Research Seminar Series

The Department of Gender and Cultural Studies hosts a lively departmental research seminar series. Participants include staff, associates and postgraduate students from the department, as well as presenters from other University of Sydney departments and from outside, both nationally and internationally.

2012 Seminars are held in The Refectory, in the Main Quadrangle (the building with the clocktower at the top of University Drive, off Parramatta Rd). You can find The Refectory downstairs from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences office.

Friday afternoon, 2pm-4pm. Seminars are followed by drinks in the Manning Bar.

Anyone is welcome to attend.

Seminar Series convenors:Tess Lea and Elspeth Probyn
Click here to email

Semester One Programme, 2012

Abstracts

March 9
GCS new ARC projects
Pru Black, DECRA.
Flying Across Disciplinary Boundaries
The Australian flight hostess/flight attendant was a profession that took off at the height of modernisation. So, how best to talk of it now? An interdisciplinary approach to studying the history of this modern profession seems de rigueur, working across the fields of design, gender studies, Australian history and cultural studies. A major theme in my past research has been the analysis of the cultural and historical contingencies that surround iconic women: in this instance it is the flight hostess. Empirically grounded, attentive to theory and alert to knowledge transfer opportunities this interdisciplinary approach is designed to attract a cross-over audience (Curthoys, 2011) for those interested in academic and popular history, and more specifically the gendered and industrial history of a profession emerging from the corporate world in 20th century Australia.

Kane Race ARC DP
Sex and Sociability: How should we understand transformations in gay socio-sexual space and what has this got to do with HIV prevention?
In this talk I ask how we might research and theorize transformations in gay sexual and social space in the presence of online and GPS hookup and cruising devices. My questions emerge from the recently awarded ARC Discovery grant “Changing Spaces of HIV Prevention: A cultural analysis of transformations in gay sexual sociability”. In this project, I propose to use a Latourian associology to trace the changing constitution of gay social and affective space, with the aim of assessing implications for HIV prevention. But researching spaces of sexual encounter - especially those facilitated by ‘private’ and ‘mobile’ technologies - raises methodological, practical and conceptual challenges which I begin to address and formulate here. In particular, I ask how we might produce inhabited sexual knowledges, sketching some of the institutional and epistemic obstacles to this task.

Lee Wallace, ARC Future Fellow
Queer Home Life
My current research involves an interdisciplinary study of gay and lesbian domestic environments across the twentieth century. Contemporary historiographies of homosexual culture are often rooted in theoretical models that derive from subcultural and urban studies that overlook or under-value the private domestic worlds gays and lesbians realized before and after gay liberation. In addressing the relation between sexuality and space, I will also approach the broader methodological problem of reconstructing an archive of private relationships and practices that have left little documentary evidence.

Vicki Grieves ARC Project
More than Family History: Race, Gender and the Aboriginal Family in Australian History
The aim of this research project is to establish the contribution that Aboriginal history can make to the history of the nation and to the Reconciliation of the First Peoples and settler colonial society. This research project aims to provide a national overview to the history of the Aboriginal family. Beginning with the premise that the diversity of Aboriginal families has been formed as a result of a range of historical circumstances, it will explore Aboriginal family histories over space and time. The inclusion of the families in the research process and the methodology of the project will ensure that these family histories are developed out of the epistemologies of the families themselves – that is a history that serves the function of history within Aboriginal historical theory – and this will contribute to the wellbeing of Aboriginal family members.

This will be the first time a comprehensive history of the Aboriginal family will have been developed. While Anna Haebich’s Broken Circles: fragmenting Indigenous families 1800– 2000 is an important foundational work that documents the abduction, enslavement institutionalisation and cultural remodelling of Indigenous Australian children, this work will document the formation of specific Aboriginal families and chart the family fortunes over generations. This will be a means of identifying certain family types, charting the interplays of race and gender and identifying patterns of family formation as they have occurred in geographical space and over time. These may include examples of the attacks made on the development of the Aboriginal family, but will also include the stories of family survival over generations and demonstrate mixed race unions that have been functional for family development as well as those that may have been damaging.

This project is innovative in that it is an attempt to normalize the development of the Aboriginal family in order to affect Aboriginal wellbeing. This will occur through placing the Aboriginal family into a historical context of family developments generally across the world over time, illustrating how family formations are the outcome of forces that have produced similar families nationally and internationally. This project will also explore how the idea of family has changed within Aboriginal society as well as within non-Aboriginal society over time.

March 23
Allen Feldman
Between the Saying and the Said: Transitional Justice and the Echography of Tragic Witnessing
Adorno argues that the ability to be horrified - the “shudder” - is an affirmation, ultimately, of the humanity of the witness in a scenography of horror. The subject is lifeless except when it is able to shudder in response to “a total spell.” Without shudder, consciousness is trapped in reification, the shudder is a kind of premonition of subjectivity, a sense “of being touched by the other.” Aristotle in reference to tragedy’s mimesis describes an analogous concept psuchagogeo and its adjective psuchagogikon, which means to impose a movement of a soul, as in the conjuring of ghosts by the unconstrained lamenting of women that so troubled the prescriptive gendered silence of the public sphere of 5th century Athens. This disjointedness of the gestural body in effect, somaticizes and subjectifies the disjointedness of historical time; shuddering, stuttering, disjointed embodiment that becomes the archival hinge between the living and the political absentee mediates “...between two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice.”In the proceedings of the South African truth commission that I attended Adorno’s de-reifying “shudder” appeared in an antiphonal call to, and response from, the other and as authentication through acoustic and gestural collectivity. Authentication was sealed by the reciprocating social incorporation of the breath of a caller that flooded those called and willing to answer with its exteriority. This vocality emerged from the body but also from its limit and extended beyond into a provisional truth-space where it was retraced by answering auditors as their historical signature. The antiphonal choreography moved across, between and through subjects and interlocutors on and off-stage, encompassing those both present and absent, both the living and the political deportee. The agents of antiphony contoured a new cartography of truth in polyphonic screams, bodies collapsing in grief and pain, church shout-outs, the dancing of the toyi-toyi and in concurrent singing and chanting. Here embodied and expressive pain was not the debilitating blockage or disability of traumatization but rather a medium for collective truth and verifying collectivity formed around the sustaining and energizing subtraction and insufficiency of the missing and the dead. This transitive vocality stained by a history “not well lived” in turn stained the acoustic-optical hygiene of the hearings.

Allen Feldman is a political and medical anthropologist, the author of the acclaimed Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland and numerous essays on the anthropology of the senses and political violence. His forthcoming book is entitled Archives of the Insensible: Aisthesis, War, and Dead Memory (Duke 2013)

April 20
Sophie Watson, Professor of Sociology The Open University, UK. Thinking Cities through Things: A material and spatial approach to public space and the city
The materiality of urban space is analytically important but until recently it has largely been marginalised in urban studies. Thus, the aim in this talk is to bring this perspective to the centre of the analysis of the city. The paper first reviews how materiality has been taken up in the work of key urbanists. It then proposes a conceptual and methodological orientation that draws on these and sets out a way for analysing public space through materiality. In particular the paper addresses religious sites in East London. The last decade has seen renewed interest in the shaping of religious community and questions of religious identification and belonging.. Much of this work addresses questions of identity, race and diversity, but there are also new understandings of the way these elements intersect with the material and spatial dimensions of urban life which will be discussed here.

May 4
Brenda Croft
Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial (2007-09) -a case study in guerrilla tactics for secret wars
Brenda L Croft will discuss the curatorial context for establishing the inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial, held at the National Gallery of Australia in 2007, to coincide with the NGA’s 25th anniversary, the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum (Aboriginals); and issues relating to NIAT ‘07’s international tour to Washington, DC, USA, in 2009, after Croft’s departure from the NGA.

Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malgnin/Mudpurra peoples in the Northern Territory of Australia. She has been involved in the arts and cultural sectors for more than a quarter of a century as an artist, arts administrator, curator, writer, academic and consultant. In 2009 Brenda commenced as a lecturer at the University of South Australia. From 2002 – early 2009 Brenda was Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of Australia. Brenda received a Master of Art Administration from the College of Fine Arts (UNSW) in 1995, an Alumni Award in 2001, and an Honorary Doctorate (Visual Art) from University of Sydney (Sydney College of the Arts) in 2009.
Brenda has been awarded an ARC Discovery Indigenous Award and research grant for 2012 and is undertaking her PhD at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.

May 18
Jon Altman and Stephen Muecke
Extraction economics and Indigenous transformations
Stephen Muecke
With the prospect of new industries, starting with a major gas plant, the Indigenous population of Broome finds itself under pressure and internally divided. I have started working again with Goolarabooloo, who are opposed to mining on their Dreaming. Their struggle has had the effect of reviving forms of culture, that take contemporary shapes (protest camps, activist tourism, social media, rock concerts), but are always strongly linked to the traditional culture. With national and international attention focused on Goolarabooloo, my study will analyse the transformation of this confederacy of language groups in the context of industrialisation (starting with pearling in the 19th century) and tourism.

Stephen Muecke is Professor of Writing at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He worked with Paddy Roe to write the award-winning Reading the Country (1984) and Gularabulu (1983).

Jon Altman
There are increasingly dominant political and bureaucratic views dialectically echoing corporate perspectives and public discourse that the economic future of remote Indigenous people lies in the mainstream. Industrial mining is regarded as the prime site for Indigenous employment and business engagement in part because there are few other opportunities, in part because Indigenous land owners have some leverage in this production realm, and late capitalist logic dictates it must be exercised for individual and community gain. Drawing on David Graeber’s distinction in Debt: The First 5,000 Years between market (or commercial) and human economies, in this seminar I explore some of the reasons for low Indigenous participation in mining and consider an alternate form of hybrid economy that might deliver sustainable livelihood outcomes.

Jon Altman is Professor in Economic Anthropology at the Australian National University. In 2009 he co-edited Culture, Power, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining (available in toto and gratis at http://epress.anu.edu.au/caepr_series/no_30/pdf/whole_book.pdf). His chapter ‘Indigenous rights, mining corporations and the Australian state’ is included in The Politics of Resource Extraction: Indigenous Peoples, Multinational Corporations and the State edited by Suzana Sawyer and Terence Gomes (Palgraves Macmillan 2012).

June 1
Tess Lea and Guy Redden
Economies of education and social in/ex/clusion
Tess Lea
Educating for inequality – an examination of Indigenous education
It is difficult to find an analysis of Indigenous circumstances which does not promise further education and training as ‘the answer’. This talk draws on fieldwork in schools across remote Australia, starting from the premise that, for education to be answer, we need to understand how it is currently part of the problem. The disorders of policy are revealed anew, in seeing how unemployment and under-education (like subpar amenities) are turned into a problem of indigeneity.

Guy Redden
Can My School be socially progressive?
Australian schools. My School was directly inspired by U.S. frameworks mandated by the ‘No Child Left Behind’ legislation and is predicated on the idea that if stakeholders have data about school performance (based on standardized test results) they will hold educators to account, thus facilitating continual improvement in schools. My interest here is the appeals to social equity that such accountability initiatives come with. Numerous studies suggest that strategic responses to the data by educators (who are encouraged to concentrate on the students most likely to boost scores) and parents (who require various social, economic and financial resources to make the most of educational choices) do little to effect equity. In this light, I consider the prospect that My School may play a part in more equitable educational outcomes if it continues to be refined in its methodology and its data used to inform other policy initiatives