What's On at UWA

As cities across the world endure increase extremes of heat, indoor comfort has become a key vector in the debate about sustainability and energy consumption. Across Asia the carbon footprint of buildings continues to rise because of the widespread adoption of air conditioning. Current trends are unsustainable, and alternative, less energy intensive comfort regimes need to be maintained or cultivated.

This presentation examines such challenges as a thermal complex, an approach that seeks to move the debate beyond questions of engineering and smart-city solutions. In this informal presentation we want to outline our struggle at conceptualising a book, and the challenges of imparting socio-cultural histories and political analyses into a domain dominated by techno-scientific discourses.

Jiat Hwee Chang is Associate Professor at the School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore, and is author of a number of books, including A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience. He is also co-founder of Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative (SEAARC).

Tim Winter is ARC Professorial Future Fellow in the School of Sciences, UWA and was Lead CI on 2 international research collaborations on air conditioning and urban development in Southeast Asia (ARC DP) and the Middle East (QNRF).

A public lecture by David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, School of Natural Sciences,The University of Tasmania.

There is increasing recognition that a focus on understanding wildfire as a narrow physical phenomenon, and the associated pursuit of better predictions, is unable to stem the global epidemic of fire disasters. More holistic thinking is required by broadening the intellectual framework of wildland fire science to accommodate multiple, and sometimes competing, socio-political and biophysical perspective of fire. Pyrogeography encourages such broader thinking about landscape fire because it integrates and synthesizes insights and knowledge from intellectual domains with a stake in wildfire including, for example, the creative arts and design, humanities and cultural studies, and fundamental and applied hard and soft sciences. A pyrogeographic framework can enable transiting from the current vicious cycle of problematizing wildfire disasters to a more virtuous cycle of problem solving to achieve sustainable co-existence with fire. This is so because pyrogeography encourages ‘neural diversity’ by giving voice to difference points of view that lie outside classical fire science and fire management paradigms thereby revealing both barriers and opportunities for social and environmental adaptation to wildfire in a non-stationary climate. Pyrogeography thus creates space for innovation, fosters diversity, and provides pathways for building social capacity and capital in communities vulnerable to fire disasters.

This public lecture is part of the Prescribed Burning Conference 2019 - Evidence and Policy being held at UWA from 31 July - 1 August 2019. Details http://pbc2019.com.au/index.php

A public lecture by Barry Godfrey, Professor of Social Justice, University of Liverpool and Russell Ward Visiting Professor, University of New England and 2019 UWA Fred Alexander Fellow.

Which worked best, the system of convict transportation or the British home convict service? Between 1850 and 1868 a natural experiment in punishment took place when men convicted of similar crimes could either serve their sentence of penal servitude in Britain or in Western Australia. For historians and social scientists, this offers the prospect of addressing a key question posed over two-hundred years ago by the philosopher, penal theorist, and reformer Jeremy Bentham, when he authored a lengthy letter entitled ‘PANOPTICON versus NEW SOUTH WALES’. Bentham, and subsequent generations of historians did not have the data to answer this question, but now we do. This lecture asks whether British convicts or Australian convicts had higher rates of reconviction; and how both Big Data and biographical research can help us to answer this question.

Barry Godfrey is the 2019 UWA Fred Alexander Fellow. The Fred Alexander Fellowship is dedicated to the memory of Professor Fred Alexander (1899-1996), the founding Head of the History Discipline (then Department) at The University of Western Australia.

The 2019 George Seddon Memorial Lecture by Don Bradshaw, Emeritus Professor, Zoology.

It is over forty years since the publication of George Seddon’s 'Sense of Place', a masterly evocation of the city of Perth and its environs. Perth has grown and changed much in the interim and is now beset with a number of problems with which it grapples. Finding enough water to satisfy the needs of a rapidly-growing population, urban sprawl, vehicle congestion and the continuing destruction of biodiversity-rich banksia woodlands are just a few. Planners struggle to respond to the divergent agenda of developers and environmentalists and many question the sustainability of our current life style. Have we lost our sense, and are we in danger of losing our place?

The annual George Seddon Lecture is sponsored by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and UWA’s Friends of the Grounds.

George Seddon AM (1927-2007) was an Emeritus Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in English at The University of Western Australia. His books include 'Swan River Landscapes', 'A Landscape for Learning' and 'Sense of Place'. He was awarded the Eureka Prize from the Australian Museum in 1995, the Mawson Medal from the Academy of Science in 1996 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Planning Institute of Australia.

Quickly gaining recognition internationally as a fearless and versatile artist, Lina Andonovska (flute) enjoys a diverse career as soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player, collaborator and educator. In this concert, staff and students come together with Andonovska to perform exciting works for contemporary woodwinds by Dorff, Berio, Connesson, Penderecki and Liebermann.

Tickets from $10

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This talk aims to offer an analytical framework to make sense of the abundant empirical materials regarding the Christianity related protests in contemporary China. It argues that the inherent ambiguity in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) religious policy is fundamentally responsible for the many Christianity-related protests in contemporary China. However, while many Christianity-related protests in contemporary China are closely associated with the clash of ideologies, the specific causes of protests differ significantly among Catholic churches, Protestant churches, and Christian-inspired groups. The ideological incompatibility between the ruling CCP and the Catholic Church in China is epitomised by their struggle for authority and influence over the Chinese Catholic community. On the contrary, some influential Protestant church leaders have turned their progressive theology into social activism since the turn of the 21st century, leading to various forms of protests against the authoritarian policies and politics in contemporary China. In addition, ideological and theological conflicts between different religions or religious schools may also trigger the CCP’s suppression of certain religious groups and activities, which often in turn cause protests.

Dr Yu Tao teaches and researches contemporary China at the University of Western Australia. A political sociologist by training, he conducts theoretical and empirical analysis into the intersections and interactions among religious groups, civic organisations and local state agencies in contemporary China and overseas Chinese communities.

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

Fresh from her solo recital at Musica nova Helsinki (Finland’s largest contemporary music festival), Lina Andonovska joins us as a Royal Over-Seas League Visiting Artist to perform an exciting program which champions electronics and innovative audio manipulation with works by Brett Dean, Chris Cerrone, Jacob TV and Donnacha Dennehy.

Free entry, no bookings required.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often portrayed in the West as hostile towards religion, and the Party indeed still prohibits its members from joining any religion. How should we understand the apparent incompatibility between the CCP and religion? Is the CCP hostile towards religion because of the atheist ideology of a Communist Party? Or is the CCP, as an ‘organisational emperor’, is concerned with the strong organisational capacity that religious groups have in mobilising contentious politics? Moreover, if we were to study this topic through direct interviews, could we believe what Chinese cadres tell us in the first place? In this work-in-progress presentation, we will report findings revealed by a simple, yet sophisticatedly designed, list experience with 170 junior CCP cadres in Beijing. Our result demonstrates that the problem of social desirability exists in some, but not all, dimensions of the perceptions that Chinese cadres have on religion. We also revealed that Chinese cadres tend to perceive different religions with different levels of concerns, while in general they have much stronger concern over the frequency of religious congregation (i.e. the organisational aspect of religion) than over individual religious participations (i.e. the ideological aspect of religion).

In this presentation, I examine the activities of a group of heritage enthusiasts in Iran. Grass-roots heritage activism is a relatively recent phenomenon that appeared in Iran since the late 1990s. Activists often operate collectively, as NGOs that focus on heritage. They represent a range of cultural and socioeconomic origins with different political views. However, they share a certain ambivalence towards and critical approach to official, state definitions of heritage and identity. By referring to data collected through fieldwork I argue that these activities constitute a form of heritage movement and outline some of the characteristics of this movement.

Ali Mozaffari is a Fellow of the Australian Research Council with the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. Through his research, he seeks to understand the uses of the past in contemporary discourses of heritage and built environment in Iran and West Asia. His publications include Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place (2014) and World Heritage in Iran: Perspectives on Pasargadae (2016), and “Picturing Pasargadae: Visual Representation and the Ambiguities of Heritage in Iran” (Iranian Studies, 2017).

This conversational presentation will consider both the process and the implications of intermittent research conducted by Associate Professor Yamanouchi since 2009 in the vibrant, northern, coastal town of Broome, in Western Australia's Kimberley region. Via a focus on emphases such as a Japanese diaspora, identity, history, ethnicity, food, place‐naming and making, the complex extent to which Indigenous Australians and persons with Japanese heritage identify and interact in Broome, will be explored, alongside an interest in theories of contemporary identity.

Dr Yuriko Yamanouchi is an Associate Professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). She finished PhD (Anthropology) at the University of Sydney. She has been visiting Broome and conducting research with Indigenous people who share a Japanese heritage since 2009. Dr Yamanouchi lectures in Oceania Studies Course at TUFS (The Tokyo University of Foreign Studies).

Populism is popular but generally gets a bad press—for good reasons. But could populism actually be a progressive force in domestic and even international politics? Recent movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the abortive Arab Spring suggest it might. This presentation previews my forthcoming book and considers—more in hope than expectation—whether a populist upsurge could actually mobilise around the issue of climate change. We will undoubtedly be forced to respond to climate change eventually, but thoughtful, constructive responses may no longer be possible by the time we do. Yet public pressure to make policymakers act in environmentally sustainable ways is still just about possible. Progressive forms of populism, especially in democratic states, could compel even the most conservative politicians to take climate change seriously before it is too late. As Mrs Thatcher might have said, as far as the majority of us who have no influence over policy are concerned, there really is no alternative. This presentation is based on Mark’s new book of the same name.

To mark World Breastfeeding Week, three of UWA’s leading breastfeeding researchers will share their research projects and participate in a panel discussion:

* What does the research tell us about the role of breastfeeding in allergy prevention? - with Professor Valerie Verhasselt, Larsson-Rosenquist Chair in Human Lactology;

* Breastfeeding the baby reduces obesity and related diseases later in life: how does that work? - with Associate Professor Donna Geddes, Chief Investigator of the Hartmann Human Lactation Research Group and

* LactaMap, an online lactation care support system - with Melinda Boss, Senior Research Fellow, School of Allied Health.

Parents, extended families, health professionals and interested members of the general public are invited to join the discussion.

Join us for a screening of The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), followed by a discussion with Alex Haslam, Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology and an Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a feature film that revisits the psychology of power and abuse. In 1971, twenty-four male students at Stanford University were divided into guards and prisoners in a mock jail, and quickly spiralled into sadism and subordination. Adapting it for the screen, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez cranks up the claustrophobia to nightmarish levels.

It is true that prisons are damaging places for both prisoners and prison workers. But it is dangerous to derive general implications about human behaviour from flawed evidence; the Stanford Prison Experiment has been used to banalize evil by arguing that any ‘‘ordinary’’ individual can be made to engage in extraordinarily malicious acts, and this is simply not the case. As Professor Alex Haslam will argue, the social psychology textbooks will need to be re-written.

In recent years, scholarship on international student mobility (ISM) has proliferated across various social science disciplines. Of late, an interest in the ethics and politics of ISM seems to be emerging, as more scholars begin to consider critically questions about rights, responsibility, justice, equality, etc., that inhere in the thorny relationships between ISM stakeholders. To date, however, these discussions remain largely scattered. Bringing together these scattered conversations in literature, this paper outlines elements of a framework for (re)thinking the ethics and politics of ISM. The proposed framework identifies eight key ISM actors between whom various ethical and political relationships arise, where these relationships range from the social to the institutional. Furthermore, the framework discusses four sets of concepts from the literature deemed pertinent in thinking further about ISM ethics and politics. This proposed framework is aimed at stimulating further conversations and efforts to make ISM more socially equitable and sustainable.

Dr Peidong Yang (DPhil Oxford) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies Education at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. With a background in sociology of education, Dr Yang’s research interests are mainly located at the intersections between education and migration/mobility. He is the author of International Mobility and Educational Desire: Chinese Foreign Talent Students in Singapore (Palgrave, 2016) and various international peer‐reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

There is no more time to delay taking urgent action on the ecological crisis which is upon us. Unless we respond now, societal collapse and mass extinction are seen as inevitable by scientists and many other experts. We can all feel it coming.

Extinction Rebellion WA is part of an international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience to minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse. Extinction Rebellion believes it is a citizen’s duty to rebel. History shows us that peaceful civil disobedience is the most effective way to bring about rapid social change.

In this public talk, we will share the latest climate science on where our planet is heading, discuss some of the current psychology around climate change, and offer solutions through the study of social movements.

In August, Extinction Rebellion WA will roll out direct actions across Perth, including a Declaration at Parliament on August 15th.

Everyone is welcome and there will be time to ask questions and discuss afterwards

The VOSE Memorial Prize is UWA's most coveted performance award, with three finalists chosen to perform with a full symphony orchestra in the Perth Concert Hall in October. Join us for the first round, as 23 talented students perform their chosen concerto for our panel of judges.

The competition will run from 4pm to approximately 8pm, with each performance lasting roughly 10 mins. Audience members are welcome to arrive or leave at any time between each performance. Free entry - no bookings required

This paper explores the archaeological evidence for the making of baler shell (Melo spp.) knives found in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene deposits in Boodie Cave on Barrow Island, northwest Western Australia. While such knives have been reported in surface midden contexts the archaeological signature of baler shell knife manufacture as not been described and these artefacts are rare. This study aims to determine how the knives were made, characterise the manufacturing debris and investigate how they were used using three sets of data – Barrow Island knives, knives made by Kaiadilt people and experimentally made knives. This presentation will discuss these three data sets in detail. In the 1960s Tindale both filmed and collected knives and their manufacturing debris made by the Kaiadilt on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In late 2018 Fiona Hook and Sean Ulm recorded the collected knives held in the South Australian Museum. Using this ethnographic information, a series of knives were made by Kim Akerman. The experimentally made knives were used in butcher and woodworking experiments to capture usewear patterns. The ethnographic and experimental data was then compared with the Boodie Cave knives. This paper will discuss the initial results of the analysis showing that the experimentally made knives have been key to understanding manufacturing debris patterns, providing the basis for possible identification of shell knife manufacture in the Boodie Cave deposits where whole knives were not found.

This talk investigates the process of creating a 24-lesson syllabus for a secondary school linguistics course. Doing this has required a fine balance between student needs, student interest, availability of existing materials, teacher skillset, and the requirements of the language curriculum.

Initially, materials from the yearly OzCLO competition — the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad — were selected for their wide availability and appeal. This appeal, while evident in a competitive situation, has not translated to the classroom. Speedy analysis is one useful skill in linguistics, but other skills have taken precedence in this curriculum, including knowledge about language, code-switching, and the ability of students to analyse their own language behaviour.

Daniel is working on this project with Amy Ward, a teacher at Scotch College.

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

This week Conservatorium Voice students present 'Christmas Comes Early' – an eclectic concoction of Christmas favourites across the ages, with a sprinkling of the unexpected.

Free entry, no bookings required.

This paper deals with causes and impacts of casual teaching staff exploitation at Australian Universities, with a case study from UWA. Casualisation of employment relations is a measure of improving economic efficiency and profitability of businesses. The number of unstable jobs has been increasing globally across industries for the last ten years and resulted in a new socio-economic class, precariat (Standing 2011). At the same time the pressure on the remaining permanent staff to perform increases without any guarantees of continuing job security. Ironically, top management and a growing class of technocrats are the main beneficiaries of this organisational restructuring with seven figures salaries at the VC level becoming the standard. The impact of these new employment arrangements for the precariat is often devastating at various levels: financial, professional, social, personal and health-related. Paradoxically, the long-term impact of growing work casualization has a negative effect on the restructuring organisation: high employee turnover, loss of knowledge and skills, and poor consumer (students) satisfaction.

Dr Andrzej Gwizdalski is an independent researcher and multi-award winning ‘freelance’ lecturer who explores global issues related to the impact of emerging technologies and politics on work, economy and society. Andrzej has been involved in supporting and representing casual teaching staff at various levels of industrial dispute resolution at UWA since 2013.