What's On at UWA

Perth has long relied on its ground water resources. Today just under half of Perth’s water supply comes from ground water. The science of our water resources is a fascinating story of different aquifers and how they interact with the landscape around Perth. The story of how we have tapped into these different aquifers over time and their potential for the future is a fascinating journey that stretches from the scandalous to the most modern water-cooling technology. This presentation will provide a unique insight into the science behind our ground water and share personal experience ranging from hot springs on Garden Island to wild brumbies to cooling a supercomputer. The annual George Seddon Lecture is sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Studies and UWA’s Friends of the Grounds. About Dr Clark Dr Clark was CEO of the CSIRO from 2009-2014. Prior to CSIRO, she held various roles with Western Mining Corporation, was a director at NM Rothschild and Sons (Australia) and was vice president, Technology and subsequently Health, Safety, Environment, Community and Sustainability with BHP Billiton. She has a PhD from Queen’s University, Canada and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Australian Institute on Mining and Metallurgy and the Australian Institute of Company Directors. In 2014, she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. She is currently at non-executive director of Rio Tinto and CSL Limited and an advisory board member of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia and the Australian Agricultural Company.

The Earth sits in a cosmic shooting gallery. Phil will talk about the window that the Desert Fireball Network gives us on asteroid impacts, and how the project might change our understanding of how planetary systems form. It will look at the journey that these rocks have taken, from their origins far beyond the orbit of Mars, to their landing sites in the Australian desert, and the excitement of searching for them in the Australian bush.

This public lecture is sponsored by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). Professor Phil Bland came to Australia in 2012 on a ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. He is on science teams for several space missions, including the NASA OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission which launched last year. His research focusses on the origins and early evolution of the solar system. In 2006 Asteroid ‘1981 EW21’ was renamed ‘(6580) Philbland’ for contributions to planetary science. Most recently his work has included construction of the Desert Fireball Network – the worlds largest planetary observational facility, built to track meteorites to the ground, and recover them from desert areas of Australia. The system allows us to track meteorites back to their source regions in the solar system.

In this lecture Dr Martin will present different high order numerical tools using finite-difference or finite element approaches to propagate seismic waves in a wide variety of Earth structures at different scales in order, in the near future, to couple them through different physics related to different frequency content of the sources involved. He will discuss two applications that could be linked in the future: the Pyrenees chain imaging at moderate source frequencies and wet/dry (non-)linear viscoelastic wave modelling in wet/dry/non-consolidated granular materials in the near surface. Dr Martin will present a hybrid inversion method that allows us to image density distributions at the regional scale using both seismic and gravity data. One main goal is to obtain densities and seismic wave velocities (P and S) in the lithosphere with a fine resolution to get important constraints on the mineralogic composition and thermal state of the lithosphere. In the context of the Pyrenees (located between Spain and France), accurate Vp and Vs seismic velocity models are computed first on a 3D spectral element grid at the scale of the Pyrenees by inverting teleseismic full waveforms. In a second step, Vp velocities are mapped to densities using empirical relations to build an a priori density model. BGI and BRGM Bouguer gravity anomaly data sets are then inverted on the same 3D spectral element grid as the Vp model at a resolution of 1-2 km by using high-order numerical integration formulae. This procedure opens the possibility to invert both teleseismic and gravity data on the same finite-element grid. It can handle topography of the free surface in the same spectral-element distorted mesh that is used to solve the wave equation, without performing extra interpolations between different grids and models. WGS84 elliptical Earth curvature, SRTM or ETOPO1 topographies are used. Dr Martin will reproduce numerically the response of seismic waves in granular/porous media at the laboratory scale (01.-10kHZ sources) and this will enable us to better understand the signals recorded close to the surface when high frequency content will be used to better image the near surface, in particular by taking into account seasonal water content variations and complex rheologies and steep seismic velocity gradients present in the first hundred meters depths. Dr. Roland Martin is a senior research scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research, Universit̩ Paul Sabatier РToulouse 3, France and has been working for many years in France where he obtained his PhD in Geophysics (1998). He has been a researcher in Mexico City (1999-2004) before integrating the French CNRS (equivalent to the Australian CSIRO) in 2005 at Pau University and GET laboratory in Toulouse. His main interests are the numerical modelling in geophysics at different scales using different numerical techniques for the forward and inverse problems. He is developing and applying those techniques to the modelling and imaging the Earth at different scales: from the near subsurface or laboratory scale to the Earth crust scale with some specific sites of study like the well monitored Pyrenees chain located between Spain and France. Seismic and gravity dense measurements are mainly used to obtain more information on both seismic wave velocities and densities in the Earth crust and to couple the structures to the surface using not only high resolution numerical tools but also more complex physics in solid-fluid mechanical systems. In 2017, Roland was awarded an Institute of Advanced Studies Robert and Maude Gledden Visiting Senior Fellowship.

China has enjoyed almost four decades of high economic growth. This growth has slowed in recent years due to rising domestic wages, a rapidly ageing population and falling demand for exports.

Further growth will rely on economic restructuring and deepening reforms. This China in Conversation brings two prominent economists together to discuss China’s economic growth from an Australian and Chinese perspective.

Join in the conversation and learn how China can overcome the obstacles and sustain economic growth, while considering the implications for the Australia-China economic relationship.

This China in Conversation public event is proudly presented by the Confucius Institute in partnership with the UWA Business School, as part of The 29th Chinese Economics Society of Australia (CESA) Annual Conference.

Confucius Institute at UWA is dedicated to the strengthening of cultural and educational ties between China and Western Australia.Each China in Conversation public event opens a dialogue between a Chinese and an Australian expert on topical subjects, from culture to education and from science to economics.

REGISTER YOUR ATTENDANCE HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/china-in-conversation-rebalancing-and-sustaining-chinas-economic-growth-tickets-34268613345

http://www.confuciusinstitute.uwa.edu.au/china-in-conversation-rebalancing-and-sustaining-chinas-economic-growth/

Vascularization continues to represent a major challenge in the successful implementation of regenerative strategies. Current approaches for inducing vascularization in vivo include pre-forming a vasculature ex vivo, and the use of a variety of strategies to stimulate vascularization in situ. Vessel network assembly within 3D tissues can be induced in vitro by means of co-culturing of endothelial cells, fibroblasts and cells specific to the tissue of interest. This approach supports formation of endothelial vessels and promotes endothelial and tissue-specific cell interactions. In addition, we have shown that in vitro pre-vascularization of engineered tissue can promote its survival and vascularization upon implantation and that implanted vascular networks, can anastomose with host vasculature and form functional blood vessels in vivo.

Sufficient vascularization in engineered tissues can be achieved through coordinated application of improved biomaterial systems with proper cell types. We have shown that vessel network maturity levels and morphology are highly regulated by matrix composition and analyzed the vasculogenic dynamics within the constructs. In addition, we have recently shown that adipose-derived endothelial cells and mesenchymal stem cells enhance vascular network formation on 3D constructs in vitro and can contribute to in vivo vascularization of tissue-engineered flaps. We also explored the effect of mechanical forces on vessels organization and demonstrated that morphogenesis of 3D vascular networks is regulated by tensile forces. Revealing the cues controlling vascular network properties and morphology can enhance in-vitro tissue vascularization and improve graft integration prospects..

Professor Levenberg conducts interdisciplinary research on stem cells and vascular tissue engineering. She did her PhD at the Weizmann Institute on cell adhesion and her post doctorate research at MIT on stem cells tissue engineering with Professor Robert Langer, a world leader in biomaterials, drug delivery and tissue engineering. In 2004 she joined the Technion Faculty of Biomedical Engineering. During 2011-2012 she spent her sabbatical year as a visiting professor at the Wyss institute at Harvard University. In her research she studies the mechanical control of tissue assembly in vitro and in vivo with a focus on vessel network formation and anastomosis in engineered tissues. She is also developing micro bioreactors and nanoliter droplet devices for stem cell growth and manipulations and for early diagnostic applications. Levenberg is currently the elected Dean of the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Technion and a member of the Israel National Bioethics Committee.

To most North Americans and Europeans otters are highly esteemed for intelligence, playfulness, and attractiveness. These qualities have contributed to otters receiving considerable research and conservation attention in North America and Europe. Additionally, such favourable attitudes and otters’ dependence on aquatic habitats offer potential for otters to serve as an aquatic flagship species to promote aquatic conservation. However, little is known about public attitudes towards otters outside of North America and Europe, and characteristics of a species that engender support from the public vary considerably among cultures.

Dr. Serfass developed a 5-point conceptual model/approach comprised of 5-elements to serve as a basis for evaluating and developing an aquatic flagship species based on ecotourism: 1) presence at tourist-focused areas; 2) viewing opportunities—when, where, and how; 3) public support & tourist/tour operator interest; 4) public education and involvement, and 5) promotion of long-term persistence/ monitoring.

In this lecture Professor Serfass will review research outcomes and conservation experiences related to the North American river otter (Lontra canadensis) in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, USA and the spotted-necked otter (Hydrictis maculicollis) in Rubondo Island National Park, Tanzania to demonstrate the potential for the model to be applied in developing these species as aquatic flagships. He will also discuss potential challenges likely to be imposed by differing environmental, cultural, economic, and wildlife conservation policies/systems. Additionally, he will identify virtues and liabilities in using a game species, such as the river otter, to promote a holistic environmental agenda (in this case aquatic conservation) by contrasting it to the preservationist approach often followed by government agencies.

Professor Tom Serfass is Professor of Wildlife Ecology and former Chair in the Department of Biology and Natural Resources at Frostburg State University, and Adjunct Professor at the Appalachian Laboratory – University of Maryland (College Park) Centre for Environmental Science. A large portion of his research and conservation activities focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of wildlife restoration programs and recovering wildlife populations – particularly mesocarnivores. Tom conceived and coordinated the successful Pennsylvania River Otter (Lontra canadensis) and Fisher (Pekania pennanti) Reintroduction Projects. Tom is the North American Coordinator and African Co-coordinator of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources’ Otter Specialist Group.

A public lecture by Ned Curthoys, English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia.

In a famous and enduringly influential reading of Jane Austen’s novels, the moral philospher Alasdair MacIntyre argues in his germinal work of moral philosophy After Virtue (1981) that Austen was the ‘last, great effective voice of that tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues’. MacIntyre suggests that Austen’s novels promote a catalogue of virtuous behaviours including amiability, practical intelligence, constancy, humility, and a capacity for self-examination. These intrinsic virtues, practised by Austen’s heroines and heroes, can be considered to build character in a manner that can be distinguished from the simulated charms of personages in her novels who are focused on external goods such as wealth and reputation. It is essential to MacIntyre’s conception of the virtues that they are not timeless and universal, but relevant to particular societies in their struggle against the vices and social ills of their age. Perhaps controversially MacIntyre insists that for Austen the ‘touchstone of the virtues is a certain kind of marriage and indeed a certain kind of [English] naval officer’. For Austen companionate marriage is conceived in patriotic and conservative terms as supporting a well ordered household and stable social structures. Austen’s emphasis on constancy as a cardinal virtue is buttressed, argues MacIntyre, by her powerful moral criticism of irresponsible parents, and guardians, and the caprice of younger romantics such as Marianne Dashwood.

This lecture will explore the strengths and weaknesses of MacInytre’s interpretation of Austen’s novels and its subsequent critical reception. It will emphasize that MacIntrye is contributing to an ongoing repositioning of Austen as a novelist with moral and philosophical intentions. It will examine MacIntyre’s interpretation of Austen alongside recent scholarship pointing to her reinvention of literary genres focused on manners and social etiquette and her promotion, following David Hume, of the ‘education of the passions’. Lastly the lecture will discuss Austen’s indebtedness to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s discourse on the profound moral significance of robust and convivial conversation.

About this Series - New Perspectives on Jane Austen On the two-hundredth anniversary of her death, this UWA Institute of Advanced Studies - Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Lecture Series presents new perspectives on the life and work of Jane Austen. Drawing upon the latest literary and historical research, UWA researchers tackle key themes in Austen's work and the wider social and cultural contexts in which she created her now world-famous novels.

This masterclass gives an overview of the fuzzy-modelbased control systems with emphasis on stability analysis, in particular for the issues of relaxation of stability analysis results. The development of FMB control from the concept of fuzzy logic first proposed in 1965 and early stage of fuzzymodel-free control ideas to the state-of-the-art FMB control system analysis will be presented as a start. It then walks through the beauty of fuzzy-model-free control to the advance of fuzzy-model-based control. Professor Lam will then present his notion on the partially/imperfectly premise matching and membership-function-dependent analysis, which bring the stability analysis of fuzzy-model-based control system to another level from the point of view on applicability, practicality, design issues and relaxation of stability analysis. In short, the design constraints and conservativeness of stability analysis are alleviated compared with the traditional approach. Various practical applications will be demonstrated in support of the claims.

Professor Hak Keung Lam received the B.Eng. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, in 1995 and 2000, respectively. During the period of 2000 and 2005, he worked with the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as PostDoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow respectively. He joined as a Lecturer at King’s College London in 2005 and is currently a Reader. His current research interests include intelligent control and computational intelligence. He has served as a program committee member, international advisory board member, invited session chair and publication chair for various international conferences and a reviewer for various books, international journals and international conferences. He is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, IET Control Theory and Applications, International Journal of Fuzzy Systems and Neorocomputing; and guest editor for a number of international journals. He is a coeditor of two edited volumes: Control of Chaotic Nonlinear Circuits (World Scientific, 2009) and Computational Intelligence and Its Applications (World Scientific, 2012), and author/coauthor of three monographs: Stability Analysis of Fuzzy-Model-Based Control Systems (Springer, 2011), Polynomial Fuzzy Model Based Control Systems (Springer, 2016) and Analysis and Synthesis for Interval Type-2 Fuzzy-Model-Based Systems (Springer, 2016).

This masterclass is jointly organised by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the Complex Data Modeling Engineering for Remote Operations (ERO) group, UWA Faculty of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences.

‘The whole universe is one single nest,’ from the Upanishads, adopted as a motto by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). In this special talk, Peter Underwood will discuss two recent radio snippets broadcast on Radio National, both concerning medical research.

Peter Underwood is a doctor, academic and writer. An Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, he is a Vice President of the Medical Association for Prevention of War (www.mapw.org.au). He lives in Perth and Denmark, WA.

'I was born in Perth, studied science and then medicine at UWA, and after a spell as a doctor in Oz’s far north, travelled slowly through India and Central Asia, a life changing experience.

Eventually reaching London, I completed post-graduate studies but fell under the spell of both EF Schumacher of Small is Beautiful, and, though irredeemably irreligious, some radical groups practicing ‘liberation theology’. As a result, I ended up with my then-wife and tiny child working as volunteers for several years in the remote mountains of North Yemen.

Returning to Perth and UWA, I was a founder of UWA’s Department of General Practice but continued to work and travel in 'wild places’. In my teaching and research in medicine I have tried to emphasise the ‘human’ and the 'social’ against the notion of humans as elevated bits of clockwork. I believe that this impoverished idea of what we are and can be underlies our increasingly narcissistic and commodified world.

I now share my time between writing and broadcasting, some medical teaching and consulting, running a small farm, looking after my grandchildren, and peace and environmental activism. I reckon Santayana’s saying that 'life is not a spectacle nor a feast but a predicament' is baloney: life is all three'. 

Aspirin has been used to relieve pain and discomfort for thousands of years and has been commercially available for more than 100 years. Today it is one of the most widely used drugs globally and can be obtained without prescription from most supermarket and corner stores.

Scientific discoveries detailing the mechanism of action and the benefits of aspirin for patients are detailed in thousands of research papers published over the past century. People were aware of aspirin’s analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties long before any research was performed, but it was not until scientists found that it reduced blood clotting that aspirin transformed the management of patients with cardiovascular disease. Aspirin’s cardiovascular benefits are explained by its unique pharmacology. When taken at low doses, aspirin is cleared from the circulation within an hour. It takes only minutes for aspirin to permanently block the blood platelets that cause heart attack and stroke, and its rapid clearance limits the potentially harmful effects of aspirin on the walls of blood vessels when it is given in higher doses.

Recent discoveries have further refined our understanding of the cardiovascular benefits of aspirin. The evidence supporting its use for the treatment of heart attack and stroke is overwhelming, but we are now less certain of its benefits for “primary” prevention in persons without a history of cardiovascular disease, and aspirin may even be harmful when used for this reason in older persons. Possibly balancing this concern is the unexpected finding that continued use of aspirin for more than a decade prevents the onset of cancer.

Current aspirin research focuses on the evaluation of aspirin for new indications, optimizing its benefits with alternative dosing regimens, and reducing the risks of bleeding. Aspirin does not fully protect against the risk of a further heart attack or stroke, and trials currently underway are exploring whether its use in combination with other treatments is more effective. Efforts to replace aspirin with potentially more effective and safer new designer drugs have so far proven unsuccessful, and in the meantime new aspirin discoveries continue unabated.

How long can this old dog continue to surprise us with new tricks?

John Eikelboom, MBBS, MSc, FRCPC is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, McMaster University, and haematologist in the Thrombosis Service, Hamilton General Hospital, Ontario, Canada. He originally trained in Internal Medicine and Haematology in Perth, Australia and subsequently moved to Hamilton to take up a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine. Dr Eikelboom has co-authored more than 500 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His current research, supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, focuses on the efficacy and safety of antithrombotic therapies, outcomes after blood transfusion and bleeding, and the mechanisms of variable response to antiplatelet drugs.

It is generally agreed that 1% of the prison population are innocent inmates who are the victims of injustice. This presentation will detail two wrongful convictions in 1961 and 1963 and how a Perth journalist with no legal training could succeed in gaining the innocent men’s exonerations 40 years later, winning against the odds after they had lost seven combined appeals in the 60s.

When John Button’s manslaughter conviction was quashed by the WA Court of Criminal Appeal in 2002, and Darryl Beamish’s wilful murder conviction was quashed in 2005, they were the longest standing convictions to be overturned in Australia.

As well as the exonerations, the work corrected Perth’s history. Eric Edgar Cooke, the perpetrator of the two murders and the last person executed in WA, had been remembered for killing six people and attempting to kill two more in 1963. Cooke is now recognised for eight murders and 14 attempted murders over a five-year period from 1958.

The work also gave a voice to 12 of Cooke’s previously-unknown attempted murder victims, gave hope to innocent prisoners and raised public awareness of wrongful conviction and its causes: police misconduct including blinkered investigation, over-zealous prosecutors, weak legal representation for the uneducated and marginalised, false confessions, fabricated evidence by witnesses with incentives, faults in forensics, eyewitness misidentification and fallible memory. While not the cause in the Button and Beamish cases, the fallibility of eyewitness memory has been found to be the greatest contributor to wrongful conviction – 72% of eyewitness identifications being wrong in the US Innocence Project’s successful exoneration cases.

This lecture is part of the 2017 Limina Collective Conference - Memory: Myth and Modernity. Visit www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au for more information.

Estelle Blackburn is a writer whose determined sleuthing uncovered the truth about Perth’s most notorious serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke. Her investigative journalism, authorship of Broken Lives and citizen advocacy led to the exoneration of convicted killers John Button and Darryl Beamish, 40 years after they were wrongfully convicted of Cooke murders. Estelle was a journalist for The West Australian then the ABC, before becoming a press secretary to several WA Ministers and a Premier. The winner of many awards including an OAM, WA Citizen of the Year (Arts and Entertainment), WA Woman of the Year, Premier’s Award for non-fiction, and journalism’s top honour, a Walkley Award for the most outstanding contribution to the profession, she is also an inductee into the WA Womens Hall of Fame. Now working in Canberra, Estelle still spends her spare time crusading against wrongful conviction.

In this Talking Allowed, Robin McClellan will explore the ways in which art can be utilized as a galvanising tool to provoke thought leadership, by challenging and encouraging discussion whilst also evoking emotional connection to social issues and new ways of being. Robin McClellan is the Chief Executive Officer of Leadership WA. Prior to this role, Robin was the Director of Minerals Research Initiatives at Curtin University. Before that she was based in Singapore as ExxonMobil Corporation’s Senior Advisor for Asia Pacific Government Relations. From 2004 to 2007 she served as the US Consul General during her 24-year career in the US diplomatic service.

‘Talking Allowed’ is a new series of presentations offered by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

On the second Tuesday of every month, a UWA academic will give a short presentation on a topic of current relevance to the arts and culture before inviting the audience to participate in discussion and debate.

‘Talking Allowed’ is designed to be thought-provoking, challenging, stimulating and engaging. Come along and join the dialogue on matters that are of great importance to our society.

Martin Luther was the media superstar of his time. Thousands of painted and printed portraits of Luther were issued particularly during the early years of the Reformation. Some were even signed by Luther in the first recorded instance of a celebrity sending out autographed portraits. These likenesses did not simply chronicle Luther’s life, they created his image - as a doctor of the Church, as a divinely inspired prophet, as a heroic outlaw, or (in the hands of Luther’s adversaries) as a devilish miscreant.

This lecture will explore how these portraits both responded to and boosted Martin Luther’s importance to the success of the Reformation, as they lent a face to the cause and allowed wider audiences to follow the fate of a charismatic figurehead.

Susanne Meurer is a lecturer in Art History at UWA. Her research interests are art historiography, prints and printmaking, Northern Renaissance and Baroque. Her most recent publication is “Aus aller Herren Länder” – Die Künstler der Teutschen Academie von Joachim von Sandrart, ed. by Susanne Meurer, Anna Schreurs, Lucia Simonato, Brepols 2015.

About this Series

On the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, this UWA Institute of Advanced Studies – Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Lecture Series reconsiders the legacy of Martin Luther, who in 1517 published Ninety-Five Theses criticising the Church’s sale of indulgences. From diverse historical perspectives, UWA researchers tackle key issues regarding Luther’s life, his thought, and his significance for the momentous changes that Europe underwent during his lifetime.

http://www.mems.arts.uwa.edu.au/

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

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.

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.

How can a photograph of nothing—of nothing discernable or apparently significant—be said to offer some useful political purchase on the world it inhabits? How can a photograph that represents, but does not depict, a given situation be freighted with historical knowledge and import? Confining itself primarily to examples of cameraless photography, from the 1830s to now, this paper will ask these questions with a view to determining a politics for such photographs in the present. It will argue that photographs which draw attention to their own coming into being assume photography is always already a politics; by engaging the visual and chemical grammar of the photograph, they dispute and challenge the fixity of that politics. In any case, to make such photographs today returns photography to a unique, hand-made craft and away from global capitalism and its vast economies of mass production and exploitation. Not that these photographs are innocent; on the contrary they are often generated by actions that are toxic, radioactive, enigmatic, violent, dangerous. Nor are they “abstract.” Instead, I will argue, they redefine the nature of both photography’s realism and its potential as a political agent.

Professor Geoffrey Batchen teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, specializing in the history of photography. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004), William Henry Fox Talbot (2008), What of Shoes? Van Gogh and Art History (2009), Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010) and More Wild Ideas (forthcoming in Chinese, 2017). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012). In April 2016 his exhibition, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, opened at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. A book of the same name was published last year by Prestel. In October 2017 an exhibition curated under the direction of Batchen and titled Apparitions: The Photograph and its Image will open at the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington.

One of photography’s most distinctive features is its schizophrenia. Capable of shifting shape and identity in the blink of an eye, photography has always encompassed both material and immaterial manifestations, both physical objects grounded in specific configurations of time and space, and apparitional images floating free of any particular substrate and capable of endless reproduction in a variety of media and formats. The result is a process of spatial and temporal migration that makes photography a difficult phenomenon to define or fix in place. My seminar will trace a history for this migration, examining the consequences of the reproducibility of photographs, the role of the negative in the practice of analog photography, the relationship of a photograph to its image, and the various theoretical and practical challenges all this raises for the collection and study of photography. Participants will be invited to debate some proposed solutions to these challenges.

Reading

Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Origins without End,’ in Tanya Sheehan and Andres Zervignon eds., Photography and Its Origins (New York: Routledge, 2014), 67-81.

Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Double Displacement: Photography and Dissemination,’ in Thierry Gervais ed., The ‘Public’ Life of Photographs (Toronto: Ryerson Image Center/The MIT Press, 2016), 38-73.

Professor Geoffrey Batchen teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, specializing in the history of photography. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004), William Henry Fox Talbot (2008), What of Shoes? Van Gogh and Art History (2009), Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010) and More Wild Ideas (forthcoming in Chinese, 2017). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012). In April 2016 his exhibition, Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, opened at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. A book of the same name was published last year by Prestel. In October 2017 an exhibition curated under the direction of Batchen and titled Apparitions: The Photograph and its Image will open at the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington.

International media and popular culture have been perpetuating the presumption that criminals of Calabrian origins around the world must belong to, and replicate the structure of, the mafia-type Calabrian ‘ndrangheta clans in Italy. This presumption has been largely confirmed by Italian authorities and recently been considered by Australian ones. However, without analysis of the mechanisms of mafia mobility in the particular contexts of Australian cities and communities there is a danger of replicating awed conceptualisation of mafias as always hierarchical and monolithic from the USA while risking to miss the true nature of the Calabrian mafia phenomenon and its hybrid forms abroad.

This presentation will re ect upon contemporary challenges to police ethnic mafia-type organised crime groups across borders, when cultural traits of origins are deemed fundamental to the knowledge of the phenomenon, like in the case of the ‘ndrangheta. By looking at the way the Calabrian mafia is understood, conceptualised and contrasted in Italy and in Australia, this work will challenge stereotypes and bias from Italian authorities while also assessing the degree of cultural differences of the Calabrian clans abroad from the point of view of Australian law enforcement. The very core of this paper, therefore, is a reflection on the concepts of policing through cultural awareness, which requires an evaluation of concepts such as the culture and ethnicity within migrant groups as applied to behaviours typical of the “mafia method”, and with an attempt to overcome cultural relativism and ethnocentrism.

Dr Anna Sergi holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex, UK, an LLM in Criminal Law, Criminology and Criminal Justice from King’s College, London and a specialist law degree from the University of Bologna, Italy.As a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Essex, she specialises in organised crime and mafia studies, from different perspectives, privileging comparative research approaches in policing and criminal justice methods. She has been a visiting fellow in different institutions, among which New York University, Flinders University, University of Melbourne, the Australian Institute of Criminology and the University of Montreal. Anna has published articles in various international peer-reviews journals and two books, one about the ‘ndrangheta and the ‘glocal’ dimensions of Calabrian mafia clans, and one of the policing of organised crime and mafias in Italy, UK, USA and Australia, both with Palgrave Macmillan. Currently, in 2017, she is working on a project on mafia mobility across Europe, Canada and Australia, funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust in the UK.

A public lecture by Professor Erika Techera, Director, Oceans Institute, The University of Western Australia.

The offshore oil and gas industry is facing the prospect of de-commissioning thousands of installations in the coming decades. In some parts of the world the issue is already pressing. The technical difficulty and financial cost of complete removal is significant, and therefore the prospect of leaving part of the installation in situ is attractive. Furthermore, it is clear that in some cases, marine ecosystems have established themselves around this infrastructure, and are providing ecosystem services. Nevertheless, despite the success of rigs-to-reef projects in the US it is unclear whether such initiatives are transferable to Australia given very different physical and jurisdictional contexts. UWA researchers are exploring the way forward through multi-disciplinary projects including engineering and technical advances, marine science, socio-economic, legal and sociological perspectives.

This lecture will explore the issues, the questions being examined and potential solutions for Australia and beyond.

About this Series: All at Sea - Restoration and Recovery

Our oceans and coasts provide us with food, energy, livelihoods, cultural and recreational opportunities, yet they are coming under increasing pressure. This UWA Institute of Advanced Studies – Oceans Institute Lecture Series explores the wonders of our seas, the challenges they face and how research at UWA - in a diverse range of fields including marine science, ocean engineering, health, humanities and social sciences – are contributing to ensure sustainability.