PROFESSOR STEPHEN GAUKROGER  (University of Sydney)

"Strategies for the Naturalization of the Human in the Eighteenth Century"(work in progress)

 DR TAMARA KAYALI (University of Sydney)

"Authenticity and Antidepressants: The Role of Medication inNarratives of Depression and the Self"

 DR CHRISTOPHER RYAN (WESTMEAD HOSPITAL)

"Coercive treatment for mental illness should be based on capacity not a likelihood of harm"

(POSTPONED -DR DANIEL TRAMBAIOLO (Princeton University)

 DR SAM WILKINSON (Edinburgh University)

The Personal/Subersonal Distinctin in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

Monday 30TH APRIL

 DR SABINA LEONELLI (University of Exeter)

DR ARNON LEVY (van Leer Institute)

"Mechanisms, Causal Organization and Strategies of Abstraction"

DR TREVOR LEVERE ( University of Toronto)

"Dr. Thomas Beddoes (1760-1809): Science, Medicine and Politics in an Age of Revolutions".

In the late 18th century, democracy in England was viewed as seditious and even treasonable. French science was seen as a product of French revolutionary ideology, and French chemistry in particular was distrusted by establishments. Joseph Banks was among those who sought to depoliticize science, and to maintain scientific exchanges with French scientists even in time of war. Beddoes was a chemist and physician who advocated democracy aided by chemistry, a stance that cost him a Regius Chair at Oxford and put him, along with Joseph Priestley, on a government list of seditious characters; he worked with James Watt in the application of pneumatic chemistry to medicine, and enjoyed the support of Erasmus Darwin and the Wedgwoods; he founded a research institution to test pneumatic medicine. Politics was always present: I shall look at some of the resulting tensions.

Monday28TH MAY

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DARLINGTON CENTRE CONFERENCE ROOM

2pm Start presentations

3.30 Coffee break

3.45 recommence presentations

5pm conclusion of presentations

MOVE TO SCIENCE MEETING ROOM 450 CARSLAW BUILDING

5.30 pm Drinks and nibbles

6pm KEYNOTE PRESENTATION

DR JOOST COTE (Monash University) joost.cote@monash.edu

Modernising Java:  Thomas Karsten, colonial architect, and the 'psychology of modernity', in 1930s Dutch East Indies.

Thomas Karsten (1885 – 1945) is generally known in his role as a prominent architect and town planner in the last decades of the Netherlands East Indies.  As architect, apart from several major office buildings in Semarang and his work for the Mangkunegara palace in Solo, his architectural legacy is best remembered for his interest in the design of a range of functional public buildings – a number of markets, a slaughter house, a school, a hospital, a museum and a theatre.  As town planner, he is remembered for his contribution to town planning and the preparation of the Stadsvormingordinantie of 1938, the blueprint for colonial town planning.  This document marked the culmination of a career as consultant to numerous municipal authorities on the principles and design of town planning.

                This paper, however, examines Thomas Karsten, the colonial intellectual. I argue that his professional career was based on his conception of a ‘culture of modernity’ in terms of which Indonesia became his life-long project.  Through an analysis of the ideas developed in a sequence of articles in both professional  (Lokale Belangen) and cultural journals (De Taak, Djawa, Kritiek en Opbouw) and though his involvement in the Java Institute, the paper aims to show that underpinning his professional ‘practice’ was a Lamarkian-like notion of cultural transference. As developed in an unpublished notebook, this was a theory to explain how the colonial ‘task’ of preparing an urban Javanese ‘middle class’ for modernity should be undertaken. It constituted a ‘psychology of modernity’ in two senses:  an explanation of the psychological processes involved in the modification of an individual’s cultural behaviour and an exploration of the broader socio-psychological attributes of ‘modernity’ as a cultural consition. 

Influenced by Jungian notions of the ‘alienated individual’,  ‘the psyche’ and the ‘collective unconscious’, Karsten’s perception of Indonesia as a colonial project reflected a wider theme of disillusionment amongst inter-bellum intellectuals and artists.  Karsten’s ‘modernity’ was in that sense an ‘anti-modernity’ - perhaps even a ‘post-modernity’ - which saw positive signs in early Fascist integralism, Soviet communalism and ‘American ‘mass society’ – as well as in a reformed colonial society; it posited a movement towards (or back to) societies characterised as a ‘collective’.   Herein lay his solution to the conundrum faced by colonial progressives in attempting to reconcile ‘progress’ and culture.  Eventually, as developed in a lengthy credo influenced by diverse strands of Eastern philosophy and Western psychology, Karsten envisaged that such ‘post-modern’ communities would form an essential evolutionary pathway to a better (world) society after the war – the Unity of the World.

In the final analysis, Karsten was just one more manifestation of the colonial – the European in the East asserting the inevitability of Western modernity and claiming the right to intervene in Indonesian society – albeit one (amongst many others) who believed they were dedicating themselves to (their version of) the future of Indonesia.  

Bio:

Joost is an adjunct attached to the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash.  He researches early twentieth century Indonesia, (Java and Sulawesi) with a particular focus on colonial cultures and the emergence of cultural nationalism. He is currently co-writing a biography of Thomas Karsten, and following his translation of the letters of Kartini’s sisters (Realizing the Dream of RA Kartini, Ohio, 2008), is preparing a new translation of all Kartini’s correspondence and prose writing.  He is also currently working with colleagues at Tadulako University, Palu, on the history of central Sulawesi.