What's On at UWA

Academic debate about the anachronism of national borders has been common for some time. The general population, however, has been less keen to embrace such ideas. This paper considers some of the academic arguments, and then offers evidence from focus groups conducted across Australia, that indicates that in some quarters thinking beyond the nation is occurring. It argues that the ideology of the nation state remains extremely strong among the general population, who use a particular rhetorical device, ‘the principle/practical’ dichotomy, to attempt to shut down conversation about the possibility of moving beyond national borders to a state of postnationalism. However, it also offers evidence that some Australians are able to think past the taken-for-granted nationalism that this viewpoint represents, if not to consider alternatives, at least to recognise the arbitrariness of current practice. The paper considers the degree to which such arguments are acts of ‘banal anti-nationalism’ or indeed, postnationalism.

"Integrate" - Craig Ogden is Principal Lecturer in Guitar at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and Visiting Lecturer at London’s Royal College of Music. In this performance, Craig works with some Western Australia’s finest emerging artists in a concert that is sure to mesmerise.

Every year, the outstanding ability and youthful passion of the emerging artists and their mentors combine to celebrate the culmination of a yearlong collaboration. Under the baton of Head of School and resident conductor, Alan Lourens, three young artists perform a movement of their chosen concerto onstage with orchestra in the finals of the prestigious VOSE competition. In the interval, vote in the People’s Choice Award for your favourite performance before immersing in the magnificence of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. For tickets, please visit: http://www.music.uwa.edu.au/concerts/artistry

The Atikamekw are an Algonquian group, now living in three communities in the Upper St- Maurice region (Québec, Canada) and number around 6,000 people. While they have been “invited”, all through the colonial period, to gradually exclude themselves from Nitaskinan, their ancestral lands, they maintain to this day intimate relationships with their territory. In order to regain and affirm their autonomy, the Atikamekw are engaged at three interrelated levels: at the national political level, in arduous land claims negotiations with the federal and provincial governments; at the regional technical level, in their attempts to conclude co-management agreements with non-Indigenous groups of interests, like the forestry industry; and at the level of the communities/settlements, on a more social and cultural basis. The Atikamekw are concerned with the maintenance and the reproduction of their customary land tenure system, based on family territories, while constantly adapting it to new constraints, namely Quebec’s administrative delimitations and non-Indigenous activities on Nitaskinan. The Atikamekw family territories, as postcolonial spaces, have thus become the grounds of complex co-existence and entanglement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous regimes of values, land tenure systems, forms of governance, and conceptions of the forestland and its non-human inhabitants. The Atikamekw are also concerned about the transmission of knowledge, values and ethos pertaining to hunting and gathering to the younger generations and explore novel avenues to meet that objective. These different forms and levels of engagement will be discussed in my paper. Sylvie Poirier is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Université Laval (Quebec, Canada). She has done research among Aboriginal people in the Australian Western Desert since 1980 and among the Atikamekw, a First Nation in north-central Quebec, since 1990. She is the author of A World of Relationships: Itineraries, Dreams, and Events in the Australian Western Desert (2005) and coeditor (with John Clammer and Eric Schwimmer) of Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations (2004). Since 2006, she is working, closely with the Council of the Atikamekw Nation, on the documentation and valorization of their traditional knowledge, and exploring avenues to make it more available to the younger generations.

Acclaimed worldwide for his technique and musicianship, British cellist Steven Isserlis enjoys a distinguished career as a soloist, chamber musician, educator and author. As a concerto soloist he appears regularly with the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including in recent seasons with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, NHK Symphony, Washington National Symphony, and Cleveland Orchestra. Steven Isserlis gives frequent masterclasses around the world, and for the past fifteen years he has been Artistic Director of the International Musicians’ Seminar at Prussia Cove in Cornwall.

Steven Isserlis appears courtesy of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

RSVP [email protected] **please note seating for this event is strictly limited.

This year’s archaeological field school (ARCY3002) took place at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Fremantle Prison. Field work began on September 23rd and continued until Oct 4th. In this presentation we will discuss the background history of the site, the areas chosen for investigation, an overview of our programmatic agreement with the facility, and UWA’s five year on-going plan for excavation. Three of the Masters of Professional Archaeology students functioned as trench supervisors and will present a summary of their individual findings and experiences. This year’s investigations revealed insight into the history of the original bath-house, its refurbishment, the complex drainage system and its problematic nature. It also helped us understand some of the refuse disposal practices related to the upper yard, particularly the infirmary during the early twentieth century. These are but small windows into the archaeology of a very complex heritage resource, and it was a great experience for everyone involved.

In this seminar, I will give an overview of the background of the project, and introduce some of the aims of my research. What I am going to present is a study of migration as practiced by an Indonesian ethnic group, the Bugis. The Bugis homeland is the low-land central-western part of Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. As most scholars emphasise the same key word, i.e. ‘sompe’ or ‘passompe’ to describe the Bugis migrants and deny the spirit of ‘mallekke dapureng’ in analysing the Bugis migration. Mallekke dapureng literally means ‘moving out the kitchen’; interpreted as moving the whole family out to another place and not intending to return to the initial home. Although both sompe and mallekke dapureng have similar meaning, they indeed refer to different motives. The typical difference is that mallekke dapureng is permanent; while sompe refers to mobile settlers or migrants. We can distinguish the terms from the destination of Bugis settlers. Thus, my argument is focused on the permanent migration. In this case, I will focus on Bugis migrants in a transmigration area. My aim is to explore the changing meaning of migration in Bugis settlement as mobile migrants become permanent migrants. The motives of these migrants, how they create a new frontier world, and how they penetrate the indigenous community; are among the questions I aiming to answer. Furthermore, I intend to reconstruct the Bugis notion of merantau (lit. to wander) with a new interpretation. By this, the original contribution will be to bring new evidence of the Bugis process of settlement Indonesia.

Callaway Series is unreserved and ticketed at the door. All tickets are $10.00. Doors open 15 minutes prior to the event.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Keyed Up! performance by Bernadette Harvey has had to be cancelled.

Please contact music.uwa.edu.au for further information.

With a passionate interest in both solo keyboard music and chamber works, Alex’s performance experience includes tours of California, Taiwan, Germany and a vast amount of concerto, solo, and chamber music engagements in Australia including several broadcasts on ABC Classic FM, 2MBS Fine Music FM, 3MBS FM and 4MBS Classic FM.

This event has been cancelled. Tess Tsokos: Gesture and response in the primary children's choir

Free 50min Concert every Thursday during Semester at 1:10pm

Steam, Trains, Soldiers and Guns Rock art and Resistance in Northern South Africa 4-5pm Thursday, 31st October Social Sciences, Lecture Room 1 Archaeology School of Social Sciences Seminar Series 2013

Written in 1742, Handel's Messiah was almost banned by Jonathan Swift, Dean of the Cathedral in Dublin, the city in which it received its first performance. But the piece more than survived the challenge, going on in its composer's own lifetime to be seen as his greatest work. In a year of masterpieces to celebrate the UWA Centenary, there could be no more fitting a finale as we approach the Christmas season.

Mr Sanjay Bhattacharya who is part of a delegation visiting from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs will give a lecture 'Look East Policy' of India. Staff and students are welcome to hear this distinguished speaker in the Social Sciences Room G208 which is opposite the Oak Lawn.

Young people at international schools (who are often referred to as Third Culture Kids) are expected to be “international” and open to difference by virtue of their education and transnational upbringing. However, the processes involved in becoming “international” are fraught with tensions because they are embedded within national and global structures of power. This paper interrogates the ways in which issues of culture, “race” and class intersect and influence the experiences and identities of Asian students at an international high school in Indonesia. As contradictory as it may seem, some Asian students who were more Westernized than others tended to identify more as “Asian”. For some, becoming more Korean or Japanese was mutually constitutive with becoming Asian, becoming Western, and becoming international. This paper argues that becoming Asian is an expression of mutual intelligibility forged across difference that develops within transnational social spaces like that of the international school. However, international schools fail to recognize becoming Asian as cosmopolitan practice because their Eurocentric focus overlooks the diversity of cosmopolitan practices that emerge out of the cultural inequalities present in transnational social spaces. Data are drawn from a yearlong ethnographic research that I carried out a in 2009, consisting mainly of participant-observation of high school students (grades 9 to 12) at an international school catering to foreign expatriate and upper-middle class Indonesian families. I also conducted in-depth interviews with over a hundred and thirty students, school staff, parents, and alumni.

Rational belief formation involves holding beliefs with the firmness that the evidence warrants. Unfortunately, humans are known to fall short of this ideal, being prone to various forms of “misbelief”. Such deviations from rational belief range from “healthy” (yet potentially destructive) forms, such as “positive illusions” about one’s prowess and prospects, to the bizarre delusions common in certain psychiatric and neurological disorders. According to the dominant psychiatric conception (e.g., the DSM), delusions are fixed beliefs that are under-responsive to relevant evidence. I will argue that whereas many cases of misbelief fit this definition (e.g., sexual overperception, positive illusions, anosognosia), delusions do not. I will present evidence that delusion-prone individuals are actually overly responsive to current evidence. Biography Ryan McKay is a senior lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests include cognitive neuropsychiatry, evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics. He was educated at UWA (B.Sc. Hons) and Macquarie University (MClinPsych, PhD), and has held research posts in Boston (Tufts University), Belfast (Queen’s University), Zürich (University of Zürich) and Oxford (University of Oxford).

The Arab Spring has both changed and charged some of the region’s thorniest problems – from the rise of political Islam to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Israel-Palestine conflict to rivalries between key regional powers. Exploring the sources of conflict in the Middle East and their various linkages, the lecture would provide an assessment of whether the region is indeed destined for implosion or whether political sagacity and diplomatic creativity can bring it back from the brink.

Professor Mohammed Ayoob is Michigan State University's Distinguished Professor of International Relations. He has published 13 books and over 90 papers and articles in leading journals such as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Foreign Policy, International Affairs, amongst others. He recently published an edited volume with Etga Ugur entitled Assessing the War on Terror. The lecture will present the ideas contained in his forthcoming book to be published by the Polity Press (Feb 2014).

While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speaker´s arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here I discuss how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is dedicated to the distinction between the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar speakers, in everyday situations or in the forensic context, and on the processes and representational changes that accompany the learning of new voices. I describe how specific impairments and individual differences in voice perception could relate to specific brain correlates. Finally, I consider that voices are produced by speakers who are often visible during communication, and present evidence that shows how speaker perception involves dynamic face-voice integration. Overall, the representation of para- and extralinguistic vocal information plays a major role in person perception and social communication, could be neuronally encoded in a prototype-referenced manner, and is subject to flexible adaptive recalibration as a result of specific perceptual experience.

Biography: Stefan Schweinberger is a full professor at the University of Jena in Germany. He is chair for General Psychology and head of the DFG-funded Person Perception Research Unit. Stefan received his Ph.D. and Habilitation from the University of Konstanz and was professor at the University of Glasgow before moving to Jena. His research interests include the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying person perception, particularly the electrophysiological correlates of face and voice perception.

This talk will discuss some results of an ongoing collaborative research project between the Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philippines, the Australian National University and UWA on the Pleistocene-Early Holocene settlement of the Philippines. The Philippines have recently produced some significant evidence related to early human colonization episodes, including the currently oldest securely dated evidence for modern humans in Island Southeast Asia altogether. The project is aimed at contextualizing these finds through systematic identification, excavation, dating and multi-disciplinary analyses of new sites on a number of islands.

This talk will concentrate on new results from recent archaeological investigations at the Bubog rock shelter sites on the small island of Ilin (Mindoro Occidental). The archaeological and stratigraphic sequences at the two sites provide evidence on how variability in landscape formation, sea levels and landmass during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene influenced past human behaviour, demonstrating a correlation between human foraging strategies and environmental changes. The current results of this project contribute substantially to our understanding of the processes of human colonization and adaptation in the Archipelago. They complement ongoing research into Island Southeast Asia's palaeogeography and enhance current knowledge of human occupation and subsistence strategies across the region.