What's On at UWA

UPDATED with payment details. Buy tickets via:

https://payments.uwa.edu.au/DoWomenMatterSouthAsianMiddleEasternPerspectives

Centre for Muslim States and Societies, The University of Western Australia, invites you to an interdisciplinary conference, Do Women Matter? South Asian and Middle Eastern Perspectives.

The conference is being organized to develop understanding of the role South Asian and Middle Eastern women play as agents of change in the region and globally, and how this agency is manifested in different environments and spaces. It specifically focuses on their participation in the social, cultural and political arena in these societies and the challenges women face. The ultimate aim is to shed light on how women from these regions have shaped local, regional and global interactions in the contemporary world.

Dates: 11 to 12 August 2017

Times: 9.00AM to 5.00PM, 11 August AND 9.00AM to 1PM, 12 August

Venue: The Karrakatta Club Incorporated 4 Sherwood Court, Perth W.A. 6000

Cost:

Students: A$30 first day; A$20 second day Others: $50 first day; A$45 second day

Note: The costs cover morning tea, lunch and afternoon on the first day and morning tea and lunch on the second day.

Confirmed speakers and topics: Dr Huda Al-Tamimi, Effects of Iraq’s parliamentary gender quota on women’s political mobilisation and legitimacy post-2003, Australian Nation University

Associate Professor Savitree Thapa Gurung, Role of women in Nepal in shaping debates on public policy and use of authority, Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority Government of Nepal, and Tribhuvan University

Leila Kouatly, Lebanese women through film: the illusion of empowerment, The Australian National University

Setayesh Nooraninejad, Women's political-love letters and writing practices: the public dimension of personal correspondence with prisoners of conscience in Iran, The Australian National University

Dr Zahra Taheri, Breaking boundaries and raising voices: women in Iranian cinema, The Australain National University

Professor Samina Yasmeen, Women's agency in jihad: narratives of Jamat ud Dawah and Lashker-e-Taiba, The University of Western Australia

Dr M. Murat Yurtbilir, Islamist in form, patriarchal in content: role of women in Turkey under Justice and Development Party, Australian National University

Be transported from the everyday in our free lunchtime concert series, featuring the finest musical talent locally, nationally and within the School.

This week student-led ensemble 'The Perth Orchestra Project', conducted by Izaak Wesson present Haydn's Symphony No.31 “Hornsignal” plus new works by two UWA Composers - 'Motes' (Nate Wood) and 'Sinfonietta' by Brock Stannard-Brown.

Free entry - no bookings required

Now in its third season, Fridays@Five is the ideal way to kick-start your weekend! Each session offers a unique musical experience to delight all music lovers, from young artist led concerts to informal musical drinks on the famous grassy knoll, behind the scenes workshops to lectures and masterclasses. Join us each week for a delightful musical surprise!

This week, enjoy a performance of Milhaud’s 'La Creation du Monde' and Dvorak’s 'Serenade for Winds', conducted by student Shaun Fraser and performed by UWA Music Students.

Bar Open 5pm. Event starts 5.30pm. Free entry - no bookings required.

There’s so much to discover, experience and enjoy at UWA Open Day.

Get a taste of uni life as the campus comes alive with interactive activities, entertainment, tours, displays and more.

Visit the Future Students Hub, explore our campus and facilities on a tour, check out the displays and information sessions, enjoy some lunch, chat to representatives from UWA Guild clubs and teaching staff, learn more about our sporting facilities and visit College Row.

Staff and current students will be on hand to answer all your questions about courses and career opportunities. Discover how a degree from UWA will equip you with the skills needed in a rapidly changing world.

We welcome you to write your future at UWA and embrace the opportunities that lie ahead.

Visit the website at openday.uwa.edu.au to create your own program.

#UWAOpenDay

Seminar 1: How can we get more students to study STEM subjects once these are no longer compulsory? Professor Michael Reiss, University College London Seminar 2: Teaching higher order thinking to low achieving students: do they make a marriage? Professor Anat Zohar, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

It is widely understood that music, and indeed all arts, are a critical part of society and we simply could not live without it. However, the way it is funded and supported in Australia is not set up in a way that ensures sustainability. Individual artists are expected to be entrepreneurs as well as artists, often without the necessary knowledge, skills, and networks.

This presentation explores these ideas in the context of a new foundation, Arts Initiative Australia, and introduces specific examples of innovative projects that support the sustainability of music in Australia. It also offers some frameworks for discovering and clarifying purpose and impact in artistic endeavours. Claire Stokes is a lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Social Impact UWA, as well as managing the Centre’s engagement activities such as the Social Impact Festival. Also a freelance musician and pre-concert talk speaker, Claire was previously Program Manager at the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

Free entry - all welcome!

This year the BSW theme is about fully valuing the work of women so we will also be making a "WORTH ONE HUNDRED PERCENT" wall together.

Light refreshments later served 1-2pm in the NTEU Union Office 10-12 Parkway.

The challenges of global food security and climate change have re-focussed public and political attention on agriculture in Australia.

Images of dusty ploughed fields and dying sheep and trees have generated a public perception of an inappropriate “European” agriculture in Australia that belies the innovative, efficient and productive farming systems that have developed during the last 30 years.

In this talk, Adj/Prof John Kirkegaard will discuss how Australia’s innovative farmers now grow a diversity of crops and pastures without tillage, underpinned by fundamental and adaptive agricultural research.

They retain stubble to protect the soil, and use satellite-guided precision seeding, spraying and harvesting to provide highly efficient production with reduced environmental risk. Innovation is continuing apace, with rapid soil and plant sensing to guide management, better forecasting of weather and crop yields, and novel physiology and genetics to provide better crop varieties to meet the challenges, in the coming decades, of substantially increasing food production in environmentally benign ways.

Register online at ioa.uwa.edu.au/events/register

Phanom-Surin shipwreck is a western-Indian-Ocean-style sewn ship, dated to the 9th century AD, recently found in Thailand. It exhibits planks fastened edge-to-edge with fibre cordage continuously cross stitched over wadding. The sewing seams run along the length of the ship hull. This shipbuilding technique is known in western Indian Ocean regions and has different characteristics from Southeast Asian sewn boats, or ‘lashed lug’. In addition to this, the PNS carried ceramics ranging from Persia to China that help better understand the relationship between China and the west in the 1st Millennium AD through Mainland Southeast Asia. Being the only surviving sewn shipwreck of this type, it is highly hoped that the PNS can be an excellent reference to impart knowledge of ancient shipbuilding technology. Ultimately the intensive and extensive study of the PNS is one potential way to safeguard such heritage for present and future generations. This study can also help raise public awareness to fight against illicit trafficking of our priceless heritage.

The development of platform-based businesses (like Uber), which utilise on-call contingent labour to do the work, has led some commentators to proclaim that traditional “jobs” as we know them will come to an end. Instead of being employees, workers will support themselves as flexible, free independent suppliers. Some welcome this development, others fear its consequences for the stability and quality of work – but all see it as a process driven primarily by technology, and most would consider it inevitable. Standing in the way of the “gig” economy is seen as no more feasible than the efforts of Luddites to stop the steam engine and the spinning jenny.

Some perspective is needed to better understand what is actually new about digital platform businesses, and to distinguish between the technical innovations which they utilise and the changes in work organisation which their business models also require. The major organisational features of “gig” type work – contingent on-call labour, piece work, and workers utilising their own equipment – are not new at all. And the creation of more precarious jobs, including those in digital platforms, reflects changing social relationships as much as technological progress. This lecture will put the “gig” economy in historical and theoretical perspective, identifying the reasons why businesses are expanding this type of employment, and the potential regulatory and political responses to the rise of “gig” work.

A powerful award-winning film on the war against culture, and the battle to save it. Over the past century, cultural destruction has wrought catastrophic results across the globe. In Syria and Iraq, the ‘cradle of civilization’, millennia of culture have been destroyed. But the push to protect, salvage and rebuild has moved in step with the destruction. Legislation and policy have played a role, and heroic individuals have risked and lost their lives to protect not just other human beings, but our cultural identity — to save the record of who we are. Based on the book of the same name by Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory tells the whole story — looking not just at the ongoing actions of Daesh (ISIS) and at other contemporary situations, but revealing the decisions of the past that allowed the issue to remain hidden in the shadows for so many years. Interviewees in the film include the Director-General of UNESCO, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as diverse and distinguished international experts, whose voices combine to address this urgent issue. The film has screened in a wide range of settings, including at the British Museum, for UNESCO, at universities such as Harvard, Brown and Oxford, and at film festivals globally. This event is co-sponsored by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, Faculty of Arts, the History Council of WA, and the National Trust WA. Panelists Andrea Witcomb is Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. Her research focuses on the interpretation of difficult histories and heritage sites. Her books include Reimagining the Museum and (with Kate Gregory) From the Barracks to the Burrup: The National Trust in Western Australia. Benjamin Smith is Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education. He is Professor of World Rock Art. He coordinates the Master of Heritage Studies. He is President of the International Committee on Rock Art of the International Council on Monuments and Sites and a former President of the PanAfrican Archaeological Association. He is happiest when working in remote rural areas with communities on matters of importance to them concerning their heritage. John Taylor FRAIA M.ICOMOS BArch(UWA), MA (York), PhD (UWA) is a national and international award winner for heritage work. John has extensive experience and knowledge of Australian heritage, combining valuable technological expertise within the adaptive re-use of heritage places. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at UWA. Rebecca Repper is an affiliate researcher with the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa Project, University of Oxford. Using satellite imagery, the project maintains a photographic database and monitors threats to cultural heritage in the region. Rebecca is particularly interested in photographic archives and the accurate communication and utilisation of these resources. Chair and MC Jenny Gregory AM is Emeritus Professor of History at UWA. She has published widely on aspects of urban history and heritage. She is an Executive Member of the National Trust WA, after many years as Chair and President, was a member of the Heritage Council of WA and is currently President of the History Council of WA.

This presentation provides an overview of my dissertation project, which explores a new discourse of masculinity in the visual and literary culture of Japan during the 1920s and 1930s – the Modern Boy (modan bōi), commonly shortened as the mobo. The mobo appeared at a time when what had begun as a state-sanctioned project of modernity in the Meiji period had become a multiplicity of competing modernities due to diverging views on what it meant to be modern. In this dynamic context of change and debate, this thesis attempts to demonstrate how the mobo’s often ambivalent construction in visual and textual discourses was reflective and constitutive of tensions, contradictions and contestations in the struggle to determine what it meant for men to be “modern” in Japan’s interwar years. In 1928, members of a roundtable discussion on different aspects of modern life called the mobo a “zero” in comparison with the moga as a comment on the agency of the moga and therefore, by extension, the mobo’s lack of agency. In my exploration of the discourse on the mobo, I am drawn to critically interrogate this metaphor of the mobo as a “zero” because it resonates with the way his masculine and modern subjectivity was often defined as a lack – of agency, masculinity or modernity. In my interrogation of the mobo as a “zero”, I examine the ideological assumptions and socio-historical forces underpinning visual and literary constructions of the mobo as an undesirable and unviable form of modern and sexual subjectivity. At the same time, however, this research aims to reclaim his subjectivity by understanding the mobo as an embodied form of modern masculinity that lived alongside various other modern masculinities, engaging in and inspiring new expressions and practices of modern masculinity during early twentieth-century Japan. In this way, my work on the mobo not only challenges the dismissal of the mobo’s subjective agency by commentators of the mobo in the 1920s and 1930s, it also argues for the inclusion of non-mainstream perspectives of gender and modernity in our understandings of how gender construction was linked in complex ways to Japan’s project of nation-building and international positioning in the early twentieth-century.

Over the last 20 or so years in Fiji, the statements of iTaukei chiefs on gender violence have appeared to contradict the statements of gender activists who claim that Fiji sustains a rape culture. It is this contradiction and my involvement with development projects aiming to eliminate gender violence that has provoked me to revisit a broad spectrum of social theory in order to understand the way in which gender is implicated in the relationship between culture and violence. In doing so, I question whether gender violence can truly be eliminated, if only because it is legitimated in diverse ways by overlapping imaginaries in indigenous and colonial traditions, as well as contemporary global practices.

The UWA String Orchestra and Vocal Consort join forces with renowned soprano Rachelle Durkin for an afternoon of exquisite baroque music in the majestic Government House Ballroom.

Tickets $35 tickets.perthconcerthall.com.au

My paper examines how issues of citizenship and belonging within an emergent ‘multicultural’ South Korea are articulated through the experiences and perspectives of multi-ethnic and mono-ethnic Korean primary school children. Based on ethnographic and interview data and drawing on theories of ‘affective citizenship’, geographies of exclusion (Zembylas 2011; 2014) and Korean concepts of relationality (‘we-ness’ uri, and ‘connectedness’ jeong), I analyse children’s inter-ethnic relations and the exclusionary and inclusionary politics of belonging at school. In doing so, I argue that specific Korean conceptualizations of relationality are critical to understanding the cultural dynamics of (affective) citizenship and are important for understanding processes of marginalisation and discrimination toward people with multi-racial and multi-ethnic backgrounds.

Australia has some of the strongest anti-union legislation in the OECD, to the extent that they clash with international law that sees the ability to take withdraw labour as a fundamental right. We have the first generation since the Great Depression to be looking at worse living and working conditions than their parents, income inequality is at a record levels. Universities are a microcosm of this, some of the highest paid managers in the world run the universities while real wages of staff decline, stress and workloads increase. University managements hire union busting lawyers to tear up agreements and sue union staff. I will discuss the role of unions in the modern managerial university and the limits to our power as workers to affect the institution that used to be made up of “staff and students” but is increasingly portrayed by management as a business with clients where the staff’s only role is to serve those “clients” and support the organisation’s ability to make a “profit”.

A compelling new feature documentary, Shock Room breaks open Stanley Milgram’s dramatic ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiment and forces us to re evaluate its conclusions. In the wake of the Holocaust, Milgram wanted to understand why people inflict harm on others. In 1962, he staged his experiment. Under the guise of participating in a study on memory and learning, participants were asked to inflict apparently lethal shocks on a fellow human being. Milgram later famously claimed that 65% of us will blindly follow orders.

My Lai, Rwanda, Enron, Abu Graib, the Deep Horizon Oil Spill, the News of the World phone hacking – ‘I was only following orders’ is through history. But extensive research from Sydney filmmaker and self professed Milgram obsessive, Kathryn Millard, reveals that Milgram ran more than 25 versions of his experiment, filming only one. And that, overall, the majority of people actually resisted.

Fifty years after Milgram’s original experiments, Millard, with a team of filmmakers and psychologists, re-staged Milgram’s experiments in Sydney, Australia, with actors using director Millard’s unique immersive realism technique. Shock Room combines dramatisations, animation, archival film and interviews with psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher, providing new insights about how and why people refuse to inflict harm and the conclusions of the world’s most famous psychology experiment.

Millard’s feature length documentary reveals the creative consequences of the impact of art on science … and science on art.

Professor Kathryn Millard is a writer, filmmaker and dramaturg. Psychology, mental health, popular fallacies and the afterlife of images are recurring themes in Kathryn’s body of work which spans award-winning feature dramas, documentaries and hybrids. Major credits include the feature documentaries Shock Room and The Boot Cake, the feature dramas Travelling Light and Parklands and Light Years about Australian photographer Olive Cotton. Awarded writing fellowships by the National Film and Sound Archive, Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Varuna Writers’ Centre and Screen NSW, Kathryn was Visiting Fellow in Film Studies at Yale University 2012. In her monograph Screenwriting in a Digital Era (2014) Kathryn finds the seeds of innovative screenwriting in the experiments of the past. On new projects, she continues to revisit landmark psychology experiments and explores the history of colour film in Australia. Kathryn is Professor of Screen and Creative Arts at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Professor Carmen Lawrence teaches in the School of Psychological Science, Faculty of Science, at UWA. Carmen’s research focuses on the forces that drive significant social change as well as exploring our reactions to change.

Dr Nin Kirkham teaches philosophy in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Business,Law and Education, at UWA. Nin’s research area is normative and applied ethics, with a particular focus on issues in environmental ethics and bioethics.

This event is a collaboration between the UWA School of Social Science, the School of Psychological Science and the Institute of Advanced Studies.

This proposal explores how Indigenous people from the Kimberley Region materially expressed their identities through rock art, by looking at three key rock art styles - Irregular Infill Animal, Gwion Gwion, and Elegant Action Figures (highly detailed and rich in human-animal depictions) - and the set of relationships human populations established with other animals. Rock art is an ideal medium for exploring social identity/ies as it has been argued that it was closely linked to country, material culture, animals, plants, and other beings. Following this line of enquiry, my research focuses on the analysis of human and animal interactions with a special emphasis on those scenes where human and animals are engaged (e.g. dancing, hunting, etc.), from which I will propose new theoretical approaches to explain the contribution of animals to human identity. The methods consist of iconographic analysis and Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of qualitative attributes (e.g. personal ornamentation, weaponry, body postures, scene compositions, and pigments) and quantitative and spatial attributes (size of the motifs, number of elements that integrate each individual depiction, and geographical distribution) of rock art motifs. Finally, the research relevance relies on the critical re-assessment of Kimberley stylistic sequences, the linkage between theoretical approaches to identity theory and archaeological evidence, and the implementation of a relational approach that takes into account alternative constructions of identity; thus, approaching its study from a holistic viewpoint firmly grounded on rock art, material culture, and the landscape.

Recent reports of archaeological evidence from Arnhem Land show that Aboriginal people occupied Australia by 65,000 years ago – consistent with the first comprehensive fullgenome study of Aboriginal people, published in 2016. High-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands show that Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from Eurasians between 51 and 72,000 years ago. Ancestors of Papuan and Aboriginal Australian people split after about 40,000 years ago, and ancestors of the 83 Australians formed distinct groups sometime between 10,000 and 32,000 years ago. There is evidence for a population expansion in northeast Australia in the past 10,000 years. Further genetic investigations provide additional insights into Aboriginal origins and population movements within Australia. Taken together, the recent genetic and archaeological studies reveal a number of gaps in knowledge – and opportunities for Recent reports of archaeological evidence from Arnhem Land show that Aboriginal people occupied Australia by 65,000 years ago – consistent with the first comprehensive fullgenome study of Aboriginal people, published in 2016. High-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands show that Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from Eurasians between 51 and 72,000 years ago. Ancestors of Papuan and Aboriginal Australian people split after about 40,000 years ago, and ancestors of the 83 Australians formed distinct groups sometime between 10,000 and 32,000 years ago. There is evidence for a population expansion in northeast Australia in the past 10,000 years. Further genetic investigations provide additional insights into Aboriginal origins and population movements within Australia. Taken together, the recent genetic and archaeological studies reveal a number of gaps in knowledge – and opportunities forRecent reports of archaeological evidence from Arnhem Land show that Aboriginal people occupied Australia by 65,000 years ago – consistent with the first comprehensive fullgenome study of Aboriginal people, published in 2016. High-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands show that Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from Eurasians between 51 and 72,000 years ago. Ancestors of Papuan and Aboriginal Australian people split after about 40,000 years ago, and ancestors of the 83 Australians formed distinct groups sometime between 10,000 and 32,000 years ago. There is evidence for a population expansion in northeast Australia in the past 10,000 years. Further genetic investigations provide additional insights into Aboriginal origins and population movements within Australia. Taken together, the recent genetic and archaeological studies reveal a number of gaps in knowledge – and opportunities for future research.