News
Giramondo Publishing invites you to the launch of Anguli Ma: A Gothic Tale, author Chi Vu’s reworking of a traditional Buddhist folktale set in 1980s Melbourne, when the flight of Vietnamese refugees to Australia was at its height.
To be launched by Peter Mares.
- DATE: Tuesday 24th April
- TIME: 5.30pm for 6pm start
- VENUE: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, University of Melbourne (Cnr Swanston Street and Monash Road, Parkville)
Enquiries: books@giramondopublishing.com
http://www.giramondopublishing.com/anguli-ma
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chi Vu was born in Vietnam in 1973. She is a writer, theatre maker, performer and creative producer, and she works at the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Arts Victoria. In 2000, Chi was awarded an Asialink writer’s residency to Vietnam where she wrote her critically acclaimed work Vietnam: a Psychic Guide.
Chi’s plays have been performed in Melbourne at the North Melbourne Arts House and Footscray Community Arts Centre, and in Sydney at the Sidetrack Theatre and the Sydney Opera House’s Studio program.
Chi Vu’s short stories have appeared in various journals, newspapers and anthologies, including The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature.
AASRN member Adam Aitken and Michelle Cahill will be giving talks and reading their poetry at the Deakin University Poetry symposium, taking place on the 12th and 13th April. Adam will be talking about hybridity and multiculturalism in his poetry.
Abstracts are online at http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/scca/events/poetry/
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POETRY SYMPOSIUM – The Political Imagination
‘The Political Imagination’ is a symposium that brings together some of Australia’s leading poets and poetry scholars to investigate the state of contemporary postcolonial and diasporic poetries. It aims to explore the contentious, at times controversial, issues surrounding the production and discussion of poetry and poetics in work that engages with the politics of the postcolonial, the transnational and the diasporic. Among the topics addressed by symposium participants will be opposition, identity, subversion and hybridity.
Venue: Deakin Prime, Level 3, 550 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Date: 12 and 13 April, 2012
Times: Day 1, 9.30 am to 4.30 pm and Day 2, 9.30 am to 4 pm
Comedian Jennifer Wong will be performing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) from 29 March to 22 April (yes, from tomorrow!).
For full Festival information, visit her show page for MICF HERE.
Jennifer’s biog:
Jennifer Wong is a writer and stand-up comedian from Sydney, Australia.
In 2011, she was one of five Australian comedians selected to perform in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s new talent showcase, Comedy Zone, and included in The Sydney Morning Herald’s/The Age Metro’s list of top ten new comics to watch in 2011.
She performs often in Sydney, and indulges her bookishness as a former bookseller and journalist by gigging at Late Night Library shows, bookshops, and corporate events and community fundraisers.
Offstage, she was a writer on the series return of Good News Week (2008), web editor of RoveDaily (2009), and researcher on Can of Worms (2011), all on Channel Ten.
In 2012, Jennifer will be performing her solo show on First Aid, Ouch & Other Words, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sydney Comedy Festival, and Perth International Comedy Festival.
“Smart word play and elegant cheek.” – The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age Metro
SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW (Level C, fixed-term 5yrs)
Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing, Victoria University
The overall purpose of the position of Senior Research Fellow is to support the development of the
CCDW in strategic areas, in particular grant development and research mentoring, while conducting
independent and team research in CCDW priority areas. The position will play a key role in the
development of research opportunities, preparing and submitting research tenders and grant
applications, coordinating and leading research teams, and disseminating knowledge generated through
research activities. A key part of the role is to identify, attract and secure research funding in CCDW
priority areas while progressing research projects, publications and other research outputs.
MAJOR DUTIES PERFORMED AND FREQUENCY
In performing the following duties the incumbent is required to comply with quality assurance policies
and procedures, and other relevant legislative requirements applicable to the University.
The major duties performed and their frequency are:
Undertake independent and collaborative scholarly research in relevant key research areas and
disseminate and publish in refereed journals, books, conferences and seminars, or other forms of
scientific output, to ensure that research is widely disseminated and has maximum impact at
national and international level.
Make a major contribution to research grant development across the CCDW, including supporting
and mentoring Centre members in the development of grant and research funding applications and
proposals.
Develop and maintain relationships with external funding agencies such as Commonwealth, State
and Local Governments, industry bodies, community groups and non-profit organisations in order to
identify and secure research funding and contracts.
Supervise relevant project staff to ensure that projects are completed in accordance the CCDW’s
strategic objectives and the broader University policy and procedures.
Provide research leadership and management to relevant research projects, and across the range
of activities CCDW is engaged in.
Contribute to mentoring and other forms of support that the Centre offers to its members and the
wider university.
Adhere to and cooperate with all OHS policies and procedures of the University. (ongoing)
FULL INFORMATION HERE.
The entrance to Loveday Camp 14 near Barmera, South Australia, 1945 (Australian War Memorial, ID 122983). (Sourced from Loveday Project website
ABOUT: The Loveday Project website is dedicated to Christine Piper’s doctoral research project about Japanese civilian internment in Australia that’s being undertaken at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Background: Many have heard of the internment of Japanese civilians in the United States and Canada, but few are aware that Japanese civilians were also interned in Australia during World War II. This lack of awareness could be due to the difference in numbers: there were 112,000 Japanese civilians interned in the United States, 22,000 in Canada, but only 4300 in Australia (Nagata 1996, p.xi).
Furthermore, the Japanese civilians interned in Australia were a much more disparate group than those in North America, as only 1140 of those interned in Australia had been living in Australia at the start of Japan’s entry into World War II (mostly working in agriculture, the pearl diving industry and at Japanese trading firms) – the remaining 3160 internees had been arrested in Allied-controlled countries such as the Dutch East Indies (present day West Papua in Indonesia), New Caledonia and the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), and transported to Australia to be interned (Nagata 1996, p.xi).
(Note: My research focuses on the experience of Japanese civilians rather than POWs; as such, the literature about the Cowra, NSW breakout of 1944 is parallel to my research but does not directly inform it.)
If you have a story to share on this subject, or would like to know more about the researcher, you can contact Christine here.
Photo – Heng Tang, behind the scenes.
PERIL’s special issue of Asian Australian Film Forum articles + interviews is now LIVE!
Get a taste for it with this excerpt from Lian Low’s editorial for this special issue of Peril:
“In this exciting edition of Peril in collaboration with the Asian-Australian Film Forum Network (AAFFN), we bring you a bumper edition featuring interviews and essays from Asian-Australians who have been in the industry for over three decades to emerging filmmakers.
As explained in their interview, AAFFN co-chairs Amadeo Marquez-Perez and Dr Indigo Willing reveal the reasons and impetus behind creating a network and holding the inaugural AAFFN event in Melbourne last year."
Fantastic line-up of talent and content, including:
- Annette Shun Wah’s full keynote address from AAFF 2011
- Articles by Jiao Chen, Maria Tran, and Kieran Tully
- Interviews with Alf Nicdao, Chris Pang, Heng Tang, Dominic Golding, Sofie Kim, Somchay Phakonkham, Jack Ngu, Quan Tran, Corrie Chen, Sky Crompton, Michael “Tokyo Love-in” Chin, Hoang Tran Nguyen + David Cuong Nguyen, Min Tran, and the AAFF 2011 co-convenors Indigo Willing + Amadeo Marquez-Perez, AND MORE…
The 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association
17-20 July 2012, Canberra, Australia
Registrations are now open
Conference website: http://www.iaba2012.com
The Humanities Research Centre and National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, present Framing Lives, the 8th Biennial Conference of the International Auto/Biography Association.
The field of auto/biography and life narrative studies is dynamic and interdisciplinary. Founded in 1999, the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) is the leading international forum for scholars, critics and practitioners. The Framing Lives conference will feature distinguished international speakers and events at the National Portrait Gallery and other national collecting institutions.
Border Breach: Australia & The Global Circulation of Ideas
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/history/conferences/inasa-2012
InASA 2012 Conference, Melbourne 5 to 7 December 2012
Keynote speakers: Adrian Franklin, Susan Ryan & Kim Scott
Borders obstruct through a variety of guises – geopolitically, between disciplines, across publics and counter publics. The 2012 InASA Conference will explore the conditions under which borders are breached and enforced. Attention to the transnational circuits of information, technologies, bodies and ideas is increasingly seen against the discontinuities, lapses and blockages that characterize the growing political preoccupation with border security, internet restriction and the trafficking of people and animals. Mobility itself is racialised and subject to the countervailing forces of disparate regimes of gender, class and sexuality. Security, sovereignty and secrets are pitted against protest, asylum and leaks.
Despite Australia’s economic buoyancy throughout the Global Financial Crisis, largely through its resource boom and exports markets to China and India, the nation remains anxious about its borders, and much else besides. The extradition of Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange, the decline of the Murdoch media empire, the loss of servicemen in Afghanistan, the detention of tourists for drug trafficking in Bali, the drowning of dozens of asylum seekers-all point to the ongoing dilemmas of Australia and Australians’ relationships with the region and the world. At home, the decline in the standard of debate around the critical issues of climate change, the place of Indigenous Australians in the Federal Constitution, and local versions of the Occupy movement have reignited debate about the way Australians see themselves and imagine their future. At times fretful and fearful, on other occasions Australia and Australians seem exultant and ascendant.
The 2012 InASA Conference, jointly hosted by Monash University’s History Department and the National Centre for Australian Studies, will provide a forum for much needed complex analysis and discussion around these issues through its theme: Border Breach. The conference is designed to encourage reflection on both Australian effects in transnational circuits of meaning and ideas, but also the inherently interdisciplinary and global nature of Australian studies. The movement of ideas and people across Australian borders is mirrored in the academy, compelling an immensely productive, constantly shifting context for thought and contention that this Biennial InASA conference will showcase.
Panels and papers are invited which address the following themes, in terms of contemporary debates and historical/cultural perspectives:
- Debate: climate change, corporate accountability and democracy
- Mobility: migration, diasporas, refugees and trafficking
- Difference: citizenship and multiculturalism
- Economy: trade, ethics and counter publics
- Finance: crisis, trade barriers and sovereignty
- Security: resistance, protest and hacking
- Communication: cyber activism, media empires, citizen journalism
- Land: resource, territory and place
- Indigeniety: interventions, global and local connections
We also hope to encourage discussion of the future of Australian studies itself. In its 25th year, how is Australian Studies changing to embrace new areas of scholarship such as cultural and media studies, to project Australian research and teaching beyond our borders and the challenge to engage beyond the academy? How might research in Australian studies engage with the broader national debate, through the media, in public policy and in the new national curriculum.
FULL INFORMATION, including online abstract submission form, at the Border Breach conference website:
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/history/conferences/inasa-2012
Call for Chapter Proposals – Informal Urban Street Markets
Editors: Kirsten Seale (RMIT University, Melbourne) and Clifton Evers (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
Informal urban street markets are made up of people buying and selling, fabrics and DVDs, cash moving from pocket to hand to pocket to hand. Food stall sellers sweat over open stoves. Illegal taxis compete for the business of the potential customer waving her hand in the air. Fishmongers scale and slice farmed fish on blood-soaked chopping boards. An informal banking operation operates discreetly over a wooden box of apples. Plastic products of all shapes and sizes from all over the world sit in stacks. A refugee who has just arrived in the country wanders through the stalls in the hope of hearing their own language.
Informal urban street markets coalesce around innumerable lines of living, working, representing and imagining. In the process these are made and make themselves. This book pays attention to what takes place in these informal urban street markets. We reflect on new modes of becoming that emerge from them: economic, subjective, institutional, spatial, emotional, bodily, or symbolic. How do encounters in informal urban street markets, fleeting or sustained, transform habitus and cultural capital, bodies, belonging, economics, identities, consumption and production, and material culture.
In this book we ask what can these informal urban street markets and the people who populate them teach us? Are there emergent cultural, economic, political, social, technical and environmental possibilities they can enable us to register? Do informal urban street markets generate solutions that can have a collective impact at the societal level?
A key aim of the book is to enable analyses of how relations of power interplay with all of these (Wise and Velayutham, 2009). This book will identify ways to offer support to these sites of becoming and the people who energize them. The book will locate what we can learn from becomings that occur with informal urban street markets, becomings that require us to rethink how we ‘deal with oneself, other people, and things’ (Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, 1997).
We encourage chapters that represent a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches. Examples of topics that fall into the scope of this book include but are not limited to, informal urban street markets and
- Conditions of emergence, stability, transformation and disappearance
- Regulation at the local, national and global levels
- Hegemonic models of production and consumption
- The network society: global flows, frictions and politics in local-global commodities
- Affective and embodied networks and connections
- Emotion
- The bio-cultural
- The human/animal
- Migration and everyday multiculturalism
- Reconfigurations of “the local”, “the regional”, and “the national”
- Identity – ethnicity, dis/ability, gender, sexuality, youth, etc.
- Technological, economic and/or financial innovation
- Environmental sustainability
- Waste, appropriation and renewal
- Architecture and the built environment
- Space and/or place
- Media
This edited collection follows upon the successful workshop “Street Markets: Micro-economics, sustainability, place making, and cultural identity” held in Shanghai, China in 2011. The workshop was organized by Clifton Evers, Kirsten Seale, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Maurizio Marinelli, Sophie Watson, Elspeth Probyn, Dunfu Zhang and Lili Hernandez.
Proposals should be 500 words and provide a clear indication of what the chapter will be about. Proposals should also contain the following information:
- Title of paper
- Name of author
- Affiliation
- Keywords
- Bionote (100 words)
Proposals should be submitted by email to both the editors (clifton.evers@nottingham.edu.cn and kirsten.seale@rmit.edu.au).
Mention explicitly in the email that your submission is intended for this edited collection. The proposals will be evaluated for relevance to the themes and guidance will be given. All submissions should be in .doc format.
Deadline for proposals: April 6, 2012
Deadline for final submission: January 30, 2013
Publication: 2013.
If accepted, final submissions should be no more than 6,000 words (including notes and references)
References:
- Spinosa, C., F. Flores, and H.L. Dreyfus. 1997. Disclosing New Worlds: Entrpreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Wise, A. and Velayutham, S. 2009. Everyday Multiculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
A new issue of Altitude: An e-journal of emerging humanities work (www.thealtitudejournal.com) is now online.
Edited by Clifton Evers
- Gary Crew: the Image of the Atomic Bomb’s Mushroom Cloud in Picture Books for Children
- John Gunders: Created Communities: Caboolture Historical Village
- Julie Bilby: Advertising Creativity in China
- Cheri Logan: Verbalizing the Visual: Researching and interpreting design contexts
- Spyke Boydell and James Arvanitakis: Five Questions on the Republic
- Jack Kang Jie Liu: Australian Chinese Daily, not for Australian Chinese?
Altitude is a peer reviewed journal of emerging innovative and creative work in the humanities. We particularly support early career researchers from non-English speaking backgrounds who would like to and choose to publish in English to share their research.
Altitude uses web-based open-access technologies to provide access to research. We believe that research should be freely available for fellow scholars and the general public. Altitude is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Journal articles are included in a long time preservation project that the DOAJ service is running together with the National Library in the Hague, Netherlands. Uploaded PDF’s are long time preserved at the e-Depot in the Netherlands (http://www.kb.nl/e-Depot).
Please visit our website: www.thealtitudejournal.com
