International Workshop on Diaspora and Development: South Asian Diaspora Engagement in South Asia
25th – 26th September 2012; National University of Singapore, Singapore
This workshop, organised by the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), seeks to shed light on various forms and fields of diaspora engagement that include entrepreneurship, philanthropy, international relations, portfolio investment, remittances, advocacy, peace-building, trade such as in ethnic goods, political engagement, socio-cultural linkages and religious or spiritual movements, amongst many other categories. Any form of these engagements is potential to advance growth and development in the origin country and merits scientific inquiry. However, despite immense development potential, there is little systematic work on development engagement of the South Asian diaspora groups. This workshop attempts to address and close this gap in the existing literature.
Interested scholars (senior and junior scholars, including graduate students and recent doctorate holders) are invited to send extended abstracts of 500 words that provide a clear and sufficient outline of their proposed paper. A selection of papers presented at the workshop will be considered for publication.
Submission of abstract 15th February 2012
Notification of acceptance of abstract 29th February 2012
Submission of full paper 1st August 2012
Email your abstract and other required information to:
Ms Mamta Sachan Kumar (isasmsk@nus.edu.sg); Ms Hema Kiruppalini (isashk@nus.edu.sg) with a copy to Dr Md Mizanur Rahman (mizan@nus.edu.sg)
Families of Fortune: Chinese People in the Tweed screening at the Powerhouse Museum
The 26 minute documentary Families of Fortune: Chinese People in the Tweed will be running on a loop in the Powerhouse Museum’s King’s Cinema until Sunday 5 February.
It features stories of Chinese migration to the Tweed River area and was made by Magali McDuffie for the Tweed River Regional Museum and the NSW Migration Heritage Centre.
This video can also be viewed online at the Migration Heritage Centre website: HERE.
4th ‘No Fuss’ Re-Discovered Past conference (CHINA Inc)
11-12 February 2012; Cairns, Queensland
The conference program and abstracts for this event are now available (see PDF below).
Chinese Heritage in Northern Australia (CHINA Inc) is a not-for-profit association committed to promoting research and study into the Chinese Australian experience in northern Australia. It encourages the proper recording of Chinese Australian history and heritage.
Chinese have made contact with northern Australia for several centuries, starting with sporadic visits by traders and fishermen and culminating in the large scale immigration of workers, miners, agriculturalists and business people during the 19th century. Indeed, there has been a long history of cultural diversity (which includes other peoples from the Asia Pacific region) and this, combined with the vast landscapes, tropical climate, and remote frontier conditions, created in northern Australia a dynamic social environment that was in many ways unique.
One of the key activities of CHINA Inc is the hosting of a biennial Rediscovered Past Conference at Cairns, far north Queensland. This ‘no fuss’ event brings together people from many disciplines – including history, archaeology, heritage management, law, literature, linguistics, art, and library science. Another activity is publishing a collection of selected articles based on papers presented at the CHINA Inc conference. CHINA Inc also provides a link to people undertaking genealogical research on Chinese Australian families.
We are calling out to culturally engaged, audacious, poetic and progressive writers to take part in the We Australians Exhibition program in April 2012 taking place in Melbourne.
WeAustralians.org publication invites proposals for works which respond to new ways of representing Australian identity and culture. We would like to hear the sound of multiple voices to acknowledge the many contemporary contours of Australian culture and identity. Works may include poetry, creative writing, non fiction, interviews, artwork and photographs.
Deadline for proposals by Jan 16th 2012, with final works completed Feb 6th 2012.
Successful submissions will be included in a nationally distributed publication, and our online platforms, promoting new expressions of contemporary Australian culture and identity.
Please pass this call out through your networks and if possbile post on your websites/blogs/forums to support this exciting project.
Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television Symposium and a Mini Film Festival
Monash University Prato Campus, Italy 8 – 11 July 2012
Convened by School of English, Communications and Performance Studies and the National Centre for Australian Studies.
This interdisciplinary event brings scholars at Monash University in Australian film and television studies (Therese Davis, Olivia Khoo, Belinda Smaill) and Australian cultural studies (Tony Moore, Mark Gibson, Liz Connor) together with an invited group of leading international Australian cultural studies scholars – Meaghan Morris (Sydney University), Graham Turner (University of Queensland) and Chris Healy (Melbourne University) – to discuss international aspects of Australian film and television. Recent responses to what Ben Goldsmith has called “the international turn” in Australian film and television have tended to focus on issues of industry practices and economics. The aim of this event is to supplement that work by developing new historical and cultural critical frameworks for analyzing transnational relations in Australian screen content and the inter-cultural interactions of its production and reception.
The event comprises a one-and-a-half day mini film festival that spotlights international aspects of Australian film. Invited guests will introduce featured films, including a public lecture by Professor Meaghan Morris on the opening evening of the festival. The festival will be followed by a one-day symposium and a half-day research workshop.
Call for papers for the one-day symposium:
We are calling for offers of papers for the one-day symposium (with approximately twelve speakers). Each speaker will contribute a 3-4,000 word pre-circulated paper to be discussed within a research dialogue scenario – a round table – with a limited number of observers taking part in the discussion as well. Speakers will also be invited to participate in a half-day research workshop on developing large collaborative grants, led by Professor Graeme Turner.
Topics for research papers will include (but are not limited to):
theories of post nationalism and transnational cinema; case studies in the international reception of Australian screen media; film/TV content produced in Australia by non-Australian filmmakers or TV producers; cultural analysis of international co-productions; international collections of Australian screen content; Australian film and international film festivals; international reception of Australian Indigenous media; Asian-Australian film and TV; spectatorship; film and post colonialism; international images/narratives/reception of Australian foreign policy issues, such as Tampa, Afghanistan and, most recently, offshore processing.
Expected outcomes: Publication of research papers as a special issue of a highly ranked journal such as Continuum (to be confirmed), an edited book collection, and the development of collaborative grants.
If you are interested in participating in this event, please send a 400 word abstract and short bio to event conveners by 30 January 2012.
‘Population’ has been an abiding preoccupation in the settlement of the Australian continent. It has never been a fixed concept, but one capable of promiscuous connotations and discursive articulations. It has featured in debates about the balance between the City and the Bush; the appropriate ‘racial’ composition of the nation; about fertility, families and the role of women; about development and economic growth; and, in particular, about the rules around immigration and the nature and prerogatives of the nation state.
Globalization and the rise of the environmental movement, however, have changed the terms in which we discuss the idea of population. It is a key concept in global debates about planetary sustainability, climate change mitigation and adaptation, the curtailment of human freedoms in response to uncontrolled population movements and potential struggles over resources. In Australia recent asylum seeker debates and the emerging issue of environmental refugees have sparked conflicts over the question of what is an optimal national population with regard to economic growth and the continent’s carrying capacity.
In recent times, in Australia as elsewhere population has become associated with urban problems and their management. It is a key concept in expert debates about desirable models of urbanity – low density urbanism, consolidation, sustainability and so on – and about patterns of urban consumption and infrastructure such as transport, water, energy and food security and carbon emissions. The prospect of increased population sparks populist defences of the suburban dream and the ‘Australian way of life’ and triggers fears about the impact of demographic change on housing, on traffic congestion, and on environmental resources. Those seeking to challenge parochialism argue for a human rights perspective and a recognition that climate change is a global issue that refuses the notion of national borders and protectionist mentalities and is one that necessarily requires urban solutions to adjust humanity to its new biospheric conditions.
Centrally important in contending with Australia’s urban future, the notion of population serves at once as a statistical object of social scientists, a field of intervention for urban planners, a rhetorical resource for politicians and activists, and a spectre haunting a popular imaginary concerned with the imperilment of the suburban everyday. This conference asks: What is the future of the low density city? What are its prospects in a context in which ecological and population pressures make the infrastructure that under-grid such cities no longer sustainably, if it ever was? In the wake of these intersecting pressures, how are alternate futures for this urban form to be imagined and governed? How are its populations to be managed? Individual lives conducted? Resources circulated? How do these questions impact of relations of gender, ethnicity, and class and those between City and Bush? In addressing these questions this conference will bring together international and Australian academics, politicians and other expert speakers and commentators in the fields of cultural studies, urban sociology, urban infrastructure and population to discuss the future of the low density city in an era in which climate change and the prospect of population increase operates as a major challenge to established forms of urban life.
Keynote Speakers
Andrew Ross – Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University
Michael Neuman – Professor of Sustainable Urbanism, University of New South Wales
Abstract Submissions
Conference Themes
climate change
population
immigration
urban densification
urban environmentalism
urban planning
gender
ethnicity
City and Bush
Paper and Panel Proposals
Paper and panel proposals addressing the conference themes are invited. Those spanning one or more themes are especially welcome. Please send abstracts (up to 300 words), your affiliation, and a biography (up to 150 words) to Ben Dibley
Deadline for submissions is 31 March 2012.
Conference Convenors
Dr Fiona Cameron and Dr George Morgan with Professor Helen Armstrong, Dr Amanda Third and Dr Ben Dibley, Centre of Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia
“Asian Australian actors, directors, writers, producers, scholars and community members talk about why it’s important to have Asian Australians active on and behind the screen. Created and edited by Maria Tran, screened at the Asian Australian Film Forum & Network inaugural event November 2011. AAFFN Co-chairs Amadeo Marquez-Perez & Indigo Willing wish to thank Maria and all the contributors for sharing their perspectives and insights for present and future generations.”
Join us at Asian Australian Film Forum & Network (AAFFN)!"
“This was one of the absolute highlights of AAFF 2011 for me – great stuff! Highly recommended viewing!” – Tseen Khoo, Convenor – AASRN
“Understanding Japan’s dynamic decade”: A symposium on Japan in the 1960s
Dates: 15-17 December 2011 (Thursday 2-6 pm, Friday & Saturday 9 am-6pm)
Venue: The University of Melbourne, Old Arts, Lecture Theatre B
“Understanding Japan’s dynamic decade” explores a pivotal moment of Japan’s cultural formation. This symposium will investigate the “age of revolution”—a time when anything seemed possible and all forms of art and social life experienced dramatic change. Papers will investigate visual arts, film, performance, music and the politics of the times.
Presentations by: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Freda Freiburg, William Marotti, Vera Mackie, Holger Hartung, Peter Eckersall, Sara Jansen, Stanca Scholz-Cionca, Eiichi Tosaki, Yasuko Ikeuchi, Adam Bronowski, Corey Wakeling, Katherine Mezur, Philip Flavin, Luciana Galliano & Alison Tokita.
A symposium jointly organised by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, Monash European and EU Centre and the Australian Institute of Polish Affairs (AIPA)
This symposium addresses key challenges and questions facing both Australia and Europe: How to respond to increasing (and not always controllable) migrations? How to deal, on the national level, with widening ethno-cultural diversity? How to prevent this diversification from becoming the force of social fragmentation, ethnic fracturing and segmentation? How successful, in these respects, have been multicultural policies in Australia? What is the political future of multiculturalism in Australia and Europe?
Invited Australian speakers include prominent scholars Andrew Markus and Bob Birrell from Monash University, Jan Pakulski from the University of Tasmania, Alex Naraniecki from Deakin University, Dr Stefan Auer from La Trobe University as well as government officials and community leaders, such as Jose Alvarez and Hakan Akyol from Victorian Multicultural Commission.
The invited guest speakers from Europe include:
Pawel Kaczmarczyk (University of Warsaw, and Head of the Central and East European Economic Research Centre)
Magdalena Lesinska (Deputy Director of Centre of Migration Research, member of International Migration Integration and Social Cohesion (IMISCOE) Research Network)
Families of Fortune: Chinese People in the Tweed screening at the Powerhouse Museum
We are calling out to culturally engaged, audacious, poetic and progressive writers to take part in the We Australians Exhibition program in April 2012 taking place in Melbourne.