technologies and copyright law. He is also a project officer with Creative Commons Australia, the organisation that administers Australian Creative Commons licences and supports Australian licence users. At the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences, freely available to creators, that foster sharing and collaboration. Creative Commons builds upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. Elliott will provide an overview of the Creative Commons system operated by Creative Commons Australia and discuss the range of research being conducted in relation to this system.
Listen to the podcast
4 JUNE
Venue: SPW226
Professor Brian Costar–
Train Wreck At Westminster: The End Of The Line?
The last six months have been traumatic for the British political system. Last week the Speaker of the House of Commons was forced into resignation (the first to do so since 1695), in December the police entered the Palace of Westminster to arrest a member unprecedented since Charles 1 arrived at St Stephens Gate with an armed band in 1642 (an action that was to later cost him his head) and the parliament has been racked by the worst rorting scandal of modern times. The Brown government is, of course, doomed, with some predicting a landslide as big as 1945. This will be as nothing compared with the current crisis of confidence in the system as a whole. Many MPs have stated that they will not contest the next election where voter turnout is predicted to fall as low as 70%. Since members of all three parliamentary parties have been enmeshed in the expenses scandal, extremist parties such as the xenophobic British National Party (BNP) may win seats. If any good is to come out of this mess, it might be the death of the ‘Westminster system’. Contrary to popular opinion, most political scientists hold that system in very low esteem. An unwritten constitution, weak bicameralism, an ossified party system and parliamentary sovereignity have combined to shift almost total power to the Executive arm of government. In addition, Britain operates a decrepit electoral system, retains a class-ridden judiciary and a system of local government too powerful for the country’s good. These undesirables have been made much worse in the ‘age of terror’ and especially after the London bombings of 2005. The UK is in need of root-and-branch constitutional reform if it is to survive as a nation state.
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11 JUNE
Venue: SPW226
Dr Michael Leach – East Timorese Youth Attitudes Toward National Identity: 2002-2007
This paper examines some key intergenerational debates in Timor-Leste, using the findings of a survey investigating East Timorese tertiary students' attitudes toward national identity. Longitudinal survey data obtained by conducting the International Social Survey Programme 'National Identity' module (Dili, 2002 and 2007) is presented, along with some personal interviews with East Timorese political figures and
young people. The findings suggest that a younger generation of East Timorese conceive of national identity in ways which partially contest the 'official' cultural affiliations of the nation-state, while strongly supporting other core narratives of national identity and history. In so doing, they highlight the difficult cultural legacies of consecutive colonial eras. The paper also highlights some significant changes in these youth attitudes since independence in 2002.
18 JUNE
Venue : AGSE 207
Professor Jeffrey Olick (University of Virginia) - Making Sense of Historical Analogies: Insights from Memory Studies
Politicians and commentators frequently frame contemporary events by analogies to the past: Waterloo, Munich, Hitler, the Great Depression, etc. Historians, by contrast, often show why such analogies are misleading, how the politicians got it wrong, while sociologists try to discover the hidden interests behind the analogy - what the politicians were trying to accomplish with it - and hence to discredit it. But analogies, philosophers have shown, are never completely right or completely wrong; no two events are exactly the same, nor are any two that involve humans completely distinct, which is why teachers always ask their students to compare and contrast. How, then, are we, the critical public, to make sense of the use of historical analogies in public? Factual criticism and discovery of intentions are indeed important, but they are not nearly enough. In this lecture, I outline a number of different dimensions that critical publics must bring to their reception of historical analogies. Based on recent work in the emerging field of memory studies, I explore the role of fantasy, emotion and aesthetics in the deployment, and hence reaction to, historical analogies in public discourse.
Listen to the podcast
24 JUNE (Wednesday)
Venue: SPW226
Dr Jeffrey Tobias – Connected Innovation – Beyond Open Innovation
Open Innovation is an unrealized opportunity. It is the potential to innovate that would exist if all the barriers within an organization, and all the barriers between an organization and its ecosystem, could be removed. In order to realize the potential of Open Innovation, the entities of an ecosystem need to be connected. The use of connectedness to remove barriers within an organization and between an organization and its ecosystem is what I call Connected Innovation. Connected Innovation is the actualization of the potential of Open Innovation by means of the twin strategies of connectedness – collaboration and technology. Connected Innovation is an entirely new paradigm that private and public organizations alike will need to embrace if they are to evolve and thrive in the 21st century and beyond. It will be Connected Innovation that delivers the potential of Open Innovation. This talk explores the exciting concept of Connected Innovation. We will examine a framework for the construction of governance models that facilitate Connected Innovation, leading to architectures for implementation. The value of Web 2.0 technologies will be considered, with a number of case studies presented.
2 JULY
Venue: SPW226
Professor Peter Newton – Hybrid Buildings as a Pathway to Carbon Neutral Housing
In the residential sector there is growing interest in the concept of carbon neutral and net zero energy housing within the context of emerging cl imate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. A hybrid building represents one class of carbon neutral/net zero energy buildings. It is defined here as a residential building which has the capacity to supply, in total, the annual operating energy requirements of its occupants by providing locally generated energy to the grid at times of generating energy surplus to its occupants’ immediate demands and receiving energy back from the grid when the dwelling is unable to generate sufficient energy for autonomous operation. Operating energy includes energy for heating, cooling, lighting and domestic appliances (built-in and plug-in). Local energy is supplied by a number of distributed generation technologies, both low-emission and zero-emission. Innovation in building and energy systems are represented across a three horizon spectrum ranging from incremental to transformational. This presentation reports on an eco-efficiency analysis of alternative configurations of a hybrid building, where variations in performance are explored across: different types of residential structure (detached, medium density, highrise), different energy ratings of the shell, the number and mix of domestic appliances in use and the type of distributed generation technology employed. The most prospective intervention points for delivering carbon neutral residential development are identified.
23 JULY
Venue: SPW226
Associate Professor Andrea Whitcombe (Deakin University) – The politics and poetics of contemporary exhibition making: Towards an ethical engagement with the past
In this paper, I situate the development of more poetic, affective forms of interpretation within exhibition spaces as a response to a complex set of circumstances which include a dissatisfaction with pluralist models of representing cultural diversity, the development of more 'palpable' forms of history making (Gibson 2008) and a more sophisticated understanding of the potential of immersive and interactive forms of interpretation. I develop my arguments by looking at two case studies - one in Grenough, WA, the other at the Melbourne Museum. Along the way, I show how Stephen Johnson's (2005) work on the architecture of contemporary multimedia texts can be usefully applied to understanding the nature of interpretation in some museum and heritage site installations. Like Johnson, I wish to call attention to the complexity of the work required by these texts, in which an 'architecture of rewards' produces a multilayered interactive space instead of a traditional 'morality play'. The paper will end by suggesting that this new poetic and interactive approach requires an ethical engagement with the presence of the past in the present.
30 JULY
Venue: SPW226
Dr Deb Warr (University of Melbourne) –
Understanding and responding to place-based disadvantage: insights from the Victorian Neighbourhood Renewal strategy
As part of the State Government’s Neighbourhood Renewal strategy which has been implemented in 19 of Victoria’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, local peer-researchers undertake biannual surveys of 300 residents at each site. The surveys collect a range of quantitative and qualitative data which are used to evaluate the progress of the strategy and to build improved theoretical understanding of associations between place and health. Deborah Warr is a university-based partner guiding and supporting the community survey process in five Neighbourhood Renewal sites, and a partner investigator on a research project that investigated the health impacts of Neighbourhood Renewal. In this presentation she will discuss findings from a series of analyses that shed important light on relationships between place and health. Issues include factors influencing the spatial patterning of socio-economic disadvantage and ill-health; associations between neighbourhood environments and self-reported health; and problems of neighbourhood stigma. She will also reflect on the benefits and challenges of the participatory method adopted to conduct the community surveys.
6 AUGUST
Venue: SPW226
Associate Professor David McCallum (Victoria University) - Is there a child abuse crisis in Australia?
Child protection in Australia is reportedly in a state of crisis. Regular media commentary on escalating rates of child abuse, continual reports of deaths of clients in child protection services, and the use of the army and police in Northern Territory Indigenous communities all seem to point to an upsurge in the harming of children. This paper briefly places these events in the historical context of recurring shifts in how the problem of child abuse is calculated and acted upon; it presents an overview of some of the literature on the emergence of the term child abuse; and it provides a recent instance of the role of the media, statistical calculation and the law in the construction of crisis. The paper argues that the crisis may refer to tensions within liberal political reason about the intervention of government agencies in the private sphere of the family. These tensions underpin the evolution of new forms of power deployed in relation to children and families, which reduce the role of formal legal process and promote the fiction of individual parental responsibility for the social and economic context affecting families.
20 AUGUST
Venue: SPW226
Dr Richard Evans and Helen McKernan –Policing Vietnamese Australians: Lessons from the past and the country of origin
The researchers report on historical and comparative aspects of the four-year ARC linkage project on policing Vietnamese Australians — Exploring the experience of security in the Australian Vietnamese community: practical implications for policing. As in the US, UK and Canada, Australian police forces have recognised the need to improve relations with local ethnic minorities. The study investigates whether Victoria Police has learned from past lessons in policing Vietnamese Australians and the implications for more recently arrived refugee communities. Drawing on historical documents from Victoria Police and other sources, patterns of relations, successes and failures are shown. In February 2009 a small research team travelled to Vietnam to conduct interviews with the Department of Police and NGOs. Policing practices in Vietnam along with the transnational aspects of communities inform understandings of the tensions and complexity of relationships between police and Vietnamese Australians in Melbourne.
27 AUGUST
Venue: SPW226
Dr Maria Tumarkin – The Curve of Forgetting: Battles over historical memory in the present-day Russia
There is a joke that has been doing rounds in the present-day Russia. Stalin's ghost appears to Vladimir Putin in a dream. Troubled by the crippled economy, Putin asks the Great Dead Leader for advice. "Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue," Stalin replies. "Why blue?" Putin asks. "Ha!" says Stalin. "I knew you wouldn't ask me about the first part".
Stalin is back and not only in Putin’s dreams. In 2008 ‘The Name of Russia’, the project under the umbrella of none other than the Russian Academy of Sciences broadcast by the State-owned TV channel instituted a nation-wide search for a historical figure that best represented Russia of today. Modeled after BBC’s ‘100 Greatest Britons’, ‘Name of Russia’ had Stalin finish third in a contest, which commenced with five hundred potential candidates for the title. This result would have been inconceivable only a decade ago. There is no doubt about. And this is despite a surplus of archival and personal documents painstakingly chronicling the fate of millions of Soviet citizens killed, imprisoned, deported, sent to Gulag or forced to live in constant terror.
In both the independent local and the international media, the apparent success of the government-led rehabilitation of the Soviet regime and most cynically, of the figure of Stalin, is rarely explained without a reference to some kind of a grotesque caricature – it may be the masochistic craving for an iron fist deeply ingrained in Russian psyche or a case of the nation-wide über-forgetting of mythic proportions, or perhaps the powers of mass hypnosis attributed to the neo-totalitarian government of Putin-Medvedev. But what happens when we try to make sense of what is happening in today’s Russia without a recourse to these or other convenient caricatures?
10 SEPTEMBER
Venue: SPW226
Dr Dan Leach – ‘Counter-memorialisation’?: The destruction of monuments in minority nationalist and subversive militancy
“The destruction of a monument is a privilege for the victors, and a sacrilege for the vanquished.” Dario Gamboni
The sight of a monument being hauled from its pedestal by jubilant crowds has become a familiar media spectacle in recent years, from the removal of Lenins in Eastern Europe to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The public ritual that is monument destruction marks the downfall of a despised regime and the overthrow of its value system, most commonly as the result of foreign invasion or popular revolution. It promises both a liberation from past sufferings and a utopian future.
Yet the destruction of state monuments is not the sole preserve of triumphant ‘People Power’ movements or foreign invaders. It has also a lengthy history as a propaganda tool employed by subversive militant groups, particularly ethnic minority nationalists in Europe and North America. In these cases, identity is contested from within by marginal extremists, who embark upon campaigns of national counter-imagining through spectacular ‘direct action’ against state symbols. In this way, the demolition of monuments has commonly presaged campaigns of increasing terrorist violence, including those of some of the most committed separatist organisations in the world today.
This work-in-progress seminar aims to provide an overview of the history of monument destruction as a subversive tactic, drawing upon key examples and examining their symbolic, political and historical impacts. Situating this phenomenon within scholarship relating to memorialisation, iconoclasm, vandalism, and terrorism, it seeks to assess the role of what can be termed ‘counter-memorialisation’ in minority nationalist militancy. In particular, it asks whether the ‘illusion of power’ created by popular acts of symbolic destruction inevitably leads to an escalation of violence and eventual bloodshed.
15 SEPTEMBER (Tuesday)
Venue: AGSE 207 Lecture Theatre
Time: 3.30-5.30pm
Professor Jeffrey Cole (USC Annenberg School for Communication) - The Ever-Changing New Media User
Drawing on eight years of data and insights from a worldwide study in over 20 countries, Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future, will separate myth from reality as he describes how the Internet and mobile technology are changing the fabric of daily life. Will user-generated content successfully challenge content from traditional media? Is the web a continual threat to television, or can the two live and work together? How will advertising evolve in a digital era? The presentation will examine the trends and developments that are likely to occur in the next two to three years.
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15 OCTOBER
Venue: SPW226
Associate Professor David Charnock (Curtin University of Technology) - What do Australian voters mean by ‘Left-Right’?
A quite common claim in recent decades has been that to see politics through the prism of the Left-Right paradigm is an outdated and even irrelevant notion. However, a range of recent international research, including some Australian, has questioned this claim and, since self-location on a left-right spectrum has a quite strong association with voting behaviour in Australia, this raises the electorally important question of what meaning(s) Australian voters attach to the left-right divide. In this article I explore this in some detail by drawing primarily on data from the 2007 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes and conclude (among other things) that although attitudes towards inequality and the role of government are an important aspect of left-right differences, any such differences are also contingent on other beliefs. I also find some large age-related differences that might be very significant electorally.
22 OCTOBER
Venue: EN 407
Dr Lorenzo Veracini - Settler Colonialism and Suburbia
This paper is premised on a global analysis of settler colonialism and its political traditions and outlines the possibility for new research. It is premised on what I have elsewhere defined as the settler colonial “situation” and the “special sovereignty” of settler collectives, and suggests that an awareness of a settler colonial dynamic can aid an original approach to the interpretation of suburban forms. Of course, references to the suburban “frontier” have been frequent in both public discourse and scholarly debate, and a suburban organisation of space is a phenomenon that uniquely characterises settler societies in a multiplicity of locales. This connection, however, has not been the subject of more sustained investigation.
My paper focuses on shared traditions of anti-urban perception and on a determination to secede from the metropole/metropolis in the presence of growing tensions and contradictions. As settler colonial projects constitute a separate sovereign entity via an “outward” movement, independent suburbs endeavour to maintain local control over local affairs. The recent phenomenon of gated communities and the restrictive capacity claimed by a still growing number of “homeowners associations” also constitutes a similar circumstance where a group of “like minded” people establishes sovereign separation by “moving in” rather than moving out. In all these cases, displacement is thus a response/the only response to crisis.
5 NOVEMBER
Venue: SPW 226
Dr Catherine Middleton (Ryerson University) Always-On Technologies in Organizations: Blackberry Usage in the Workplace
This presentation explores the adoption and use of Blackberry smart phones in organizations. Although the functionality of a Blackberry is similar to that of other smart phones, it is observed that (at least in the North American context) Blackberries have assumed a unique identity, and their use is actually shaping some organizational practices. The talk will explore contradictory usage patterns (e.g. adopting the device to increase personal freedom but working more as a result), identity some efforts at resisting or taming the devices, and make the case for a more reflective approach to organizational technology adoption.
12 NOVEMBER
Venue: SPW 226
Melissa Lovell (Australian National University) - ‘Disillusionment and Possibilities: Developing Effective Critiques of the Northern Territory Intervention’
In August of 2007 the Howard federal government introduced a wide range of measures aimed at addressing the serious issues of child sexual abuse reported in the Little Children Are Sacred report. The more controversial aspects of the Commonwealth measures involved the compulsory acquisitions of townships by the government through five-year leases, the dismantling of the permit system for communities on Aboriginal land, the removal of customary law and cultural background as considerations during bail and sentencing, an increased police presence in indigenous communities and reforms to welfare payments. There is a tendency, amongst critics of the Northern Territory Intervention, to interpret the Intervention as a case of illiberal and exceptional policy. Critics have appeared bewildered by the ability of policy to fall so far short of normative ideals of liberal government. This is an understandable disillusionment but it leaves critics of the NT Intervention without a tool for understanding how a policy which they see as self-evidently discriminatory and authoritarian could possibly have received bi-partisan political support.
In this seminar presentation I draw on ideas about authoritarian liberal government and the liberal tradition of evaluating the capacity of liberal citizens to develop an understanding of the justifications given for the NT Intervention. In the case of the NT Intervention, authoritarian measures are deemed necessary to bring reforms into place and secure liberal freedom for potential liberal citizens (including the innocent children at the centre of the Little Children Are Sacred Report). This relies on the representation of indigenous people as citizens who are not yet capable of making good decisions. However there is an ongoing tension, in liberal politics, between the choice of authoritarian policy to enforce liberal ideals of citizenship and freedom and the liberal preference for facilitative forms of government. Arguments against the Northern Territory Intervention should therefore capitalize on the preference for facilitative forms of government and incorporate a critique of the ‘goals’ for which authoritarian policy is justified.
19 NOVEMBER
Venue: SPW 226
Dr. Gaia Giuliani (University of Bologna) - Cesare Lombroso and the making of White Australia
International accepted anti-black stereotypes pervading Australian racial thinking and race relations at the turn of the nineteenth century were revitalized and even transfigured by Social Darwinism and Eugenics. In its new formulations, in terms of environmentalist theories of human evolution, or in terms of biological heredity, it painted a restricted conception of whiteness that systematized the exclusion from the body politic of Aborigines, who were considered as impeding a full physical and symbolical appropriation of the continent as white space, Chinese, who “invaded the country”, and not-so-white southern Europeans and Mediterranean people who were now coming to the country.
The present essay will try to explore some aspects of the idea of whiteness emerging from the influential role played in Australia by the international debate on race from the end of 19th century to the 1930s and the inheritance of oldest and strongly grounded prejudgments against Blacks and of imperial ideas on the inferiority (or non-humanness) of not-white races. In particular, it will investigate the influence exerted on the Australian intellectual and political establishment by the theories of the inferiority of Southern Italians and black races articulated by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso in the 1890s. It will contextualize these influences in the scientific orientations and outcomes of the medical field-studies undertaken by some authoritative Australian doctors of the 1930s. Contextualization will allow me to seize Italian-Australian differences and similarities in scientific as well as ideological orientations on race. In my survey, thus, the focus on the theoretical interchange existing between few Italian authoritative fin-de siècle and Fascist raciologies and the peculiar Australian intertwining between environmentalist theories and eugenics will allow me to stress the transcontinental nature of late 19th and early 20th centuries racialised knowledge. Cultural dislocations will be taken in account showing how European, and strictly Italian, raciologies, transfigured and situated in the Australian cultural and political context of the Immigration Restriction Act (or White Australia Policy 1901), could have been predicated to a conception of the Australian political subject as “purely white”.
26 NOVEMBER
Venue: SPW 226
Professor Gary Wickham (Murdoch University) - Sociology, the Public Sphere, and Modern Government
There is an unfortunate tendency within some branches of sociology - particularly those usually called ‘critical’, that is, those associated with ’critical social theory’ - to treat with disdain the understanding of the public sphere that many modern governments use daily in making and implementing public policy. The majority of sociologists in those branches seem to prefer, as part and parcel of their normative commitments, Jürgen Habermas’s Kantian understanding of the public sphere, which focuses primarily on reason and morality and insists that these two forces are of a higher order than politics and law. This paper offers a set of criticisms of the Habermas-Kant understanding, arguing that its focus on reason and morality, were it to become more widespread, would steer sociology into public policy irrelevance. The paper goes on to describe a very different understanding of the public sphere, a politico-legal or civil-peace understanding which operates as the public policy focus of those governments that have relegated questions of salvation (whether religious or ideological) to the private sphere. This understanding emerged from early modern attempts to carve out a domain of relative freedom and security against the deadly violence of religious disputation sweeping across Europe. The paper readily acknowledges that some ‘non-critical’ branches of sociology already employ a version of this understanding.
3 DECEMBER
Venue: SPW 226
James Scambary - Conflict and Identity in a Timorese Urban Migrant Village
This presentation examines the social dynamics of an urban migrant village in Dili, the capital of East Timor, and the groups within this village. This presentation makes the argument that to design more sustainable policing and peacebuilding strategies, more account should be taken of the complexity of modern, urban settlements and of the societies that live within them.
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