What's On at UWA

Presentation 1: Title: Assembling, Deploying, and Contesting Social Impact Bonds in Australia

Speaker: Jacob Broom

Research Proposal Presentation)

Presentation 2: Title: The Political Economy of Post-Crisis Financial Stability Governance: A case study of macroprudential framework implementation in Australia

Speaker: Peter Thomsett

(Chapter Presentation)

Soprano Miriam Allan's "sublime singing" (Gramophone, 2017) has been enjoyed around the world. As UWA Institute of Advance Studies Visiting Fellow she joins Sara Macliver, Cecilia Sun and Shaun Lee-Chen for a special free concert.

Free entry, bookings essential.

trybooking.com/BASXE

For students to learn feedback needs to be timely, tangible and targeted. This workshop will consider the nature of formative and summative feedback and consider University policy on feedback and expectations. Register through the link provided.

Everyone Googles... but do you really know how to get the best out of Google Scholar for your research? This hands-on workshop will demonstrate the best tips and tricks to use Google to find scholarly material.

For students to learn feedback needs to be timely, tangible and targeted. This workshop will consider the nature of formative and summative feedback and consider University policy on feedback and expectations. Register through the link provided.

Family violence and violence against women remain a major issue globally and in Australia. This affects migrant communities, including Muslim families, in Australia. In this presentation, Rachel Mathewson will outline the Home Affairs provisions and support provided for visa-holders affected by family violence. The information is practical and explains when and how people contact the Department and the types of information required.

Rachel Mathewson is the Assistant Director of the WA Community Engagement team with the Department of Home Affairs. She has worked in the Department since 2007 in a variety of roles from Learning and Development, Student Visas and Refugee and Humanitarian.

ENTRY: Free, but please RSVP to [email protected]

Consider a pair of parallel planes in and a strictly convex closed curve laying on one of the planes. Is there a convex hypersurface of constant Gauss curvature such that it is trapped between the planes, the curve is on its boundary, and the surface strikes the other plane at given constant angle? This problem can be viewed as a generalisation of the Alt-Caffarelli problem for the Gauss curvature case. In this talk we will discuss the existence of weak solutions and the regularity of the free boundary, which is the unknown part of the boundary of surface.

Abstract: This talk has three main sections: 1. An outline of the main sedimentary processes controlling coastal and marine archaeological sites, with a focus on Australia's NW shelf. This is relevant because it is a critical control upon much archaeological work in NW Australia, but it is poorly dealt with or, at worst, ignored. 2. A critique of the ongoing mis-use of radiocarbon dates as data in studies of past human demography. 3. An analysis of why these and other critical issues can become overlooked by some in archaeology, with a view of how it can be resolved to improve the quality of everyone's research.

Bio: In western Europe and Australia, Piers Larcombe has had 30 years of fun in sedimentary research, trying to understand how sedimentary systems work. His aim is that research and applied studies should use more information about the relevant physical systems.

The “butterfly effect” was coined in 1972 by Edward Lorenz in a talk titled “does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” It models how a small action can have a significant impact.

In this year’s Grace Vaughan Memorial Lecture, the Honourable Antoinette Kennedy AO, Western Australia’s first and longest serving female judge, will speak about the history of women in the law and her own history and what that has taught her about the many issues faced by women. The progressive act of taking opportunity and then using that position to speak truth for those that are voiceless is a feature of Antoinette’s life, and the essence of this year’s Grace Vaughan Memorial Lecture. Throughout her career, Antoinette’s primary interest was not what Governments could do for women - though she regards this as important - but what women could do for each other if they were properly informed and had the will. In particular, Antoinette is interested to explore what can be achieved when women support each other, have their consciousness raised, the freedom to look at issues outside of the male gaze and each woman has a power base consisting of every other woman.

Her talk will explore this concept as it applies to issues that particularly concern women and girls, in particular, family violence, the victimisation of girls through paedophilia, and how ignorance of this has left parents and the community undereducated and less able to protect girls. Finally, Antoinette will discuss the #Metoo movement as the most recent iteration of the women’s equality movement.

The Honourable Antoinette Kennedy AO was the first and longest serving female judge in Western Australia, serving for 25 years, and despite her retirement, remains the longest serving judge in the state. She was the first woman appointed as Chief Judge of the District Court (the first female head of a jurisdiction in WA and only the third in Australia) in 2004. She was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and was inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame in 2012.

The annual Grace Vaughan Memorial Lecture lecture commemorates the life and achievements of Grace Vaughan, a social worker, social activist and parliamentarian, who was dedicated to the improvement of life at all levels and had a deep commitment to Australia’s participation in the Asian region and to ensuring women’s full participation in society. The lecture is presented by the Australian Association of Social Workers, the Institute of Advanced Studies at The University of Western Australia and Department of Communities Western Australia.

The teaching of these skills is vital to our students’ critical thinking and problem solving but are often overlooked. This workshop will introduce a framework to help you identify and embed these skills into your curriculum. Register through the link provided.

What are the realities and challenges of community-led, on-country language-revitalisation/maintenance of Martu languages in the Western Desert today?

After graduating from the ANU in 2015 with Honours in Language Studies, Duke (Garry Earl-Spurr) moved to the East Pilbara in mid-2016 to work as an applied linguist for Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa (KJ) – a Martu organisation that aims to keep country and culture strong, and to build sustainable Martu communities. Since then, KJ’s language program has been steadily gaining momentum as language increasingly becomes integrated into all facets of KJ’s work.

Duke will speak about the realities and challenges of working as an applied linguist and a part of KJ’s Martu language team on the revitalisation and maintenance of Martu languages in the Western Desert. He will discuss the integral role of language in underpinning the fundamental and amorphously intertwined Martu aspirations of strong culture, right-way land-management, and sustainable community development.

Key themes will include: Language policy & management; working and learning together in a cross-cultural setting; language and caring for country; language and cultural empowerment; language and sustainable development in the Western Desert; intergenerational transmission; decolonisation; and Western Desert Languages.

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 we welcome back the ever-popular Irwin Street Collective in conjunction with UWA's talented voice students to present Handel's German arias

Free entry, no bookings required.

The teaching of these skills is vital to our students’ critical thinking and problem solving but are often overlooked. This workshop will introduce a framework to help you identify and embed these skills into your curriculum. Register through the link provided.

Presentation 1:

In the wake of choice: Perth’s autonomous women’s engagement with the discourse of choice via post-abortion narratives presented by Dorinda ’t Hart.

Pro-abortion discourse generally presents abortion as an unproblematic event in the course of a woman’s reproductive life. However, pre-field discussions with women confirm that an abortion experience is a significant episode in an individual’s life and not easily forgotten. Further, current research tends to present some women as autonomous agents who have unobstructed access to abortion services while empirically examining barriers to access for those women who are considered less autonomous. However, this research fails to examine the intersection of women’s perceived autonomy and the internalisation of social norms that guide and inform a woman’s abortion decision. Via this research project, I aim to engage with women’s post-abortion narratives, shared through in-depth interviews throughout Perth. Through the recruitment of those women who consider themselves to be autonomous, I seek to understand each woman’s engagement with the discourse of choice and their ongoing negotiation of meaning of their abortion experience.

Dorinda ’t Hart is a PhD student in Anthropology and Sociology.

Presentation 2: Growing older overseas: How older Vietnam-born people are experiencing ageing and aged care in Australia presented by Hien Thi Nguyen.

Older Vietnam-born people (OVP) make up the sixth largest migrant community in Australia; however, they are under-researched. To help address this gap in the literature, this study will examine OVP’s experiences of ageing and aged care, using qualitative research methods, including ethnographic interviews, participant observation, social media fieldwork, video recording, and social network analysis tools guided by an interpretive phenomenological paradigm and grounded theory. The central research question is “How are Vietnam-born parent migrants and parent visitors experiencing ageing and aged care in Australia and what is the role of their local, virtual and distant support networks?”. The research will be conducted in Perth and Melbourne, cities which have a large number of older Vietnam-born residents (ABS, 2016b). The research will target two groups: (i) parent migrants and (ii) parent visitors that represent a mix of past and recent Vietnamese migration to Australia.

Hien Thi Nguyen is a PhD student in the Anthropology and Sociology Discipline. Her research interests include domestic and transnational migration, ageing and aged care, women and gender and new media.

Speaker: Hassan Alavi (Buali Sina University, Iran)

Title: On transitive automorphism groups of 2-designs

Time and place: 4pm Friday 23 Aug 2019, Weatherburn LT

Abstract: A 2-design with parameters (v,k,lambda) is an incidence structure consisting of a set of v points and a set of b blocks with the incidence relation such that every block is incident with exactly k points, and every pair of points is incident with exactly lambda; blocks. An automorphism group of a 2-design is a group of permutations on points of the design which maps blocks to blocks and preserves the incidence and non-incidence. The main part of this talk is devoted to giving a survey on recent study of 2-designs admitting a flag-transitive automorphism group. I also present some recent results on block-transitive automorphism groups of 2-designs.

A public lecture by Paolo Boccagni, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Trento, Italy and 2019 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

All across social sciences and humanities, "home" has emerged as a unique research topic, despite its inherent ambiguity, as it bridges a variety of divides - public vs private, material vs immaterial, descriptive vs prescriptive, "us" vs "them". However, under conditions of displacement and large-scale migration home is no more what it used to be. From an apparently natural background to people's lives, it turns into something to be achieved, or recovered, from scratch. Struggling for an adequate and ideally better home, successfully or not, is a process that irremediably parallels migrant life trajectories. Likewise, retaining some aspects of all that used to stand for home, while adapting to the views, emotions and practices associated with home in the countries of destination, is critical to migrant and refugee integration over time. Whether for practical purposes or in a more existential sense, coping with home anew is part and parcel of the migrant condition. Parallel to that, home - as a set of emplaced relationships and emotions, not just a place - is a key analytical tool for researching migrant trajectories and the attendant social transformations. Based on an original sociological understanding of home, and on the European Research Council HOMInG project, this lecture invites you to appreciate the significance of home for displaced and migrant people, as an often unaccomplished experience and as a balancing act between past, present and future. The methodological implications and the policy relevance of research on home and migration will also be discussed, against the backdrop of “homing” as a universal and often unmet human need.

All across social sciences and humanities, “home” has emerged as a unique research topic, despite its inherent ambiguity, as it bridges a variety of divides - public vs private, material vs immaterial, descriptive vs prescriptive, “us” vs “them”. However, under conditions of displacement and large-scale migration home is no more what it used to be. From an apparently natural background to people’s lives, it turns into something to be achieved, or recovered, from scratch. Struggling for an adequate and ideally better home, successfully or not, is a process that irremediably parallels migrant life trajectories. Likewise, retaining some aspects of all that used to stand for home, while adapting to the views, emotions and practices associated with home in the countries of destination, is critical to migrant and refugee integration over time. Whether for practical purposes or in a more existential sense, coping with home anew is part and parcel of the migrant condition. Parallel to that, home - as a set of emplaced relationships and emotions, not just a place - is a key analytical tool for researching migrant trajectories and the attendant social transformations. Based on an original sociological understanding of home, and on the European Research Council HOMInG project, this lecture invites you to appreciate the significance of home for displaced and migrant people, as an often unaccomplished experience and as a balancing act between past, present and future. The methodological implications and the policy relevance of research on home and migration will also be discussed, against the backdrop of “homing” as a universal and often unmet human need.

Paolo Boccagni’s main areas of expertise are international migration, transnationalism, social welfare, care, diversity and home. His current research is on home-making and home-feeling processes, as a critical question for the everyday negotiation of boundaries between native and foreign-born populations. As the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant project HOMInG and of MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca) HOASI (Home and Asylum Seekers in Italy), Paolo is leading a team of seven postdoctoral researcher fellows, doing multi-sited fieldwork on the experience of home among migrants and refugees in nine different countries. Based on these large-scale collaborative projects, Paolo is elaborating on “homing” as a lifelong set of processes through which individuals and groups try to make themselves at home. In recent years he has also done fieldwork on the ways of framing and approaching immigrant and refugee clients among social workers; on the lived experience and the sense of home of international students; on the built environment, material cultures and thresholds of domesticity in refugee reception initiatives.

Please RSVP online via www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/boccagni

Ensure that your literature searching is effective, efficient and thorough. Learn how to:

Develop a search strategy; identify relevant, scholarly information sources and; use tools and techniques to track the literature related to your research. This session has a Humanities and Social Sciences focus.

People of Chinese cultural heritage has been part of the history of Western Australia since the proclamation of the Swan River Colony. They in the past were subjected to certain policies, which were legal but arguably unjust in light of contemporary societal attitude towards equality and fairness. Such policies included the poll tax (also known as the “head tax”), tonnage restrictions, exclusion from goldfields, and the dictation test. The project intends to study the period from the beginning of British settlement to the time around the abolition of the White Australia Policy. Through a cross-disciplinary approach, the project intends to examine in detail, these policies and their impact on people of Chinese cultural heritage in Western Australia during that period.

People of Chinese cultural heritage were subjected to similar policies in other countries and other Australian states around the same time. In recent decades, many of these jurisdictions including New Zealand and Victoria have issued apologies for their past policies concerning their people of Chinese cultural heritage.

During the preliminary research of this project, it is apparent that there are ample literature on the people of Chinese cultural heritage and their experiences during the 1800s and 1900s in Western Australia. There are also an abundance of literature related to the apologies which have been made in the past. However, there is little evidence of any discussion on whether the policies of the governments of Western Australia towards its people of Chinese cultural heritage should be debated. From an academic point of view, it is of significance to address that.

It is worth noting that if there is ever going to be any public debate about this, such debate should be up to all West Australians and West Australians alone.

This project aims to, through a comparative approach, combine the studies of the history concerning the people of Chinese cultural heritage in Western Australia, the apologies delivered to people of Chinese cultural heritage in other jurisdictions for similar policies, and the apologies made to other groups of Australians to analyse whether an apology should or should not be made for its policies towards its people of Chinese cultural heritage in the past. It should always be remembered that this project is about examining whether or not a state apology is appropriate, not about finding ways to justify an apology.

Feeling a bit lost trying to navigate the deluge of scholarly literature in your area of research? Let us help you feel confident that you are finding the best and most relevant information for your literature review in an efficient and effective way. We will show you how to:

- Develop a focussed search strategy - Identify scholarly sources of information relevant to your area of research - Correctly input your search strategy across a range of key databases - Use tools and techniques to track the literature related to your research.

This hands-on workshop is specifically designed for researchers and research students in the STEM areas.

Please register at the link provided.