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 Research Seminar Series 2004
For details of each of the seminars see the entries for each month below.
| Month |
Speaker |
Topic |
Date |
| February
Special Event |
Assoc. Professor Elizabeth Grierson |
Globalisation and the Arts |
16 February 2004 |
| February |
Prof. Tom Nairn |
Redeeming the Time: Old and New Nationalism |
25 February 2004 |
| March |
Dr Jose Roberto Guevara |
Shades of Green and Red: Progressive contextualisation of popular environmental education practice in the Philippines |
31 March 2004 |
| April |
Dr Lesley Farrell |
Texts, Technologies and Communities in Globally Distributed Workspaces |
28 April 2004 |
| May |
Dr Richard Tanter |
With Eyes Wide Shut: Japan, Heisei Militarization and the Bush Doctrine |
26 May 2004 |
| June |
Ms Marina Haikim |
Curriculum Beyond Borders: the Politics of Developing a Critical Education for Young People in the Refugee Camps on the Thai-Burma Border |
29 June 2004 |
| July |
Mr Tim O'Connor |
Australia's aid delivery with a focus on PNG: where the money goes and the likely success rates of the new approach |
13 July 2004 |
| August |
CANCELLED |
|
|
| September |
Clinton Fernandes |
Revisiting September 1999: East Timor and Australian Foreign Policy |
28 September 2004 |
| October |
Ken Mansell |
The Shape Of Globalisation In Regional Victoria - An Investigation Of The
Effects Of State And Local Government Policy In The Ballarat- Daylesford
Region
|
26 October 2004 |
| November |
Dr Julie Stephens |
Forgetting the Third World: Cultural Memory and the Production of the 'Global South' |
30 November 2004 |
February Special Event
Speaker: Assoc. Professor Elizabeth Grierson
Topic: Globalisation and the Arts
Abstract:
The arts have arguably long represented a legitimate communicative space whereby individuals, groups and communities constitute, express, interrogate and define identities. Through the arts - broadly defined as visual arts, performing arts of dance and drama, music, design, multi-media, film, fashion, crafts and story-telling - complex mediations of social expressions, myths, traditions, values and practices may materialise for public consumption, reflection and review. Thus the arts have a role to play in the way society defines itself and the ways the notion of citizenship may play out in local and global spaces. The creative arts through mass reproduction and circulation have long departed from the entrenched academic canons of taste to become part of popular culture and a crucial and vital rallying point of the globalisation process. Today the notion of 'creative knowledge' proliferates politically as a productive force in the global era, as new technologies of production open up the category of 'art' to multi-media forms of visual communication in the public sphere. Through bringing searching questions to the terrain of the arts in policy and practice some further understanding of global complexity might be possible.
Drawing from my current research in globalisation and the politics of knowledge in the arts, this presentation considers the arts in a globalised context as it brings attention to some of the paradoxes and tensions between local and global subjectivities and practices. The arts act as a barometer to this terrain, showing who we are as a people, where we have been, and where we might be going.
Speaker Bio-note:
Elizabeth Grierson is Head of Research and Staff Development at the School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. She has wide experience in the arts as an artist, speaker, arts educator and researcher, and a PhD (University of Auckland) investigating the politics of knowledge in institutional practices of visual arts education. Her research focuses on globalisation and the arts, with particular attention to the politics of culture and identity, and the arts as a site of knowledge in institutional practices.
Publications include New Zealand Women Printmakers (1993), and essays in ACCESS Critical Perspectives on Cultural and Policy Studies in Education, Art New Zealand, Australian Art Education journal, The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography Vol. V, International Journal of the Humanities, and various international conference proceedings. She was founding editor of Art News Auckland (1992-1994), is editor of both the ANZAAE Journal and the new ACCESS Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural and Policy Studies published by the Centre for Communication Research, Auckland University of Technology, and on the editorial board of Educational Philosophy and Theory. From research on the arts and Pacific her essay, 'Navigations: Visual Identities and the Pacific Cultural Subject' is published in Kennedy, P. & Roudometof, V. (eds.) (2002) Communities Across Borders: New immigrants and transnational cultures (Routledge); and research on UNESCO's strategies for strengthening the arts in the Pacific has led to a chapter for a book to be published by Kluwer (Holland), and a paper in the 2003 CD ROM publication of NGA WAKA ANZAAE Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Art Educators Refereed Conference Proceedings of which she was also editor.
Elizabeth's co-edited book, launched by the NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark in October 2003, The Arts in Education: Critical Perspectives from Aotearoa New Zealand, was the first of its kind to profile critical perspectives on the arts in pedagogy and practice. Her current projects include further work on the globalised rhetoric of 'excellence' in institutional practices; the politics of knowledge and subjectivity; image-text discourse analysis of tourist media in Asia-Pacific; and two books: Creative Arts Research: Methods and Practices and Art and Institutional Practices: A Genealogy of Tertiary Art Education in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Elizabeth is an appointed overseas advisor to GSA the Global Studies Association (UK), elected Fellow and NZ Chair of the esteemed RSA, Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (UK), National President of ANZAAE, the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Art Educators, Board Member of the Beeby Foundation for Visual Arts Education (NZ), New Zealand Ministry of Education Advisory Board Member for Visual Arts Curriculum (2001-2002), and member of other professional and academic bodies. Elizabeth speaks on the arts nationally and internationally.
February
Speaker: Prof. Tom Nairn
Topic: Redeeming the Time: Old and New Nationalism
Abstract:
The globe of Neo-liberalism was supposed to be one from which nationalism either evaporated, or was finally 'tamed'. Instead, it has assumed the form of ascendant US nationalism and a farther round of 'colonial' revolt across the Middle East. Why is this?
Part of the answer must lie in a general misunderstanding of nationalism. A more careful retrospect is called for. And what this shows, I believe, is that in an admittedly general sense, 'primordialism' was right and 'modernization theory' was mistaken. While many features of modern nationality politics are undoubtedly due to industrialization, trade and uneven development, others are not; and because the latter are now ascendant, a re-thinking of the balance is necessary.
What the reconsideration reveals is a chronology of the '-ism' quite different from what is now taken for granted. It has come to be assumed that nationalism is 'modern' in a sense going back to the 18th century. But nation- or national-ism is actually more recent: as common parlance, it dates only from the 1870s. Only then was it universalized, by the developing great-nation contests following the US War of Secession and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe. It has been from the start an unacknowledged sibling of 'imperialism' (and hence, in today's parlance, of incipient or would-be globalization).
This is why the dark ('primordial') brother has been so easily reanimated by the End of History and 'Neo-liberalism'. Although officially confined to the dog-house by these triumphs, he remained part of the family. As Emmanuel Todd has maintained, what the time 'After Empire' must portend is a return to diversity (including nationality politics), enriched by the information revolution and economic development. The First Globalization War (Iraq) is an attempt to forestall this development, by some 'old hands' of the great-nation era, led by Bush's USA.
March
Speaker: Dr Jose Roberto Guevara
Topic: Shades of Green and Red: Progressive
contextualisation of popular environmental education practice in the
Philippines
Abstract:
The Center for Environmental Concerns (CEC) was often called a "watermelon" organisation - green outside but red inside. The colour green relates to the CEC being an environmental non-government organisation that was established to provide scientific and technical assistance to organised grassroots communities in the Philippines. It didn't take long for the CEC staff to realise that aside from the challenges of responding to the worsening environmental crisis in the country, they were faced with working within a wider social movement for change and development - often identified with the colour red - which was suspicious and at times resistant to the practice of NGO-based environmentalism.
This paper explores the practice of progressive contextualisation, a human ecology research method developed by Andrew Vayda that studies people and environment interactions within progressively denser or wider contexts. In the context of educational practice, CEC described it as a process of adjusting the module to the local context. The paper identifies the educational tensions between the context of the local and the global, the emphasis of content on the biophysical and political, and the methodology as participatory and prescriptive, based on lessons learned from more than ten years of working with farmers, fishers, urban poor and indigenous people's organisations in the Philippines.
April
Speaker: Dr Lesley Farrell
Topic: Texts, Technologies and Communities
in Globally Distributed Workspaces
Abstract:
This seminar explores knowledge, learning and the idea of community in globally distributed, technologically hybrid workspaces. Most contemporary workspaces are hybrid, in so far as they rely on texts and technologies to 'bring together physical place and cyber place' in communication networks. Most workspaces are also globally distributed in so far as they are centrally concerned with the global production and diffusion of routine and innovative working knowledge. Here I talk through examples of people at work to think aloud about 'working knowledge' as social action that is generated, mediated, negotiated and traded amongst people in the politically charged dynamic of globally distributed, hybrid workspace communities.
May
Speaker: Dr Richard Tanter
Topic: With Eyes Wide Shut: Japan, Heisei
Militarization and the Bush Doctrine
Abstract:
Japan has signed up for the Global War on Terror, with Japanese combat personnel in Iraq and a missile defence system under way. Certainly US pressure was considerable, but the GWOT offered Prime Minister Koizumi a chance to further his nationalist agenda. In fact, the swathe of post-9.11 security legislation in Japan is best seen as part of a series of changes in doctrine, force structure, equipment and public rhetoric about security affairs that began more than a decade earlier, and which can be understood as the normalization of the Japanese state. The problem is that in the current state of the world, normal states are also highly militarized.
There are four likely consequences of this "normalization": 1. US ground forces will be withdrawn from Japan. 2. All restrictions on Japanese foreign military activities will be removed. 3. Japan will make an attempt to develop advanced thermonuclear weapons. 4. Japanese forces will be drawn into combat operations in Southeast Asia.
June
Speaker: Ms Marina Haikim
Topic: Curriculum Beyond Borders: the Politics
of Developing a Critical Education for Young People in the Refugee
Camps on the Thai-Burma Border
Abstract:
Civil war and ethnic conflict have been the rule of the day in Burma for over 50 years. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people from Burma's ethnic minorities have lived in isolation in civil war zones for over 50 years. This presentation will discuss some aspects of a proposed case study research related to critical education for young people in the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. A range of factors specific to the situation of Karen people of Burma will be examined.
The presentation will focus mainly on the perceived contradiction that traditional Karen education is routed in colonial values and as does not encourage a critical approach, while the new emerging education that attempts to be critical is grounded in Western values and is, therefore, at risk of being neo-colonial. As an implication, this study hopes to offer useful experience to education projects in other similar situations around the world, where marginalized minority communities are striving to achieve self-determination.
Speaker Bio-note:
Marina Haikim is a postgraduate student in School of Education, recently returned from a number of years spent working in border refugee camps.
July
Speaker: Mr Tim O'Connor
Topic: Australia's aid delivery with a focus
on PNG: where the money goes and the likely success rates of the new
approach
Abstract: TBA
Speaker Bio-note: Mr Tim O'Connor is a campaigner
from Aidwatch
September
Speaker: Clinton Fernandes
Topic: Revisiting September 1999: East Timor
and Australian Foreign Policy
Abstract:
The INTERFET deployment in September 1999 marked a crucial moment in the long struggle for East Timorese self-determination. Given that successive Australian governments had supported the Indonesian occupation of East Timor for 24-years, the Australian-led intervention marked a significant shift in government policy. Commenting on the nature of this shift Clinton Fernandes will discuss the September intervention as part of an analysis that also addresses the role of the 'Jakarta Lobby', the construction of Australian national interest, and Australian relations with the Indonesian government. In doing so he will critically evaluate what has often been portrayed as a noble moment in Australia's history of intervention in international sites of conflict.
Speaker Bio-note:
Clinton Fernandes is a Melbourne-based historian who specialises in Australian foreign policy. He is the author of Reluctant Saviour (Scribe, forthcoming), a study of the Australia-Indonesia relationship in the lead-up to the East Timor crisis.
October
Speaker: Ken Mansell
Topic: The Shape Of Globalisation In Regional
Victoria - An Investigation Of The Effects Of State And Local Government
Policy In The Ballarat- Daylesford Region
Abstract: Ken Mansell will be discussing wider
social and economic changes in western and central Victoria, focusing
on a case study of Ballarat and Daylesford.I will be critically discussing
the peculiar technocratic emphases in the policies of the Bracks government
and how these policies are affecting Ballarat and Daylesford.
Speaker Bio-note: Ken Mansell is an historian
and independent researcher based in Daylesford. He is currently doing
his PhD at Melbourne University on the left in Victoria in the 1960s.
He helped to organise a delegation of people from Daylesford to participate
in the anti-globalization protest at Crown Casino in Melbourne in
September 2000 and his talk will be based on research he has been
conducting since then on economic development strategies for rural
Victoria.
November
Speaker: Dr Julie Stephens
Topic: Forgetting the Third World: Cultural
Memory and the Production of the 'Global South'
Abstract: In the recent apocalyptic film about
global climate change 'The Day After Tomorrow', the U.S President
thanks the countries that used to be called the 'Third World' for
their kind hospitality during the crisis. This paper will attempt
to trace the transformation of the militant Third World of the 1960s
into the benign and needy Global South of the 1990s to the present.
In an effort to advance a different theoretical framework for memory
studies it will apply and critique theories of cultural memory (usually
based on ideas of the local) to global, transnational contexts.
Speaker Bio-note: Dr Julie Stephens is a Senior
Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Victoria University and
is a Research Associate at the Globalism Institute, RMIT.
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