What's On at UWA

A public talk by Professor Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies.

At times of great human suffering we see extraordinary courage and compassion. Receiving communities across Europe, such as Calais and Lesbos, have led with creativity, practical action, and costly generosity. Individuals and local groups have led where larger institutions and some governments have been slow, reluctant and mired in outdated thinking and ineffective solutions.

At the same time we have witnessed a rise in xenophobia and structural violence against refugees. This is something that Europe has witnessed before, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and we have much to learn from history. The last time Europe faced such numbers of refugees, it failed. In the face of this failure, in December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the 56 members of the United Nations. These very articles however, are now in peril.

In this talk, Alison Phipps will make a poetic and critical reflection on the borderzones and visa regimes operating across several large academic and artistic projects. She will argue that when homes, livelihoods, dignity and lives are destroyed, those of us with privilege and mandates should offer solidarity, practical action and learn from those with direct experience, rather than relying on second hand assumptions.

This presentation will also consider what it means to bear witness. Professor Phipps will discuss the uncomfortable, provoking and transformative dimensions of being physically immersed in experiences of refusal and separation and how it changes those who are witnesses, often profoundly.

Professor Phipps is a visiting Keynote Speaker at the 2017 Australian Sociological Association Conference being held at UWA from 27 -30 November.

Humans rely on memory at nearly every moment: we use our memories of the past to predict the future, and memory is essential to our concept of self. Nevertheless, our memory for the details of events is imperfect. Some details of an event are forgotten and other details can be falsely remembered. One other striking characteristic of memory is that that act of remembering can change what is being remembered: retrieving events from memory changes our memory of those individual events.

In this talk Professor Amy Criss, Head of Discipline of Psychology at Syracuse University and 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, will explain how the effects of retrieval on memory can be understood using carefully designed experiments, and show that the accuracy of memory for an event declines as we repeatedly recall that event. She will also discuss how theories of memory can be expressed as computational models, and how we can use computational models to understand how forgetting is caused by remembering.

Although cardiovascular disease develops 7 to 10 years later in women than in men, it is still the major cause of death in women. Exercise and physical activity are a highly effective means of decreasing the risk of heart attack, stroke and dementia. These talks, presented by the School of Human Sciences (Exercise and Sport Science) and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA, will address questions related to the most appropriate types of exercise to impact on cardiovascular health and symptoms in women across the lifespan.

Cardiovascular Disease in Women: the Benefits of Exercise - a talk by Professor Maria T.E. Hopman, Professor of Physiology, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen.

The risk of heart disease in women is often underestimated due to the misperception that females are ‘protected’ against cardiovascular disease. The under-recognition of heart disease and differences in clinical presentation in women lead to less aggressive treatment strategies and a lower representation of women in clinical trials. Understanding the role of risk factors and the pathophysiology of ischemic heart disease in women will contribute to in a better prevention of cardiovascular events.

Exercise for the Management of the Menopause - a talk by Professor Helen Jones, Cardiovascular Exercise Physiologist, Liverpool John Moores University.

The menopause is a significant life event that is characterised by a reduction in the hormone oestrogen. The impact of this oestrogen reduction on health and everyday life is huge. The menopausal transition, which lasts 1-5 yrs, is associated with an increase in cardiovascular disease risk. Nevertheless, the primary symptom of the menopause is hot flushes which affects everyday life of the women considerably. This talk will outline how improving fitness with exercising training has a positive impact on improving menopausal symptoms, blood vessel and skeletal muscle health, all of which contribute to reducing cardiovascular disease risk, even if the exercise training begins during the menopausal transition. Finally, the talk will make recommendations for females exercising during the menopausal transition.

Join two outstanding female leaders as they share the motivations, challenges and achievements of their life in activism.

Christine Milne was the leader of the Australian Greens from 2013 to 2015. She is now the Global Greens Ambassador. Her political biography, 'An Activist Life', is the story of a high-school English teacher from northwest Tasmania who became a fiery environmental warrior, pitted against some of the most powerful business and political forces in the country.

Professor Fiona Stanley AC, FAA, FASSA is the Founding Director and Patron of the Telethon Kids Institute, Director, ANDI (Australian National Development Index) at the University of Melbourne and a spokesperson for the Climate Council, Doctors for the Environment Australia and 350.org, on the health effects of climate change. For her research on behalf of Australia's children and Aboriginal social justice, Fiona was named Australian of the Year in 2003.

The conversation will be facilitated by environmental historian, Associate Professor Andrea Gaynor, who recently co-edited 'Never Again: reflections on environmental responsibility after Roe 8' (with Peter Newman and Philip Jennings).

Following the conversation, there will be an opportunity to purchase Christine Milne's book and ask her to sign your copy.

This event is presented by: UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, Boffins Bookshop and the Greens WA.

Humans are complex social beings. Curious observers through the ages have noted the dramatic differences in human behaviour around the world. How similar or different are our personalities? To understand human behaviour, an integrated perspective is required – one which considers both what we regularly do (our personality traits) and what motivates us (our values). Traits and values have been studied separately in psychology and related disciplines, yet, what we do (our traits) must somehow be related to what we hold dearly (our values). Furthermore, how can we make sense of both the proposed similarities and differences in personality and values that have been reported by travellers, philosophers and more recently in large survey studies?

In this talk, Professor Fischer, Co-Director of the Center for Applied Cross-Cultural Research at Victoria University of Wellington and 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, will use an evolutionary perspective to address these challenging questions. He will present an integration of personality and human values into a functional framework that highlights how both psychological processes are driven by mechanisms in our brains and related to our genes. Equipped with these insights, he will then tackle why we sometimes encounter different personalities and values in some parts of the world, but also debunks the myth of large cultural differences in personality. Deep down, we are all similar and an evolutionary perspective can tell us when, where and why we may behave and value things differently. He will present a gene-culture coevolution model of personality and values that shows how genes, economics, social conditions, and climate jointly shape personality. Finally, he will provide some examples that can help people to reflect on who they are and what makes us all so fascinatingly similar, and yet different.

It is generally understood that exercise and physical activity are important lifestyle factors that maintain the health of your heart and arteries and decrease the risk of the most prevalent and debilitating diseases in the Western World, namely heart disease, stroke and dementia. But distinct “doses” and types of exercise impact the benefits derived - and there may even be a risk in overdoing it.

These talks, presented by the School of Human Sciences (Exercise and Sport Science) and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA, will address the relative risk and benefits of exercise across the lifespan.

Exercise and the heart: can you overdose? - a public talk by Professor Keith George, Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Knowledge Transfer (Faculty of Science) Liverpool John Moores University.

The cardiovascular benefits of exercise are well known to nearly all of the global population. Indeed some have called exercise the cardiovascular “polydrug”. If you could wrap exercise up into a pill you would makes billions of dollars and likely win a Nobel Prize. But - if exercise were a drug it would be required to go through multiple levels of trials related to safety and efficacy – there is no FDA process for exercise. Within this process we would ask questions like; (1) is there a linear dose-response curve between exercise volume and cardiovascular health benefit? (2) are there any negative side effects of exercise? and, (3) can you overdose on exercise? This talk will address current data in relation to cardiac dysfunction and damage associated with taking large acute doses of exercise.

Screening Athletes to Avoid Sudden Cardiac Death - a talk by Dr David Oxborough, Clinical Cardiac Physiologist and Reader in Cardiovascular Physiology, Liverpool John Moores University.

Sudden cardiac death (SCD) in a young, seemingly healthy, athlete is a devastating event with current data suggesting that between 1: 40,000 and 1: 100,000 athletes will die from an inherited cardiac disorder. In response to these tragic events, pre-participation cardiac screening has now become mandatory for many sporting organisations across the globe with the aim of identifying those athletes at risk. The athlete’s heart responds to exercise through physiological adaptation, however this normal response often creates a diagnostic challenge when attempting to differentiate from inherited cardiac disease. This talk will present the current data on SCD in athletes, highlight the conditions that are responsible and demonstrate how decades of research into the athlete’s heart have helped to improve the sensitivity and specificity of cardiac pre-participation screening.

Upon winning power in 1948, the National Party (NP) immediately set out to end miscegenation in South Africa. The NP proclaimed that a central tenet of proper white sexuality was avoidance of sexual contact with people of different “races.” Many men ignored this injunction and the new government placed primary responsibility for miscegenation on them – white men who lacked “color consciousness.”

In 1950 the NP government passed the Immorality (Amendment) Act that criminalized extra-marital sex between whites and other races. The Act unleashed the police and courts to punish men who persisted in having sex with black women and the women with whom they were caught. Tens of thousands of people of all races were prosecuted for contravening the law and the vast majority were white men and their black so-called accomplices. Many served time in prison, though not in equal proportion. Lacking resources required to access legal counsel, more black women than white men went to jail. However, white men were subjected to another, unique type of punishment: intentional shaming by public exposure that accompanied arrest and subsequent trials. For many men, the emotional suffering induced by shaming was so intense they committed suicide, leaving behind families forced to carry their shame.

This public lecture by Professor Susanne M. Klausen, Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa and 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, will discuss a major lacuna in our understanding of the apartheid social order, namely the meaning and enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality for whites. This study examines the policing of white male heterosexuality and its importance to the apartheid project.

Join us each week for a delightful musical surprise!

From young artist-led concerts to informal musical drinks on the famous grassy knoll, behind-the scenes workshops, lectures and masterclasses, these free weekly musical experiences will delight all music lovers.

This week join visiting artist Jamie Hey (cello) and UWA faculty Shaun Lee- Chen (violin), Cecilia Sun (fortepiano) and Emeritus Professor Paul Wright (viola) for a unique behind the scenes look into the rehearsal process as you observe these renowned musicians preparing for their upcoming performance.

Jamie Hey is Australia’s pre-eminent period cellist and a passionate researcher of the history, development and repertoire of the cello in 17th century Italy. He has been a member of the celebrated Australian Brandenburg Orchestra since 1995 and has been their principal cellist since 2002. He is a 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

Entry is free - no bookings required.

A public lecture by Bob White, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, UWA.

The subject of war in Elizabethan literature, and Shakespeare’s plays in particular, has attracted sustained attention from a variety of perspectives. However, it is usually treated in the light of military manuals as a technical subject, which is ‘men’s work’, and the question is rarely raised--what happens to love relationships in times of war? In discussions of the comedies the existence of war is either ignored altogether or diminished to the level of ‘background noise’ even though there is a war in almost every comedy, if only a trade war in The Comedy of Errors and a diplomatic war in Love’s Labour’ Lost. In tragedies the loss of love is generally seen as part of the male protagonist’s lonely fate rather than a set of emotional tragedies in which conflict is internalised destructively within relationships, and there are female casualties not often considered in terms of their own loss—Desdemona, Cordelia, Ophelia, Lavinia, Lady Macduff, and others. In history plays, war is kept firmly in the foreground, and love is analysed only in terms of providing moments of apparently insignificant contrast. However, with the renewed critical interest in emotions, the nexus drawn in Shakespeare’s plays between war and love, and the consequences of war on love relationships emerges as a subject inviting closer attention. It is the subject of this talk.

This talk is part of a lecture series Peace and War: Representations in European Art and Literature. The three lectures in this series, offered by UWA academics associated with the UWA Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, focus on representations of war and peace in European art and literature. Collectively, they will examine the contexts and reception of cultural and political practices of war and peace in the medieval and early modern era from the perspectives of emotions history, medievalism, and gender studies. In this way, the series stands to challenge conventional interpretations of European life in wartime from the sixteenth- to the nineteenth century.

A public lecture by Professor Megan Davis, Pro Vice Chancellor Indigenous, Professor of Law, University of New South Wales and 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

For over a decade, Australians have been debating whether and how to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within Australia’s constitutional system. One of the most important moments in that debate occurred in May 2017, when hundreds of First Nations delegates gathered at a First Nations Constitutional Convention in Uluru to deliver the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Through the Uluru Statement, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples offered a clear and powerful vision of constitutional recognition, calling for voice, treaty and truth-telling.

Professor Megan Davis has been an influential figure in discussions over Indigenous constitutional recognition. As a member of the Federal Government’s Referendum Council, she played a pivotal role in the process that led to the Uluru Statement. In this lecture, Professor Davis will reflect on a decade of debates over constitutional recognition and examine the centrality of truth and justice to Indigenous aspirations for constitutional reform.

Professor Megan Davis is Pro Vice Chancellor Indigenous and Professor of Law, UNSW. She is an expert member of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Professor Davis is a constitutional lawyer who was a member of the Referendum Council and the Expert Panel on the Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, the UWA Law School and UWA School of Indigenous Studies.

A Talking Allowed event with Associate Professor Clarissa Ball, Discipline Chair, History of Art, UWA School of Design and Director, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies.

In late 2017, Donald and Melania Trump asked the Guggenheim Museum if they could borrow a van Gogh painting for their White House private quarters. Their request was rejected and countered with an offer of Maurizio Cattelan’s America, (2016) a fully functional 18-carat solid gold toilet that more than 100,000 people had already used. While some considered the Guggenheim’s offer a contemptible act of profanity, others claimed that the real work of art here was the suggestion that for the Trumps, a well-used toilet that reportedly cost in excess of $1 million to make was a more fitting artwork than a van Gogh.

Join us for this first Talking Allowed of 2018, when the complexities of this incident will be explored and we ask, what’s the fuss? After all, the toilet as subject and object of art has a long and noble history.

‘Talking Allowed’ is presented by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

On the second Wednesday 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.

A public lecture by Dr Susanne Meurer, School of Design, The University of Western Australia.

Virtuous women encountered a great deal of violence in early modern art – at times they were the victims of physical brutality or emotional cruelty, at times they were its righteous perpetrators. One of the most prominent and accomplished painters of both types of imagery happened to be a woman herself: Artemisia Gentileschi. As in the case of her friend Caravaggio, Artemisia’s work tends to be read through the prism of her life. The rape she suffered as a young woman is often thought to be reflected in the (re-)actions of her predominantly female heroines. Yet, is it wise to read biography into an artwork? To what extent are Artemisia’s visual strategies conditioned by her gender? Does a woman portray violence in a different way to a man?

This lecture is part of a lecture series: 'A Window on Italy – The Corsini Collection: Masterpieces from Florence'

The Institute of Advanced Studies is pleased to present a series of lectures to be held in conjunction with the exhibition, A Window on Italy – The Corsini Collection: Masterpieces from Florence, which is being held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from 24 February – 18 June 2018.

The exhibition is organised by the Galleria Corsini, Florence, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tãmaki, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and MondoMostre, Rome..

A public lecture by Liz Pellicano, Professor of Educational Studies, Macquarie University.

In this presentation, Liz will argue that truly understanding autism – knowing autism – requires both objective and subjective understandings, experiences and expertise, that is, listening, learning and involving autistic people and their families in research. She investigates in depth what the autistic community rightly demands of autism research and the major changes that will need to be made to deliver on their expectations.

Liz’s talk is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, as part of their 2018 public talk series.

A public lecture by Lili M. Kim, Associate Professor of History and Global Migrations, School of Critical Social Inquiry, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA and 2017-2018 Fulbright Senior Scholar, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea.

World War II, often referred to as the “Good War,” was a race war. For Americans, it was a race war against the Japanese, and it had a profound and disturbing impact on the Homefront. Against the backdrop of Japanese American mass incarceration during World War II, this talk asks the seemingly simple yet hitherto unexplored question: how did other Asian Americans cope with this time of heightened hostility and racism toward people who looked like them?

Korean Americans make an especially interesting case study. In addition to being often mistaken for Japanese based on their physical appearance, they were forced to share the same legal classification with the Japanese on the Homefront. Because Korea had been annexed by Japan since 1910 and did not exist as an independent nation at the time of U.S. declaration of war against Japan, Korean immigrants in Hawai‘i and the continental United States were legally classified as Japanese subjects and, therefore, “enemy aliens” along with Japanese immigrants. Thus, Koreans found themselves in the strange predicament of being lumped together with the Japanese, whom they despised for colonising their motherland, and ironically were now accused of having loyalty to Japan.

Framing her study as what Clifford Geertz has called “a social history of moral imagination,” Professor Kim argues that through complex, not always moral or effective, transnational politics, Korean Americans simultaneously resisted U.S. officials’ Orientalization of them as enemy and contributed to the racialization of Japanese Americans on the homefront during World War II.

A public lecture by Dr Elizabeth Reid, Researcher in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

The paintings that decorated the Renaissance home were not solely intended for aesthetic appreciation, but for moral instruction. This talk will take a small selection of the early sixteenth-century works from the exhibition as a starting point to consider the ideal role of religious and mythological allegories in domestic experiences of self-reflective looking.

This lecture is part of a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies lecture series.

The IAS is pleased to present this series of lectures held in conjunction with the exhibition, A Window on Italy – The Corsini Collection: Masterpieces from Florence, which is being held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from 24 February – 18 June 2018.

The exhibition is organised by the Galleria Corsini, Florence, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tãmaki, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and MondoMostre, Rome.

A public lecture by Bob White, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, UWA.

The subject of war in Elizabethan literature, and Shakespeare’s plays in particular, has attracted sustained attention from a variety of perspectives. However, it is usually treated in the light of military manuals as a technical subject, which is ‘men’s work’, and the question is rarely raised--what happens to love relationships in times of war? In discussions of the comedies the existence of war is either ignored altogether or diminished to the level of ‘background noise’ even though there is a war in almost every comedy, if only a trade war in The Comedy of Errors and a diplomatic war in Love’s Labour’ Lost. In tragedies the loss of love is generally seen as part of the male protagonist’s lonely fate rather than a set of emotional tragedies in which conflict is internalised destructively within relationships, and there are female casualties not often considered in terms of their own loss—Desdemona, Cordelia, Ophelia, Lavinia, Lady Macduff, and others. In history plays, war is kept firmly in the foreground, and love is analysed only in terms of providing moments of apparently insignificant contrast. However, with the renewed critical interest in emotions, the nexus drawn in Shakespeare’s plays between war and love, and the consequences of war on love relationships emerges as a subject inviting closer attention. It is the subject of this talk.

This talk is part of a lecture series 'Peace and War: Representations in European Art and Literature'.

The three lectures in this series, offered by UWA academics associated with the UWA Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, focus on representations of war and peace in European art and literature. Collectively, they will examine the contexts and reception of cultural and political practices of war and peace in the medieval and early modern era from the perspectives of emotions history, medievalism, and gender studies. In this way, the series stands to challenge conventional interpretations of European life in wartime from the sixteenth- to the nineteenth century.

Kehinde Wiley’s recent official portrait of the former US president, Barack Obama, has caused debate over dinner tables and in conference rooms. Looking unlike the conventional figure of conservative, patriarchal power, Obama is pictured seated, amidst a forest of flora. While it has been discussed as a shift in the portrayal of American presidents, the painting has also been seen as a sign of African-American empowerment.

Using Wiley’s portrait as a springboard for a personal reflection on portraiture, or more specifically the figure in a floral setting, Dr Ann Schilo will spin a tale that encompasses some favourite pictures from the annals of art history, a few ideas about representation and the presentation of the self, as well as a notation on the all-pervasive symbolism of flowers. In so doing, she will consider how images are embedded in their social cultural milieu and embroiled in the circulation of meanings.

Dr Ann Schilo has published widely in the visual arts, creative practice research, and cultural studies. In addition Ann works as an independent curator. Her edited volume, 'Visual Arts Practice and Affect: place, memory and embodied knowing' was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016.

‘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 Wednesday of every month, a researcher/practitioner 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.

A public lecture by Mark McKenna, Research Fellow, History, University of Sydney.

The UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, City of Perth Library and Boffins Books are pleased to present Mark McKenna, author of 'Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s Future' in 'Quarterly Essay 69'.

In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna pushes the debate about Australian history beyond the familiar polarities. Australia is on the brink of momentous change, but only if its citizens and politicians can come to new terms with the past. Indigenous recognition and a new push for a republic await action.

Judging by the Captain Cook statue controversy, though, our debates about the past have never been more fruitless. Is there a way beyond the history wars that began under John Howard? And in an age of free-floating fears about the global, digital future, is history any longer relevant, let alone equal to the task of grounding the nation?

In this inspiring essay, Mark McKenna considers the frontier, the Anzac legacy and deep time. He drags some fascinating new scholarship into the light, and pushes the debate about history beyond the familiar polarities.

A public lecture by Professor Evelyn Welch, Provost (Arts & Sciences), King’s College London.

The portraits of Renaissance men and women show unblemished skin, smooth, well-groomed hair and strong, handsome physiques. Women were all shown with pale white complexions while the men all have full heads of hair and ruddy cheeks. But their skeletons tell a different story, one of disease, pox-marks and deformities.

In this talk, Evelyn Welch will discuss the many recipes, potions and procedures that were used to both improve physical appearance but also to protect beauty in Renaissance Florence between 1500 and 1700. Drawing on images in the Corsini and other Italian collections, she will help today’s viewers imagine a very different sense of health and beauty in the past.

A public lecture by Professor Sarah Pink, Professor of Design (Media Ethnography), RMIT and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

Self-driving cars, screenless technologies, digital assets, self tracking, automation and data - such emerging technologies are often represented through utopian or dystopian narratives that portray them as part of a future in which human society will be strongly impacted by technological change.

In this lecture Professor Pink will discuss the role of the social sciences both as critical voice in the debates around our futures with emerging technologies, and in an interventional mode of engagement and inquiry in technology futures as they play out. Having conducted ethnographic research into each of the technologies listed above, she will discuss the significant role the social sciences can play in determining how the possible futures implied by emerging technologies are imagined, envisioned and enabled, all of which opens up and deepens contributions towards responsible and ethical technological futures.