What's On at UWA

The School of Music offers a number of stimulating and enjoyable broadening units for all undergraduates studying at UWA. Enrich! brings together these students in vibrant and dynamic ensemble performances.

In the World Percussion Carnival, Head of Percussion Louise Devenish will lead 3 ensembles in a lively performance of traditional Zimbabwean, Zulu and West African music!

Come and hear part of the wealth of musical talent on campus!

Tickets (available at the door): $10 Standard | $5 Concessions (Seniors/Children/Students/Friends of Music)

The Seminar: On 4 June 1629, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) retourschip Batavia wrecked on Morning Reef, in the Houtman Abrolhos, approximately 65 km off the Western Australian coast. The macabre events following the wrecking saw more than 100 individuals murdered over a three-month period, by mutineers attempting to subjugate surviving crew and passengers. The historical significance of the latter is well established, and has been reconstructed, through the analysis of an extensive archaeological record, both maritime and terrestrial. With specific reference to known discoveries of human skeletal remains, four individual burials were recovered on Beacon Island between 1960 to 1964; a further six individuals were recovered from a multiple grave that was excavated in stages between 1994 and 2001. A multi-disciplinary collaboration of national and international partners performed a remote sensing program involving magnetics and conductivity mapping and GPR profiling followed by a series of targeted excavations on Beacon Island in January and February of 2015, and November 2016; this included the excavation of the recently rediscovered location of the postcranial remains of a skull originally removed in 1964, in addition to excavations in the southern region of the island where a human molar was found 2013. The latter discovery proved fortuitous, with the excavation culminating in the discovery of an intact human burial at over one meter in depth. Further excavation in the area to the immediate north led to the discovery of a further two individuals buried in direct association, one on top of the other. In 2016 a further individual was found, along with ceramics. The aim of the present presentation is to briefly describe the skeletal remains of the 2015-16 field season, including their burial context, and preliminary analyses of their demographics (sex, age and stature), including descriptions of potential palaeopathology.

The Speaker: Daniel Franklin has an honours degree in bioarchaeology and a PhD in physical anthropology. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Forensic Anthropology, School of Human Sciences, The University of Western Australia. His research involves the validation and exploration of alternative approaches for the quantification of skeletal biology and to advocate its potential applications in the forensic sciences. He has published extensively in a variety of journals, most recently in the Journal of Forensic Sciences; Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology; American Journal of Physical Anthropology; and the International Journal of Legal Medicine.

Denmark Arts and the Centre for Muslim States and Societies, UWA, invite you to Sufi Songs from the Pankisi Valley by the Ensemble Aznash Lamaan.

The Ensemble Aznash Laaman are a collective of ethnic Chechen musicians from Georgia. For the Aznash Laaman there is the root, the vibration common to all, carried by the songs. It is joy and wealth for all beings.

The School of Music offers a number of stimulating and enjoyable broadening units for all undergraduates studying at UWA. Enrich! brings together these students in vibrant and dynamic ensemble performances.

The Percussion Fiesta will feature over 80 students, performing pieces from film and TV, Pop and Rock favourites as well as more traditional African melodies in the culmination of their semester's work!

Come and hear part of the wealth of musical talent on campus!

Tickets (available at the door): $10 Standard | $5 Concessions (Seniors/Children/Students/Friends of Music)

Come along to the next Futures Enthusiasts Meet-Up (FEMU) event on Wednesday, 31 May 2017 between 4-5pm to meet, share ideas and team up with other education futures enthusiasts from the UWA community, Perth start-ups, industry or technology specialists.

The FEMU event for May will feature a presentation by Dr Michael Ovens on Virtual Reality in Higher Education. Followed by a Networking Session.

Virtual Reality is considered by some to be a replacement for traditional face-to-face teaching methods, and a poor one at that. This presentation by Dr Michael Ovens, a recent Humanities doctoral graduate and educational Virtual Reality developer, will contest this position by arguing that Virtual Reality can be used to enhance rather than replace traditional teaching if educators and designers focus on the three things Virtual Reality does best: immersion, interaction, and impossibility.

Virtual Reality experiences will be made available for trial on the Futures Observatory's HTC Vive device.

Register for this FEMU event via the Eventbrite link below.

The School of Music offers a number of stimulating and enjoyable broadening units for all undergraduates studying at UWA. Enrich! brings together these students in vibrant and dynamic ensemble performances.

Rhythm & Beats will feature the Latin/Junk Percussion Ensemble, performing traditional pieces such as a Samba Batucada alongside new sounds of AfroJunk.

The concert will also feature Al On Quintet, a student led ensemble, who will present a program entitled Persian Art Music in Perspective.

Come and hear part of the wealth of musical talent on campus!

Tickets (available at the door): $10 Standard | $5 Concessions (Seniors/Children/Students/Friends of Music)

In this public lecture, Dr Heather Nancarrow will examine the data on domestic and family violence through a legal lense. The lack of an intersectional policy analysis, which would consider race, class and gender, has resulted in unintended negative consequences of civil domestic violence laws in Australia. The problem is amplified for Indigenous women. This is demonstrated through a mixed methods research design that examines: 1) gender and race differences in the application of legislation that reflected gendered aspirations (but ignored race); and 2) the kinds of domestic violence that occurred and its contexts. The data analysed were parliamentary debates, linked administrative court and police records for people who had been charged with breaches of civil domestic violence orders, and interviews with service providers and police prosecutors. A major finding was that although legislation was premised on gender-based coercive controlling violence, the application of the law in practice was far broader, applying it to fights, which is neither effective nor appropriate. For domestic violence law to be effective, it must distinguish between coercive control and fights, and victims (not just police) must have choice about state intervention. The findings have implications for the design and delivery of interventions, including justice mechanisms, in intimate partner violence. Dr Heather Nancarrow has 35 years experience working on the prevention of violence against women, including direct service provision, policy and legislation, and research and professional development. Heather has held many leadership roles at both the state and national level in regards to the prevention of violence against women. She was co-Deputy Chair of the Council of Australian Governments’ (COAG) Advisory Panel to Reduce Violence against Women 2015-16. In 2014-15 she was a member of the Queensland Premier’s Special Taskforce on Domestic and Family Violence; and in 2008-09 she was Deputy Chair of the National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, which produced Time for Action, the blue-print for COAG’s National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022. Heather has a PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice. Her primary research interests are justice responses to violence against women, particularly as they relate to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Be transported from the everyday in our free lunchtime concert series, featuring the finest musical talent locally, nationally and within the School.

Under the leadership of Helpmann Award winner and Head of Vocal Studies Andrew Foote, see these young emerging artist perform works for vocal ensemble.

Entry is free, no bookings required.

Co-creative digital practices are recently playing a central role in fostering opportunities for youth and young adults to participate in the production of new, emergent discourses that define, label and categorise new norms and counter-norms for gender and sexuality. Through digital cultural practices, recent figurations of sexuality and identity have emerged that present a widespread range of sexualities and genders challenging traditional masculine/feminine, hetero/homo dichotomies or LGBTQI labels that describe a more specific categorisation of identity practices. For example, this emergent taxonomy includes many new terms such as heteroflexible, asexual, homoflexible, sapiosexual, nonbinary, a-romantic and others, including multiple combinations. New practices of categorising and living sexualities/genders have significant implications for social theories of gender and sexuality, minority, health and mental health practices, community services, public facilities and family law. Two available approaches for understanding the emergence of new social formations of gender and sexuality include, firstly, a generational rejection of labels of earlier epochs, seeking instead a specificity for more ‘accurate’ descriptions of deeply-felt attachments, expressed principally in online settings as post-identity queer fluidity. Secondly, as a set of “micro-minoritisations” competing on a ladder of greater-or-lesser marginalisation, surveiled and policed through online interactivity afforded by the sociality of digital cultures. Drawing on nascent analyses of data collected as part of an ARC Discovery Project on queer youth support and belonging across two generations, this presentation accounts for the digital emergence of “micro-minority” taxonomies of sexual/gender identity, theorising new social practices in terms of digital affordances, while presenting a framework for understanding the implications of new, meaningful languages of identity categorisation for social theory.

The School of Music offers a number of stimulating and enjoyable broadening units for all undergraduates studying at UWA. Enrich! brings together these students in vibrant and dynamic ensemble performances.

Under the direction of Aaron Hales, the Show Choir, will be performing medleys from Broadway favourites Hairspray and Cats! Whilst the UWA Jazz Ensemble, led by Jess Herbert will perfrom staples of the Jazz repertoire.

This fantastic concert is not to be missed!

Tickets (available at the door): $10 Standard | $5 Concessions (Seniors/Children/Students/Friends of Music)

Join talented UWA Piano Students as they perform all your favourite repertoire under the guidance of Head of Keyboard Studies Graeme Gilling.

Tickets $10 Standard $5 Concessions Available at the door

Free Lecture Recital

Presented in association with the Harp Society of WA

Jacinta Dennett: Illuminating Significative Utterance in Performance

In this presentation that relates to her PhD research, Jacinta Dennett will advocate the sonic and expressive qualities of the modern concert harp through the performance and recordings of selected solo repertoire for the instrument. Helen Gifford’s Fable (1967) for harp solo will provide the lens through which a deeper enquiry into performance is sought. The research process will involve a study of Helen Gifford’s oeuvre, its critical reception authenticated by performance reviews, published and archival documents, radio broadcasts and transcriptions of interviews, and interviews between the performer and the composer herself. Using Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom (1894), in particular his theory of ‘moral imagination,’ this path of investigation will lay hold of music performance as the focus for developing an epistemology after the model of a fable, where discovery is self-initiated rather than delivered. What insights (inner sight or wisdom), does a study of Helen Gifford’s Fable (1967) reveal?

Jacinta Dennett is Harp Tutor at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Australian National Academy of Music

Forty-eight years ago, a young and apprehensive Tony Kevin set off on his first diplomatic posting to Moscow at the height of the Cold War. In the Russian winter of 2016 he returns alone, a private citizen aged 73.

Tony Kevin had a successful and challenging diplomatic career, ending with ambassadorships to Poland (1991-94) and Cambodia (1994-97). In Return to Moscow he applies his attention to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a government and nation routinely demonised and disdained in Western capitals. Why does President Putin arouse such a high level of Western antagonism? Is the West throwing away the lessons of recent history in recklessly drifting into a perilous and unnecessary new Cold War confrontation against Russia?

Tony Kevin invites readers to see this great nation anew: to explore with him the complex roots of Russian national identity and values, drawing on its traumatic recent seventy-year Soviet Communist past and its momentous thousand-year history as a great Orthodox Christian nation that has both loved and feared ‘the West,’ and which the West has loved and feared back in equal measure.

Tony Kevin is a former Australian career diplomat (1968-1998) who held diplomatic postings and ambassadorships in Moscow, UN New York, Poland and Cambodia. Since retiring from foreign service, he has been an active advocate for change in areas such as Australian asylum-seeker policy, border protection, and climate change.

He has written several books inspired by his career and life experiences, including A Certain Maritime Incident (Scribe 2004) which won the ACT Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Multicultural Writing in 2005; Walking the Camino (Scribe 2007), winner of the ACT Book of the Year Award 2008; Crunch Time (Scribe 2009), and Reluctant Rescuers (self-published 2012). In 2012 Tony Kevin was awarded an Emeritus Fellowship at Australian National University, Canberra, for his four books.

Come and hear UWA's top postgraduate students present their research in agriculture and related areas.

Vice-Chancellor Prof Dawn Freshwater will give the opening address.

Afternoon tea is provided and the event will be followed by drinks and nibbles in the Bayliss Foyer.

Registration required at www.ioa.uwa.edu.au/events/register

The release of a series of new consumer-grade virtual reality devices in 2016 opened up exciting new worlds of experiential and multimedia learning and teaching. Using these devices, students are free to move beyond the confines of the two-dimensional page and screen by walking through digital reconstructions of human blood vessels or holding in their hands fragile artefacts otherwise kept under lock and key. Teachers, meanwhile, have access to a powerful suite of simple but effective tools with which they can create virtual experiences of their own in a matter of minutes and hours by contrast to the days and weeks of years past.

Join Dr Michael Ovens at the UWA Futures Observatory for a presentation on the potential and practical use of virtual reality in education to enhance student learning, followed by a demonstration and networking event featuring many of the latest virtual reality devices including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Google Daydream. This event is funded by the West Australian Network for Dissemination (WAND), with additional support from the UWA Centre for Education Futures and the UWA School of Humanities.

Register for this event via the Eventbrite link below.

"This lecture will discuss the important convergence of beauty and justice, ethics and poetics in architecture, both in practice and in education. This reflection is urgent in view of our complex political environment and the prevailing obsession with digital tools and formal novelty for its own sake." - Dr Alberto Pérez-Gómez

The Annual Dean's Lecture will be introduced by Foundation Board Member Janet Holmes à Court AC, and is presented in collaboration with The University of Western Australia.

Alberto holds the position of Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture. Founding Director of the post-professional M.Arch. and PhD, History and Theory of Architecture Option, School of Architecture, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.

Please join us for Annual Iftar (Breaking of the Fast) Event to celebrate Ramadan 2017.

The Centre for Muslim States and Societies, UWA, holds this event annually to promote inter-religious harmony and increase understanding of Islam in a globalised world.

Professor Abdullah Saeed, The University of Melbourne, will speak on A Contextualist Approach to Interpreting Qur'an in order to highlight the significance of reformist thought in Islam. He will demonstrate how such a reading is rooted in the Islamic tradition by giving examples of precedents that might be connected to this approach. He will also respond to the criticism that a contextualist reading of the Qur'an is relativistic by arguing that there are many ways in which possible relativistic tendencies can be curtailed in such a reading.

Abdullah Saeed is currently the Sultan of Oman Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies and Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a member of the UNESCO Commission of Australia of the Department of Foreign Affairs of Australia. He was awarded Order of Australia (AM) in 2013. Among his publications are: Reading the Qur'an in the Twenty-First Century (2014); Islam and Human Rights (edited, 2012), Islamic Political Thought and Governance (edited, 2011); The Qur'an: An Introduction (2008); Interpreting the Qur'an: Towards a Contemporary Approach (2006), Islamic Banking and Interest (1999); Islam in Australia (2003); Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam (co-authored, 2004).

Free but RSVP required via url or email to [email protected]

EVENT: Blakers Mathematics Competition

The 2017 Blakers Mathematics Competition is now open.

Eligible candidates are all undergraduates in first, second and third years at a WA university.

Entries must be received by Friday, 4 August 2017. They may be mailed or given to Dr Greg Gamble, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, 6009.

PDF-scanned entries may be sent to [email protected]

Please mark your entry Blakers Mathematics Competition 2017, and include your name, address, email address, university, and number of years you have been attending any tertiary institution.

More details about how to enter can be found at

http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/students/competitions

The first billion years after the Big Bang represent the final observational frontier in assembling a coherent picture of cosmic history. During this period early stars and galaxies formed and the Universe became bathed in ultraviolet light. Hydrogen in the intergalactic medium also transitioned from a neutral gas to one that was fully ionized. How and when did this `cosmic reionisation’ occur and were star-forming galaxies the primary agents? Recent measurements by the Planck satellite suggest reionisation occurred later than originally envisaged and this raises the exciting prospect that we may be able to directly observe the first galaxies. Deep exposures with Hubble provides evidence that star-forming galaxies were present during the relevant period. Spectroscopy is now required to address these important questions. I will review the rapid progress being made with current facilities, and the prospects with the James Webb Space Telescope and the ELT.

The Perth USAsia Centre, the UWA Oceans Institute and the School of Biological Sciences invite you to join us for a panel discussion on the sustainability of the Indian Ocean and the future prosperity and peace of the Indian Ocean Rim nations. The Indian Ocean contains biodiversity and resources crucial to sustaining the people of the Indian Ocean Rim with its rapidly growing populations. It includes three of the globe's major trading choke points; the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, and Bab el-Mandab.

This public panel is a lead-up event to the 2017 In The Zone conference "The Blue Zone". In the Zone will explore the sustainability of the Indian Ocean with respect to issues of food security, environmental management, resource sustainability and maritime security.