What's On at UWA

The Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novels Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) have prompted scholars and critics towards enthusiastic comparisons with the ground breaking work of a range of international writers. With her novels all set partly in the remote Gulf Country of north Australia, Wright’s genre arises from intellectual and political commitment to Indigenous people, and aspires to the idea of a distinctive ‘Aboriginal sovereignty of the mind’. Much less known, yet we argue of complementary significance, are a broader suite of writings about this region, and we address representations of cultural identity and connections to place by authors with both Aboriginal and European ancestries. With our interest in a deliberately cross-disciplinary methodology, ethnographic research complements our focus on texts, to facilitate analysis of diverse identities in a setting produced through both the resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions and the legacies of European settler colonialism. We argue that the range of authorial representations arising from this sector of Australian society provides a focus for understanding shared and contested postcolonial imaginaries about place, culture and identity.

David Trigger is Professor of Anthropology and Head of School of Social Science at The University of Queensland. His research interests encompass the different meanings attributed to land and nature across diverse sectors of society. His research on Australian society includes projects focused on a comparison of pro-development, environmentalist and Aboriginal perspectives on land and nature. In Australian Aboriginal Studies, Professor Trigger has carried out more than 35 years of anthropological study on Indigenous systems of land tenure, including applied research on resource development negotiations and native title. He is the author of more than 60 major applied research reports and has acted as an expert witness in multiple native title claims and associated criminal matters involving Aboriginal customary law. Professor Trigger is the author of Whitefella comin': Aboriginal responses to colonialism in northern Australia (Cambridge University Press) and a wide range of scholarly articles. His most recent book is a co-edited cross-disciplinary collection titled: Disputed territories: land, culture and identity in settler societies (Hong Kong University Press). See: http://www.socialscience.uq.edu.au/david-trigger

Multiple environmental changes challenge traditional notions of ecological restoration. One option for the future may be to plant mixtures of native species to achieve desired ecosystem functions such as tightly cycling nutrients, carbon sequestration, resistance against weed invasion and prevention of soil erosion. However, it remains unknown how best to do this.

Are there trade-offs among functions? Do relationships depend on the traits of planted species? In this talk, Mike will present the theoretical and empirical foundations of the Ridgefield Experiment, which aims to shed light on these questions. He will present early results, and a broader meta-analysis of plant species effects on carbon storage led by his colleague Kris Hulvey. He will end by discussing implications for continued provision of ecosystem services into the future, and would be interested to discuss potential hydrological research questions that may be of interest to the Centre.

Bio,

Mike is an ecosystem ecologist interested in how continued system function depends on community composition and environmental change. He joined Richard Hobbs' Ecosystem Restoration and Intervention Ecology Research Group at UWA in April 2010. Together with colleagues, he established the Ridgefield Multiple Ecosystem Services Experiment in August of that year.

Prior to his move west, he looked at modelled grassland response to environmental change in Tasmania, and for his PhD, back at Imperial College London in the UK, the response of phosphorus to increases in nitrogen supply in a coupled plant-soil analytical model. Throughout his work, he aims to build and test theory through experimentation, with the aim of improving management and restoration of ecosystems into the future.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

****All Welcome****

Dr Khalid Zaheer is the Scholar at Understanding Islam UK (UIUK) since May 2012. UIUK is a non-political organization established in UK as a registered charity since 2001 for spreading a non-sectarian, peace-promoting, and moderate message of Islam based on the two authentic sources of Qur'an and Sunnah. Prior to joining UIUK, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of University of Central Punjab from July, 2009 to May 2012. Prior to joining UCP, he was the Director Education, Al-Mawrid, which is an NGO established to promote research and education on Islam. Prior to joining Al-Mawrid in September 2006, he was an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Ethics at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He has a teaching experience of more than 20 years. Before joining LUMS, he taught at IBA, University of the Punjab for 12 years as a permanent faculty member. He has also taught at various other educational institutions in Lahore. Dr Zaheer's PhD dissertation was a critique on Interest-Free Banking. His areas of interest are Islamic Banking, in particular its departures from true Islamic principles, and application of Islamic teachings in the contemporary business and social environment. He regularly contributes articles to the monthly Renaissance, a leading religious English journal of the country. Dr. Zaheer has appeared in many television programs and has also given sermons at mosques, both in Pakistan as well as in the UK. His understanding of Islamic teachings and his experiences have convinced him that our present-day world is confronted with scourges of two extremisms: religious extremism and liberal extremism. He has joined UIUK to realize his dream to promote the cause of the true Islamic message, which is neither extremist nor liberal.

Be transported from the everyday every Thursday in our free lunchtime concert series.

FREE 50min Concert every Thursday during Semester at 1:10pm. No booking required, just turn up!

Dr Khalid Zaheer is the Scholar at Understanding Islam UK (UIUK) since May 2012. UIUK is a non-political organization established in UK as a registered charity since 2001 for spreading a non-sectarian, peace-promoting, and moderate message of Islam based on the two authentic sources of Qur'an and Sunnah. Prior to joining UIUK, he was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of University of Central Punjab from July, 2009 to May 2012. Prior to joining UCP, he was the Director Education, Al-Mawrid, which is an NGO established to promote research and education on Islam. Prior to joining Al-Mawrid in September 2006, he was an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Ethics at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He has a teaching experience of more than 20 years. Before joining LUMS, he taught at IBA, University of the Punjab for 12 years as a permanent faculty member. He has also taught at various other educational institutions in Lahore. Dr Zaheer's PhD dissertation was a critique on Interest-Free Banking. His areas of interest are Islamic Banking, in particular its departures from true Islamic principles, and application of Islamic teachings in the contemporary business and social environment. He regularly contributes articles to the monthly Renaissance, a leading religious English journal of the country. Dr. Zaheer has appeared in many television programs and has also given sermons at mosques, both in Pakistan as well as in the UK. His understanding of Islamic teachings and his experiences have convinced him that our present-day world is confronted with scourges of two extremisms: religious extremism and liberal extremism. He has joined UIUK to realize his dream to promote the cause of the true Islamic message, which is neither extremist nor liberal.

Science and Faith seem to be arguing a lot lately, so is their long term marriage over? The accusations are not pretty, not even true. Can we afford for them to split? Taking a leaf out of "Life of Brian", this talk will present the key players and principles of faith which pioneered modern science up to today. WXED is a series of data-rich multimedia presentations on the theme "What's Christianity(WX) Ever Done(ED) for Us?"

Derek Arnold’s research focuses on issues that arise due to the functional architecture of human sensory processing. Sensory analyses are often initially independent, can take place in different brain regions and be completed at different rates. How then do they combine across space and time in the brain to create subjectively uniform experiences? How do we discern when one event happened relative to another?

Dr. Derek Arnold completed his PhD at Macquarie University in 2003. He then took up an Anglo-Australian Research Fellowship, funded by the Royal Society. In 2006 he took up a continuing position at the University of Queensland, initially as an ARC funded Australian Postdoctoral Fellow, then as an ARC funded Australian Research Fellow, and in 2014 he began an ARC funded Future Research Fellowship.

Title: Once, twice or thrice upon a time: Audio-visual temporal recalibration is driven by decisional processes

“Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so” (Adams, 1979). A malleable sense of time is not unique to the bacchanal, but commonplace, resulting in some striking, and some subtle, illusions. For instance, after exposure to an audio-visual asynchrony, a subsequent similar audio-visual test can seem more synchronous than it would without the pre-exposure – an audio-visual temporal recalibration (TR). The underlying cause(s) is unclear. One suggestion is that TR reflects changes in processing speed. This seems unlikely as collaborators and I have shown that one can induce simultaneous opposite TRs simultaneously, and that these tend to be tied to actor identity rather than to spatial location. Another suggestion is that TR results from multiple channels tuned to different temporal offsets, with exposure to asynchrony causing systematic changes in channel responsiveness and encoded timing. A third explanation is that TR primarily reflects changes in decisional criteria. Consistent with this last suggestion, we have found that TR is strongly influenced by task demands. TR is approximately halved by asking people if sounds preceded or lagged visual events, or if timing was indeterminable, as opposed to simply asking if signals were synchronous or asynchronous. We believe the former task encourages participants to adopt more rigorous and stable criteria, highlighting the importance of these processes over changes in the responsiveness of hypothetical channels, for which no firm evidence exists.

Winthrop Professor Ted Snell, Director of the UWA Cultural Precinct, invites you to the opening of three new exhibitions: p a n o r a m a + Transcending Borders + Worldwide Backyard at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

Visit the gallery website for more information on the event and upcoming exhibitions. RSVP to the opening via email to [email protected] or by telephone to (08) 6488 3707.

The festival coincides with Chinese Youth Day and is a celebration of Chinese music and Chinese influenced music including works for chamber orchestra, string quartet, piano trio, solo violin and cello. The concert will feature conductor Raymond Yong and soloists Alexandra Isted (violin) and Jeremy Huynh (cello) performing a variety of works including the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto with chamber orchestra in the beautiful setting of the St George's College Dining Hall. Guests are invited to join the cultural festival before the concert. From 5.45 pm please come to enjoy the various cultural offerings available from kung fu and calligraphy demonstrations, fan dancing and much more. Refreshments that includes Chinese food will be served throughout the festival. The concert will commence at 7.00 pm and is free. Bookings are essential as there is limited space.

Does your child live in fear of needles or blood? If so, read on...

Blood-Injection-Injury Phobia is a fear that is triggered by seeing blood or an injury, or by receiving an injection or other invasive medical procedure. People vary in the way they react to situations involving blood or injections. Some individuals may feel disgust, nausea, or dizziness. Some people may even faint.

The Robin Winker Clinic is a Clinical Psychology unit linked to the School of Psychology at The University of Western Australia. The Clinic will be running a group treatment program for adolescents (14 years – 17 years) for Blood-Injection-Injury Phobia. The treatment is based on evidence from up-to-date research, and was co-developed by Dr Andrew Page, a psychologist and researcher from the School who specialises in anxiety disorders. The program will run for 8 one and a half hour sessions, plus a follow-up session approximately one month after completion. Through this program, children will work in a supportive environment to challenge their fears and learn coping strategies to control anxiety and be less worried when getting an injection, seeing blood, or when visiting the doctor for a medical procedure. Techniques for preventing fainting and for coping with feelings of disgust are also introduced.

What do you do now? If you would like to reserve a place for your child in this treatment program, or if you would like more information, please call the Clinic on 6488 2644 or email [email protected]

The Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences will be hosting an evening for prospective applicants to the School Leaver Pathways for the Doctor of Medicine (MD).

Year 12 students who are considering applying to one of the School Leaver Pathways are encouraged to attend.

Booking is not required; however applicants will have priority to seating (ahead of parents, teachers and friends) should there be more attendees than the venue capacity.

Scientists have wondered for some time whether plants, like animals, can truly learn from the past and adjust their future behavior appropriately. We adopted the same approach used in studies of animal learning and memory and put the sensitive plant Mimosa to the test.

We found that plants too can learn, and rapidly, when circumstances demand it, but most importantly they remember what has been learnt for several weeks (at the very least). These findings demonstrate that memory is not property special to organisms with a nervous system, inviting us to re-examine the fundamental mechanisms shaping behavior across living systems.

PS* This seminar is free and open to the public & no RSVP required.

****All Welcome****

The Institute of Advanced Studies is pleased to announce a new series for 2014. ‘On the Edge’ will provide lectures, forums and debates on a variety of topics. This inaugural ‘On the Edge’ lecture will be given by Emeritus Professor Bill Louden.

The review of the national curriculum looks like another round of the long-running left-right curriculum wars. In this talk Bill Louden will provide a personal view of the strengths and weaknesses of Australia’s national curriculum. How fair are the criticisms of left-wing bias and how hard would that be to fix? How important is it to have a national curriculum in a federation, anyway? And how does it compare with the curriculum in countries that beat Australia in international league tables?

Bill Louden is a curriculum warrior from way back. He has worked as a curriculum writer in English in the 1980s and as a curriculum studies academic in the 1990s. As Chair of the Curriculum Council he presided over the end of outcomes-based education in WA in the late 2000s, and from 2008 to 2012 he was a board member of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority – the body that developed the national curriculum. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Education at The University of Western Australia, where he has also served as Dean of Education and Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

It's a torrid space, between healthcare budgets and complex ethical questions of end-beginning of life. Much of our talk takes place in a vacuum. So, taking a leaf from "Life of Brian" this WXED talk uses multi-media to find the pioneers and principles that Christianity has contributed to healthcare. This event is an experiment in thinking beyond the silos and we are looking for you to join the conversation.

A public lecture by Emily Darling, the David H Smith Conservation Research Postdoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina.

Coral reefs are increasingly threatened by local and global stressors and there is mounting evidence that reefs are shifting into new species and communities. What will coral reefs look like in the future, and what ecosystem goods and services will altered reefs continue to provide? This lecture by Emily Darling, the David H Smith Conservation Research Postdoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina, will outline a new, trait-based approach that she and her fellow researchers have used to classify life-history strategies for global scleractinian corals, which can be used to assess how reef-building corals are changing in response to human pressures.

Cost: free, but RSVP essential via www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/darling

Migraines are experienced by a substantial proportion of the population and, appropriately, the focus of discussion is usually on the headache phase. There are often visual sequelae associated with the headache but our research has been directed at visual performance in the period between headaches. The talk will describe a number of quite long-lasting changes in visual performance. I will outline the details of those changes, outline our investigation of what other migraine and cognitive characteristics they are associated with, examine and describe our effort to ascertain what aspects of the visual pathways and visual performance are affected, how long the effects last, and describe a re-assuring study examining potential impact on driving behaviour.

Winthrop Professor David Badcock is an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow at The University of Western Australia in the School of Psychology. He received his D.Phil. in Experimental Psychology at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then held post-doctoral appointments at UC: Berkeley and Durham University before returning to Australia to Melbourne University. In 1996 he was appointed Professor at The University of Western Australia and served a period as Head of School and is currently an Honorary Professor of Vision Science at The University of Nottingham and President of the Psychology Foundation of Australia. The focus of his research is on behavioural measurement of human visual performance in both normal and abnormal groups of observers. Currently the laboratory group is running long-term projects examining 1) how humans integrate signals across space and time to perceive both the speed and direction of object and self-motion, 2) the processes that allow us to determine the location of objects within the environment and 3) the processes that help us to integrate local signals to determine object shape. This work is also being applied to determine the nature of the long-lasting changes in visual performance that arise as a consequence of migraine headaches, to early detection and functional understanding of the losses associated with Glaucoma and to an investigation of the unusual pattern of strengths and weaknesses of the visual processing in Autism.

This book was funded by a University Centenary Grant with detailed vignettes of 71 places named after personalities on the Crawley Campus. An initiative of the UWA Historical Society, it includes a fold-out map showing each location. Join the authors and their many supporters for the launch.

A lecture by Professor Norman Sartorius, President, Association for the Improvement of Mental Health Programmes & former director of the World Health Organization’s Division of Mental Health.

Stigma attached to mental illness is the main obstacle to progress in the field of mental health.

It affects the life of people who suffer from mental illness, their families, mental health services and treatment methods used in dealing with mental illness. In fighting stigma, countries, as well as agencies and institutions, have adopted a number of postulates which need re-examination because they did not allow as much success to anti stigma programmes as one would expect from the investment made.

The lecture will discuss these postulates and propose ways in which they could be re-formulated so as to allow the development of effective interventions against stigma and its consequences.

Cost: free, but RSVP required via http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/sartorius

Do you live in fear of needles or blood? If so, read on...

Blood-Injection-Injury Phobia is a fear that is triggered by seeing blood or an injury, or by receiving an injection or other invasive medical procedure. People vary in the way they react to situations involving blood or injections. Some individuals may feel disgust, nausea, or dizziness. Some people may even faint.

The Robin Winker Clinic is a clinical psychology unit linked to the School of Psychology at The University of Western Australia. The Clinic will be running a group treatment program for Blood-Injection-Injury Phobia. The treatment is based on evidence from up-to-date research, and was co-developed by Dr Andrew Page, a psychologist and researcher from the School who specialises in anxiety disorders. The program will run for 8 two-hour sessions, plus an initial assessment session before the group commences and a follow-up session 4-6 weeks after completion. Through this program, individuals will work in a supportive environment to challenge their fears and learn coping strategies to control anxiety and be less worried when getting an injection, seeing blood, or when visiting the doctor for a medical procedure. Techniques for preventing fainting and for coping with feelings of disgust are also introduced.

What do you do now? If you or someone you know would like to take part in this treatment program, or if you would like more information, please call the Clinic on 6488 2644 or email [email protected]

Dates: 6-8pm, Tuesday May 13th to Tuesday July 1st. Fees: $30 per session and $35 for the assessment, 25% discount if paid up front. Reduced fees are available for full time students and pensioners. UWA Location: Robin Winkler Clinic, 1st floor, Third General Purpose Building, Myers St.

The Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences will be hosting an evening for prospective students: to one of the School Leaver Pathways for the Doctor of Dental Medicine (DMD), to one of the Graduate Pathways for the DMD or to the Graduate Pathway for the Doctor of Podiatric Medicine (DPM).

Year 12 students, university students and university graduates who are considering applying to the DMD are encouraged to attend. University students and graduates who are interested in applying to the DPM are also encouraged to attend.

Booking is not required; however applicants will have priority to seating (ahead of parents and friends) should there be more attendees than the venue capacity.