What's On at UWA

A bunch of highly educated and religiously inspired middle or upper-middle-class Muslims belonging to the extremist National Tawheed Jamaat based in the township of Kattankudy and linked to ISIS has carried out a highly coordinated attack on Christian churches in Sri Lanka killing nearly 300 worshippers, children and bystanders. This, in essence, is the story told by the media. However, there are too many unanswered questions at this stage and this topic goes behind this story and looks at how the country’s ethno-religious democracy had come to a dead end since October 2018 and whether this carnage opens a way out for the caravan to move.

Dr. Ameer Ali, (B. A. Hons, Ceylon, M.Phil, London, Ph.D., W.Aust) is a retired academic in economics but holding an Honorary Research Fellowship at Murdoch University, is a Sri Lankan Muslim, writing regularly on Sri Lankan affairs in academic journals and popular publications. Colombo Telegraph and Daily Financial Times in Colombo carries his pieces almost weekly. He also contributes to Australian newspapers. The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Journal of South Asia, Journal of Security and International Affairs are three of several academic journals that carried his research output. He is the author of Economic Development of Brunei Darussalam, 1906-2000, Murdoch University, 2001. Currently, he is engaged in a three-part analysis of recent developments in Sri Lanka focusing on the Easter Carnage a week ago.

A public lecture by Dr Nicolo Zingales, Deputy Director, Centre for Information Governance Research, University of Sussex and Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

Personal Data Stores aim to help individuals and communities to be the beneficiaries of insights from their data. Some think it will redress the current power asymmetry with major digital platforms like Google and Facebook. But at the same time, Personal Data Stores lay the foundations for a new type of economy based on very specific personalised marketing, which makes consumers more transparent and prone to behavioural nudging. Will Personal Data Stores set us free, or lock us further into digital dependency?

This lecture will tackle these questions, offering a blueprint for the sort of legal and governance structures that could promote trust and accountability in the development of these services.

Let us tell you about one of the stories that has been swept under the Australian carpet for far too long……. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were removed from their homelands and interned in medical and government facilities. Within these systems of racially-based removal and incarceration, people were often interned for years and deprived of certain liberties and decision-making powers. These places and practices led to the dislocation of generations of people from their families, communities and country, and were part of a pattern of events and policies that served to interrupt people’s ability to care for country and to undertake cultural practices and responsibilities. Although these practices were largely portrayed at the time as benevolent humanitarian interventions, instead they caused physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual loss to the individuals directly affected and their decedents. In addition, many places and objects associated with these activities, particular burial areas and Aboriginal stories remain unrecorded and even hidden. Community members and researchers want preservation, protection and acknowledgement of these sites, associated cultural artefacts and stories. This presentation provides an opportunity to hear about one such story the Bernier and Dorre Island Lock Hospitals (operating from 1908 -1919) and its associated centenary memorial project direct from researchers and community members, with a view to inform future policy on best practice heritage protection, acknowledgement of past acts and truth telling.

Join us at 5.30pm on Thursday 2nd May in the Murdoch Lecture Theatre (Arts G58) at The University of Western Australia.

The forum will feature NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes and guests:

Senator Louise Pratt

Senator Pratt is the Shadow Assistant Minister for Universities, Shadow Assistant Minister for Equality and an ALP Senator for Western Australia. Louise has a long history of fighting for justice across the Australian community. Louise is passionate about quality and access to higher education, an interest sparked through university student activism in the 1990s. Before entering Federal Parliament in 2008, Louise served in the Western Australian Parliament as a Member of the Legislative Council. Louise was previously the Shadow Assistant Minister for Families and Communities and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water. Louise believes that investment in education, skills, research and innovation will deliver sustained economic growth and higher standards of living.

Senator Jordon Steele-John

At just 23, Jordon is Australia’s youngest ever senator and first with a lived experience of cerebral palsy. Prior to taking up the post of Senator for Western Australia in November 2017, Jordon dedicated his time to youth and disability advocacy and was also a student of politics at Macquarie University. An active member of the Greens since he was 16, Jordon is passionate about using his time in Parliament to act on climate change, reduce youth unemployment and implement a full NDIS. He is committed to helping break down some of the barriers holding back young people and disabled people from engaging with politics, and ensuring that we make progress towards true representation; he does not want to be the last. Jordon is one of 10 Australian Greens in the Federal Parliament and has portfolio responsibility for Disability Rights, Youth, Communications and Sustainable Cities.

We also invited the Hon. Dan Tehan MP, Minister for Education (Liberal Party of Australia), though unfortunately, Dan is unable to attend.

UWA and WASO have a relationship that brings together the highest-quality music education with some of the State’s most talented and experienced professional musicians.

In 2019, the International Artist Masterclass Program continues to welcome world-class visiting artists as they inspire, challenge and celebrate some of Western Australia’s finest young musicians.

Andreas Ottensamer has held the coveted position of Principal Clarinet of the Berlin Philharmonic since 2011. Through his orchestral work, concerto, recital and chamber music performances, he is now one of the most in-demand clarinettists on the planet.

Free entry - bookings essential

Contact details: [email protected]

Further information waso.com.au/education

The 2019 Tom Stannage Memorial Lecture by Amanda Nettelbeck, Professor in History, University of Adelaide.

The desire for humanitarian reform had multiple targets in the post-abolitionist British Empire, and its impacts on imperial policy have been subject to considerable recent interest amongst historians. A major focus of this reformist agenda in the years immediately after the abolition of slavery was an official commitment to deliver Indigenous peoples with rights that could be protected in law. The 1830s policy framework of ‘Aboriginal protection’ that emerged from this moment, designed to build the civil rights of Indigenous people as British subjects, is often considered to be the most important, if flawed and short-lived, expression of imperial humanitarianism. This is particularly so in Australia, where three formal departments of Aboriginal protection operated throughout the 1840s (and into the 1850s), alongside one in New Zealand. Yet the policy of ‘protection’ was not only driven by humanitarian principles, and nor did it uniquely address Indigenous people. Rather, it sat within a larger set of legally-empowered policies designed to regulate the treatment and status of new or newly-mobile colonial subjects.

This lecture explores how the early policy of Aboriginal protection functioned within a wider field of protection policies which worked to manage colonized peoples in an expanding British Empire, where demands for labour and land jostled with the imperatives of humane governance. Over the course of the nineteenth century, protection policies proved remarkably flexible. On the one hand, they served to imprint a vast Empire with the apparent guarantee of even-handed governance. On the other, they served to build new colonial foundations by reinforcing the Crown’s authority over subject peoples. They drew colonized peoples within the embrace of colonial law and labour markets; they managed the Empire’s post-abolition labour needs; they promoted the superiority of British civilisation over competing systems of law and social governance; and they set conditions on people’s lawful conduct and mobility. Yet while they had wide application, protection policies have also carried unique legacies for Indigenous people. Not only did they endure longest in the context of Indigenous policy, but there they also held the most complex role in seeking to create a new kind of legal subjecthood, one which imperial humanitarians hoped would establish Indigenous people as British subjects and workers with reciprocal responsibilities to the settler world.

The Religious Entrepreneurship of Humanistic Buddhism

This dissertation explores the concept of religious entrepreneurship in the context of the Humanistic Buddhist movement. Religious entrepreneurship as a theoretical framework facilitates a focus on the production of religious capital by Humanistic Buddhists, which has seen it become one of the most important influences in Han Buddhism over the last century. I outline three generations of religious entrepreneurship within this tradition, beginning with the early reformers of Taixu and Yinshun and then highlighting the Taiwanese Humanistic Buddhist organisations, who adopted corporate structures and developed a new style of congregational Buddhism in the second half of the 20th century. Lastly I discuss the third generation of religious entrepreneurship, which centres around the case study for this dissertation: the Stonefrog Foundation. I argue that the Stonefrog Foundation is finding new ways to generate religious capital, which has allowed it to succeed where previous Humanistic Buddhists failed, in the transnational religious marketplace.

Illness in culture: the social construction of mental disorders in Korea and China

This project aims to analyse how mental illness is socially constructed and culturally constituted in Korea and China. Adopting social constructionism as its theoretical framework, this project argues that mental illness is embedded within cultural discourses that give meaning to and shape the way society responds to individuals who experience that illness. The conventional psychiatric knowledge does not come from the nature of the condition but is developed within a particular sociocultural context. Moreover, the concept of mental illness is produced to facilitate the exercise of power. Much of the existing scholarship has tended to focus on Western cultures, whereas little work has been done on the social construction of mental illness in Asian culture. Through an analysis of Korean and Chinese cultural beliefs in relation to mental illness, this project shows how some discourses are produced to govern and regulate people’s knowledge of mental illness in Korea and China.

Be transported from the everyday by our free lunchtime concert series, featuring the best musical talent from within the UWA Conservatorium of Music and around the country.

The Darlington Ensemble are one of Perth's premier chamber music ensembles, offering a full palate of chamber music experiences to WA audiences for over 15 years. In this free concert, they present Bach's Chaconne in D minor for violin, with piano accompaniment by Robert Schumann and Anton Arensky's Piano Trio No 1 in D minor Op 32

Free entry, no bookings required.

Assemblage thinking has exploded in policy research, especially among scholars working in the policy mobilities field who are seeking to harness the potential of an assemblage approach to understand how policies move, mutate and manifest in increasingly transnational contexts. The ubiquity of assemblage, however, does not always render it clear, with the concept being variously defined and sometimes lacking conceptual strength and explanatory power. In this seminar, I will seek to conceptualize and defend an assemblage approach to policy analysis. By synthesizing core threads from existing literature, I will identify three theoretical and conceptual foundations central to a ‘policy assemblage’ approach: (1) relations of exteriority and emergence; (2) heterogeneity, relationality and flux; and (3) attention to power, politics and agency. Together, these foundations signal a coherency to assemblage thinking and suggest an assemblage approach has powerful potential, allowing researchers to see and explain things in ways that many established traditions in policy research do not. By identifying foundations and offering examples of how each might be mobilized, I will provide the beginnings of a framework for policy assemblage research not previously articulated in a systematic form, thus inviting further discussion about what it means to undertake policy assemblage research.

Glenn Savage is a senior lecturer at UWA with expertise in education policy and sociology of education. His research focuses on education policy, politics and governance at national and global levels, with a specific interest in equity, federalism, intergovernmental relations, policy mobilities, curriculum, school funding and standards-based reform. Dr Savage has published widely in leading journals and maintains a strong media profile and links with senior policy makers. He currently holds an Australian Research Council ‘Discovery Early Career Researcher Award’ (DECRA) titled ‘National schooling reform and the reshaping of Australian federalism’, which examines how national schooling reforms in curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are reshaping the role of Australian governments in education policy.

Hamida Novakovich is an academic, writer, curator and community arts worker who traveled to Morocco, Spain, and Turkey among other places on an Australia Council Career Development grant. She also facilitated the 'Rekindling Tour' by CMSS (sponsored by the Council of Australian Arab Relations, CAAR) where 6 Australian artists travelled to Morocco in November to train in traditional arts. In this seminar, Hamida will share how understanding Islamic and traditional arts are vital for the development of the Australian Muslim community. By connecting with the history of Islamic arts and understanding the political trajectories that have influenced the community's access to artistic spaces, Hamida will share some of her ongoing research in the field.

Con-Cantorum (vocal ensemble) and UWA String and Brass students present intimate music spanning more than 150 years of the Baroque period. The program will feature Purcell Anthems, including his haunting 'Funeral Music for Queen Mary', Lotti 'Crucifixus a 10 voci', and Telemann Concerto for 4 Violins in D Major TWV 40:202

Tickets from $10 | trybooking.com/BASWU

Calling all engaged couples! If you are getting married in Perth, put Wedding Upmarket in your diary now as we will be showcasing more than 50 handpicked local designers to help you create a bespoke celebration. Draw inspiration from our beautifully styled areas around UWA’s Winthrop Hall and meet Perth’s finest designers. It is the perfect opportunity to discuss with them how they can help you transform your inspiration boards into a reality. Western Australia is home to countless talented creatives but sometimes the best wedding suppliers are hard to find. Wedding Upmarket is all about connecting couples with local designers to create a truly custom, personalised event. DETAILS: Saturday 4th May 2019
Time: 10am-3pm
 Venue: The University of Western Australia’s Winthrop Hall
 Parking and entry free, venue is easily accessible
 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley
Website: www.weddingupmarket.com.au Facebook.com/weddingupmarket

Over recent decades, tensions in the ways universities are organized and operate have become increasingly apparent. On the one hand, universities have ostensibly endeavoured to move away from traditional bureaucratic modes of governance, aiming to reduce ‘red tape’ in the process. Yet over the same period, there has been growing concern internationally about everencroaching “academic bureaucratization” (Gornitzka, Kyvik, & Larsen, 1998), with the administrative dimensions of academic work apparently becoming “ever more formalized, complicated, bureaucratic and time-consuming” (Martin, 2016, 14). To this date, however, there is a lack of systematic empirical research into this ‘new’ bureaucratic phenomenon. To address the resulting lacuna, this paper pioneers a novel way of investigating academic bureaucratization, through systematically scrutinizing some of those documents and devices which themselves co-constitute bureaucratic practices. The specific case investigated are the ‘Key Selection Criteria’ (KSC) commonly used at Australian universities for the purpose of hiring academic staff. Drawing on analyses of 273 sets of KSC, the paper finds, among other things, that the number of KSC job applicants have to address in writing are unreasonably high by all standards, as is the proportion of KSC that are redundant in terms of content, or which have a purely performative or rhetorical function (e.g., having ‘a high work ethic’; or ‘an interest in academic work such as teaching and research’). Taken together, these findings pinpoint one striking manifestation of the inconspicuous yet pervasive dynamics of bureaucratization reshaping academic work today. However, it is finally argued, the phenomena investigated also indicate, at least indirectly, that academic staff have been complicit in the normalization and reproduction of mechanisms of bureaucratization.

Learn about the proper rest and recovery techniques to use before and after you have completed a workout to prevent injury and keep you feeling your best.

Key topics covered include stretching techniques and how to use a foam roller.

The UWA Friends of the Grounds are holding a Plant Sale very soon and you're invited!

Get something for Mum, improve your herb garden or add a succulent to your work space while supporting Friends of the Grounds. Plants typically $3 - $5 each. Great finds!

Open to staff, students, and the public.

Over the last forty years or so, speculation about the origins and purpose of music within the disciplines devoted to human evolution has moved from being almost systematically ignored to centre stage. This paper sets out some of the historical influences on this change in the value placed on Music, as well as proposing why the topic is significant. It presents and evaluates the trajectories of complementary theories for the role and universality of Music from Darwin and his immediate predecessors, and reviews new contributions to the debate that are appearing with increasing frequency in literatures as diverse as: pre-natal learning; acoustic archaeology; geriatric medicine; cognitive development; social intelligence; and hemispherical integration.

In conclusion, the paper will illustrate the possibility that music, rather than being a luxury that emerged as a side-benefit of language, may have played a part in the development of symbolic thinking, religious ritual, and theory of mind at an early stage in modern human cultural development.

A public lecture by Maureen O’Malley, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

Microbes in the gut (‘microbiomes’) are thought to play a major role in producing disorders such as autism, anxiety and depression. Gut microbiomes even appear to have effects on general cognition and memory. Some strong interpretations have been made of these findings, including claims that microbes control our minds. Other researchers have argued that microbiome contributions mean we need a new concept of self: the ‘microbial self’. This talk will examine such statements in light of several broad problems in microbiome research, to do with causality, ‘dysbiosis’ (sick microbiomes), and probiotic treatments. The talk will conclude with reflections on whether insights into microbiomes change our views of who we are as humans.

Radicalisation, Counter-Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation



For nearly two decades since 9/11, policymakers and the academia alike have paid much attention to radicalisation and terrorism involving jihadist groups and Muslim actors. Despite costly military interventions and an array of counter measures and policies, transnational jihadism and its inspired acts of terrorism have not diminished, transpiring in the rise and fall of ISIS with new challenges, including the issue of foreign fighters and their families. The recent Christchurch terrorist attacks (March 2019) further have shown that radicalisation is not simply limited to groups and individuals basing themselves in jihadism and Islam. They add to the list of threats from multiple forms of extremism that exist in our societies. Overall, the situation calls for more comprehensive and evidence-based policy responses to address radicalisation and find ways towards de-radicalisation.

This one-day conference aims to explore:

Radicalisation, its causes, its various manifestations, and how different spaces enabled by globalisation have spread radicalisation

The experience of other countries in responding to radicalisation

The responses by Australian government and community to radicalisation

Emerging issues of responding to returning foreign fighters and their families exposed to terrorism in the wake of the fall of ISIS

The symposium therefore aims focuses on both research and policy in the areas of radicalisation, counter-radicalisation and de-radicalisation.



Co-hosted by

Centre for Muslim States and Societies, University of Western Australia

Public Policy Institute, University of Western Australia

Australian Institute of International Affairs WA

SPEAKERS

Keynote address, Professor Stephen Smith, Advisory Board Chair of UWA Public Policy Institute

Dr Hass Dellal AO, Preventing violent extremism, Executive Director and Company Secretary, Australian Multicultural Foundation

Professor Shamit Saggar, Evidence about Islamist inspired radicalisation, Director, Public Policy Institute, University of Western Australia

Professor Raymond Taras, Xenophobia and Islamophobia: what has changed since Runnymede 1997?, The Australian National University, Canberra

Professor Michele Grossman, Radicalisation and counter-radicalisation: post-Christchurch attacks, Deakin University

Dr Mark Briskey, The rise of right wing extremism, Murdoch University

Ms Shameema Kolia, Muslim youth response to Christchurch attacks, Community Relations Manager at MAA International

Ms Rizwana Begum, Pluralism as Counter-Radicalization strategy: the education of Singapore Muslims

Professor Samina Yasmeen, Returnees and dealing with children and women exposed to terrorism and radicalisation in Syria, The University of Western Australia

Dr Azim Zahir, Salafism, radicalisation and foreign fighters: lessons from the Maldives, Associate Lecturer, University of Western Australia

Mr Muhammad Suleiman, Countering radicalisation: African experiences, PhD Candidate, University of Western Australia

Conveners

Professor Samina Yasmeen, Director, Centre for Muslim States and Societies, University of Western Australia

Dr Azim Zahir, Associate Lecturer, University of Western Australia



Tickets: Tickets via Eventbrite. Prices include morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea (Vegetarian and non-veg options would be available. For dietary requirements please email to [email protected] with the subject line "dietary restrictions")



For more information: Dr Azim Zahir, Associate Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia

M: 0417800303; E: [email protected]

Trirelational kin terms are lexemes that identify a family member (the referent) via triangulation, by simultaneously specifying their relationship to two other parties: the speaker and propositus (person from whose perspective the relationship is calculated—often the addressee) (Laughren, 1982; McConvell, 1982; Merlan, 1989; O’Grady & Mooney, 1973). Modern descriptions of Australian languages often concede that trirelational terms are no longer actively used, or indeed even remembered (Dalton et al., 1995, p. 93; Meakins & Nordlinger, 2014, p. 166). Logically, as these systems fell out of usage they must have passed through intermediate stages, however brief, in which subsets of speakers still controlled subsets of terms—or, intriguingly, subsets of the meanings that these terms once encoded. To my knowledge, however, the progress of this shift has never been directly observed. This paper provides just such an observation.

Mudburra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan) is a highly endangered language of Australia’s central Northern Territory. While modern Mudburra speakers no longer use any trirelational terms as such, these lexemes and their meanings are not entirely lost; in fact, they seem to be contracting in a very systematic fashion. Data from eight speakers of varying fluencies show that trirelational terms are evolving into simple terms through erosion of the speaker-propositus and speaker-referent relationships, with the propositus-referent relationship maintained. Furthermore, data from one elderly speaker reveals an intriguing intermediate stage: as in traditional usage, he insists that these terms must involve three parties—but unlike traditional usage, he only specifies the propositus-referent relation (allowing the other two to be of any sort). This step-by-step contraction suggests that, of the three relationships that trirelational terms index, propositus-referent is most salient. Furthermore, it provides yet more evidence that language change is structured, even in situations of extreme pressure and shift.

The UWA Friends of the Grounds are holding a Plant Sale very soon and you're invited!

Get something for Mum, improve your herb garden or add a succulent to your work space while supporting Friends of the Grounds. Plants typically $3 - $5 each. Great finds!

Open to staff, students, and the public.