What's On at UWA

Blasphemy in Pakistan: a spectacle of piety Sana Ashraf, PhD candidate, Australian National University

Blasphemy allegations in Pakistan in recent years have led to a student getting lynched on a university campus, neighborhoods getting burnt down by angry mobs, and a governor getting killed by his own security guard, among other similar incidents. Pakistan inherited the clauses concerning 'Offences Related to Religion' from the British government that criminalized insult to any religion in colonial India. However, in the 1980s, the military dictator General Zia-ul-Huq introduced laws exclusively protecting the sentiments of Muslim majority of Pakistan. Consequently, there have been more than 1500 recorded incidents of accusations, and at least 75 of the accused have been killed by mobs or individuals between 1987 and 2017.

The seminar will explore the issues related to blasphemy in Pakistan and its significance for the wider socio-political and moral landscape of the nation.



ABOUT SANA ASHRAF

Sana Ashraf is a final year PhD candidate at The School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University. She has been researching the socio-cultural context of blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan since 2012. She has conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Pakistan for her research and has presented at various international forums.

The 2018 Ian Constable Lecture by Professor Andrew Dick, Director, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology.

Our immune system does not operate solely to protect against infection, cancer and tissue damage. The immune system has evolved so that many cells, both of the immune system and non-immune cells in all tissues, have an ability to generate immune responses that regulate and maintain normal cellular, tissue and organ function. Activated and overactive immune responses are observed in many blinding non-infectious disorders. The eye is endowed with an exquisite network of cells capable of regulating function of the ocular tissues compartments (such as the retina and cornea). However, two diseases I will discuss demonstrate how the dysregulation in the immune system generates blinding disease. The first is uveitis, a general and non-specific clinical term to describe inflammation inside the eye and the second is age-related macular degeneration. This talk will describe how our understanding has led to step changes in treatments in children and adults with uveitis and the current research on how the diseases inform our understanding of immune responses that maintain normal tissue function by regulating metabolism and cell function.

Professor Andrew Dick is a clinician scientist and immunobiologist. He is Director of the UCL-Institute of Ophthalmology where he is Duke Elder Professor of Ophthalmology. He is also Chair and Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of Bristol, UK.

The annual Ian Constable Lecture lecture is presented by the Lions Eye Institute and the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and honours the work of Professor Ian Constable. Professor Constable is recognised as one of the world’s leading ophthalmic surgeons. He was appointed the Lions Foundation Chair of Ophthalmology in 1975. In 1983 Professor Constable established the Lions Eye Institute (LEI) dedicated to the prevention and treatment of blindness and eye disease. Today the LEI is a not-for-profit centre of excellence that combines world class scientific research into the prevention of blindness with the highest level of eye care delivery, combining the expertise of researchers and ophthalmologists.

This annual Ian Constable Lecture presented by the Lions Eye Institute and the UWA IAS, honours the work of Prof Ian Constable who is recognised as one of the world's leading ophthalmic surgeons. Please join us for the 2018 lecture presented by Professor Andrew Dick: 'Tale of two diseases: regulating immune responses in the retina'

A public lecture by Rob Wilson, Professor of Philosophy, La Trobe University and 2018 UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

Familiarity with the eugenic past, particularly that associated with the Holocaust, has primed a wariness about the potential misuse of new ventures in biology, such as the Human Genome Project and the emerging gene-editing technology of CRISPR. That critical perspective, shared by academics and lay persons alike, has sometimes cast a skeptical shadow over future uses of existing reproductive technologies both to create designer babies and to discard embryos or fetuses that do not measure up to some ideal or standard of normality. In his preface to the second edition of In the Name of Eugenics, the historian of science Daniel Kevles cautioned that the “specter of eugenics hovers over virtually all contemporary developments in human genetics”. And in his Backdoor to Eugenics the sociologist Troy Duster viewed contemporary technologies utilizing individual choice as a pathway to a eugenic future. The message here has been clear: understand past eugenics, critique present eugenics, avoid future eugenics.

Yet, for Professor Wilson, eugenics doesn’t feel like that. Not because it’s not a danger, but because its more than a mere possibility lurking in current and future technologies. That feeling stems in part from his work in oral history with eugenics survivors in the Canadian province of Alberta over the past ten years.

In this talk Professor Wilson will share his reflections on eugenics, disability, and attitudes towards human variation, adopting what he calls a standpoint eugenics, eugenics from the standpoint of those who have survived it.

Rob Wilson returned to Australia as professor of philosophy at La Trobe University in 2017 after teaching previously at Queen’s University and the University of Alberta in Canada, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in the United States. His philosophical work ranges across the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, as well as metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy. Amongst his award-winning books are 'Boundaries of the Mind' (2004) and 'The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences' (1999), of which he was general editor, together with the developmental psychologist Frank Keil. Graduating with first-class honours from UWA in 1985, Rob completed his PhD at Cornell University in 1992. In 2009, Rob’s contributions to academic philosophy were recognized with his election to the Royal Society of Canada. Over the past ten years, Rob’s time and energy has been invested primarily in a number of community-focused philosophical initiatives, including founding Philosophy for Children Alberta (2008-2015), serving as the principal investigator for the internationally recognized project Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada (2010-2016), and most recently organizing the Melbourne-based network Philosophical Engagement in Public Life (PEiPL). His most recent book is 'The Eugenic Mind Project', published by the MIT Press in March 2018.

Linguistic lineages are reconstructed on the basis of comparative linguistic patterns assumed to reflect the social process of language transmission over time. In this seminar I introduce the notion of balance as a central element in the interpretation of such patterns.

I argue that the idealised, comparative pattern associated with genetic relationship is balanced, and therefore that the more unbalanced a comparative pattern is found to be, the less consistent it is with the type of history that can be modelled as a lineage. Imbalance is instead the expected linguistic signature of a significant history of contact.

I go on to argue that in order to interpret unbalanced comparative patterns it is therefore crucial to consider the possible effect of bilingual processing biases which can, over time, give rise to transmission biases, so that eventually it will be possible to better evaluate different historical explanations for a particular pattern – e.g. is unbalanced pattern A best explained from a starting point of common ancestry plus a transmission bias B, or from a starting point of no common ancestry plus an alternative transmission bias C? I end by presenting research which makes a significant contribution towards this goal.

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.

This week, the UWA Brass ensemble under the direction of WASO's Liam O'Malley and the UWA Horn Choir, directed by Rob Gladstones (WASO Principal 3rd Horn) will be joined by Ensemble in Residence 'Golden Gate Brass' to present a Lunchtime Concert of big, bold, brassy delights!

Entry is free - no bookings required

Cosmopolitanism is generally understood as a moral ideal whereby the individual transcends particular solidarities to see themselves as belonging to humanity as a whole. This ideal is seen as increasingly relevant due to processes of globalisation. Social scientists have turned to the concept of cosmopolitanism to investigate how individuals see themselves as belonging to the world rather than to the nation-state. In spite of its growing popularity, social scientists have also criticised cosmopolitanism research for being Eurocentric, elitist, and for valuing individual freedom over collective solidarity, resulting in a poor understanding of how cosmopolitanism operates in practice. This research seeks to contribute to addressing these gaps by focusing on the lived experiences of Filipino migrants in Australia. More specifically, this presentation explores how one can be both open to the world and rooted within a particular ethnonational cultural location, by investigating three non-state structures established by Filipino migrants: Migrante WA (an activist organisation for Filipino labour migrants), Gawad Kalinga (a diasporic philanthropic organisation) and Iglesia ni Cristo (a Filipino Christian church). This research found that national rootedness and cosmopolitan openness are not mutually exclusive. In fact, for cosmopolitanism to take effect, shared ‘frameworks of meaning’ must be established. However, the case studies demonstrate that while particular domains of commonality were built between non-national others, such forms of openness were typically limited by anxieties, tensions and contradictions, resulting in the reinforcement rather than dissolution of boundaries. Through these findings, the research thereby illuminates the possibility of a pluralistic view of cosmopolitanism that recognises the significance of rootedness to belonging. Bio: Charmaine Lim is a final year PhD candidate in the Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia. Charmaine graduated with First Class Honours from a Bachelor of Arts degree at Curtin University in 2013. She is currently researching the lived experiences of Filipino migrants in Australia. Through her voluntary engagement with Filipino migrant organisations, Charmaine is particularly interested in looking at the role that non-state structures play in societal and individual cohesion both locally and globally. Her research interests include identity, belonging, cosmopolitanism, community and migration.

Over the past two decades, Asian international mobility has literally changed the face of Australian campus, altered the socio-political dynamics of higher education, and posed many challenges for policy makers, managements, academics and students caught up in the torrents of globalization. This paper outlines the transformed higher education landscape, and contests against the ‘neoliberal cascade’ of students as customers and the marginalization of public good. It draws out the implications of the State regulatory regime’s attempts to redefine the public good of a university in market citizen terms at a time of Asia’s rise as a hub of knowledge production. The paper argues that in face of increased mobility, Australian universities have imposed uniformity in governing practices in which difference is sublimated and categorized along a developmental continuum. The paper notes what is unique about the Australian university system is its openness to the inflow of students and academics from the Global South but dominated by the hegemonic ideology of the Global North. The paper argues for a new ontology as well as a new epistemology that recognise the ‘internationalising’ effect of international students, and oblige a global cognitive justice and build an international constituency of the public good of international student mobility.

The UWA School of Social Sciences Annual Social Sciences Week Public Lecture by John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Sydney.

Democracy urgently needs reimagining if it is to address the dangers and opportunities posed by current global realities, argues leading political thinker John Keane. He offers an imaginative, radically new interpretation of the twenty-first century fate of democracy.

In this talk Professor Keane will discuss why the current literature on democracy is failing to make sense of many intellectual puzzles and new political trends. His talk will focus on a wide range of themes, from the growth of cross-border institutions and capitalist market failures to the greening of democracy, the dignity of children and the anti-democratic effects of everyday fear, violence and bigotry.

Professor Keane will discuss the idea of ‘monitory democracy’ to show why periodic free and fair elections are losing their democratic centrality; and why the ongoing struggles by citizens and their representatives, in a multiplicity of global settings, to humble the high and mighty and deal with the dangers of arbitrary power, force us to rethink what we mean by democracy and why it remains a universal ideal.

For the first time in Perth, join ten world-leading UWA researchers as they escape their labs and lecture theatres to bring impactful talks into ten Perth City bars. Raising the Bar Perth is for one night only, so bookings are essential.

Democracy urgently needs reimagining if it is to address the dangers and opportunities posed by current global realities, argues leading political thinker John Keane. He offers an imaginative, radically new interpretation of the twenty-first century fate of democracy. In this talk Professor Keane will discuss why the current literature on democracy is failing to make sense of many intellectual puzzles and new political trends. His talk will focus on a wide range of themes, from the growth of crossborder institutions and capitalist market failures to the greening of democracy, the dignity of children and the antidemocratic effects of everyday fear, violence and bigotry. Professor Keane will discuss the idea of ‘monitory democracy’ to show why periodic free and fair elections are losing their democratic centrality; and why the ongoing struggles by citizens and their representatives, in a multiplicity of global settings, to humble the high and mighty and deal with the dangers of arbitrary power, force us to rethink what we mean by democracy and why it remains a universal ideal. This lecture is presented by the UWA School of Social Sciences and the Institute of Advanced Studies. Professor Keane’s talk will be followed by discussion with scholars from UWA’s School of Social Sciences.Discussants : • Yu Tao, Lecturer, Asian Studies • Tauel Harper, Lecturer, Media and Communication • Tinashe Jakwa, PhD Candidate in Political Science and International Relations.

About Professor Keane John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge and Melbourne-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and Media Decadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

Harold Rowell was an experienced pilot with MacRobertson Miller Airlines (MMA). He had served as a pilot in the Second World War and joined MMA as a commercial pilot in 1948. The introduction of jet aircraft to service the Pilbara and the North West in the 1970s meant that many of the gravel airstrips, suited to propeller-driven aircraft, were unacceptable for the new jets.

Harold Rowell, who knew the Kimberley like the back of his hand, was forced to land a jet aircraft, in the dark, on the gravel strip at Fitzroy Crossing, when Derby airport was closed to fog. Instead of being hailed as a hero for preserving the company’s safety record and saving the lives of 53 passengers, he was stood down, and pilloried by his employer and the Department of Civil Aviation.

In 2017, the Australian Federation of Air Pilots commissioned the Harold Rowell Award for outstanding airmanship.

Dr Hough has contributed entries to the Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and The New Grove Dictionary od Opera. His first full-length biography, A Man of His Time: the public life of Robert Mitford Rowell, will be launched in November. A Dream of Passion: the centennial history of His Majesty’s Theatre (2004) was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s History Prize, and his Boans for Service: the story of a department store 1895-1986 (2009) was a best-seller.

Members: Free, Guests: $5 donation

In an era marked by Brexit, Pauline Hanson One Nation, the election of US President Donald Trump, and many years of problematic governance in parts South East Asia and South America, we are beginning to learn what right-wing populism is, how it comes about, and puts at risk some of the core institutions of a just and ethical society and obscures some of the alternatives used to describe future societies.

But how do we challenge and combat populism? is it enough to say we just don't like it? Do we Argue for the solidification of liberal institutions, or do we push for even more radical social and governmental systems? In what ways are different groups, organisations and communities actively combatting populism already? What can the humanities and social sciencs learn from existing real-world experience, and how can we better work together to address one of the world's significant social and political problems?

Please join Professor John Keane (The University of Sydney), Professor Mark Beeson (UWA) and other speakers from The University of Western Australia and the community for lively discussion on how we address right-wing populism and protect social justice and ethical societies.

The Conservatorium of Music invites you to join us for the first Perth International Classical Guitar Festival.

Over five days, enjoy a jam-packed program featuring local, national and international artists including Craig Ogden, Jonathan Fitzgerald, Josinaldo Costa and the Perth Guitar Quartet, as well as the cream of Western Australia’s young emerging artists.

Be treated to a variety of performances from soloists, duos and ensembles, as well as the Australian Premier of Andy Scott’s Concerto for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra (2017), co-commissioned by the Conservatorium of Music.

The Festival will also include masterclasses, workshops, open rehearsals and demonstrations – allowing you to dive in and immerse yourself in all things guitar!

Full program details available here: www.perthguitarfestival.com

A public lecture by Dr Jo Jones, Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies, Curtin University.

Questions of narrative and linguistic form have preoccupied novelists, historians and theorists for at least a century and, most particularly, since the 'Crisis of the Representation' in the post-war period. This was a response, among other things, to widespread atrocity. When confronted with a national past framed by acts of atrocity, Australian novelists have taken on challenges of history and form that have yielded varied aesthetic and political results.

The relative formal freedoms offered through historical novels, when compared to conventional history writing offer the chance to confront the past in all of its contradiction and complexity. The terrain of the postmodern and historical sublime — of loss and uncertainly — is one in which historical fiction can perform an important political and ethical role.

Here, Jo Jones discusses the way novels engage Australian history, from novels written in the Bicentenary year to the present time. Jones explores the journeys that authors have made, through one or more novels, into both openly recognised and hidden histories. These authors include Richard Flanagan, Rodney Hall, Kate Grenville, David Malouf and Kim Scott.

Jo Jones is a lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. She has a PhD on Australian historical novels and the History Wars and has taught extensively at various universities including the University of Tasmania and The University of Western Australia. At present, Jo is working on recent versions of Australian Gothicism and, also, the connection between literature, modernity and place. She has recently published an co-edited volume, Required Reading: A History of Secondary English Syllabus Lists with Tim Dolin and Patricia Dowsett, Monash UP, 2017.

This talk is based on the topic of Jo Jones’ latest book, 'Falling Backwards: Australian Historical Fiction and the History Wars', published by UWA Publishing.

Copies of the book will be available on the night, or pre-order your copy from uwap.uwa.edu.au

Jo's talk is presented by UWA Publishing and the Institute of Advanced Studies.

In this seminar, I will report on two visits to Central India that I conducted as part of an exploratory team from Tübingen University (Germany) and the ROCEEH Project (Heidelberg, Germany). India has one of the richest and complex archaeological records in the world. The Indian Subcontinent has a rich Lower Palaeolithic record and continuous human occupation throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene. This evidence also includes painted and engraved rock art. It is now well established that rock art on the Indian subcontinent has a substantial chronological depth and probably covers the whole period from the Palaeolithic, the Neolithic and to the present. As such, it is reflective of an exceptionally wide range of different societies, economic strategies, religious and ritual practices. The importance of this latter heritage has been widely recognized, for example, through the UNESCO World Heritage status of the rock art complex at Bhimbetka. My talk will present some first-hand impressions of some significant Pleistocene archaeological and rock art sites from Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. It will also highlight some challenges of working in India. The talk will not contain complicated theoretical considerations but a lot of lovely images.

The perceptions and behaviours which form Indonesian university students’ diet and exercise cultures are simultaneously an individual experience, a collective mode of identification and reflect diet and exercise trends across the economically developing world. As this generation of Indonesian young people become more educated and aspire to higher-paying sedentary careers in urban centers, the number of kilojoules people can afford to consume will increase while the amount of exercise people participate in is likely to decrease, which, I posit, will have significant social and economic implications for levels of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs). I hypothesize that students, partially in response to broader social pressures for educational success, often ignore their body’s diet and exercise needs. This attitude will probably cause weight gain and set up patterns for life. With rising rates of lifestyle-induced diseases, Indonesia now faces the complex double burden of under- and over- nutrition which could lead to a public health crisis within one generation. In this broader context, the period of university study offers an opportunity to educate young people about diet and exercise, with the hope of enabling them to avoid lifestyle induced NCDs in the future.

Although psychological gender differences have been reported in a variety of domains, sometimes amounting to psychologists comparing them with the distance between Mars and Venus (Del Giudice et al., 2012, PloS One), linguists still debate about the magnitude of such differences in language use. I present findings from a corpus linguistic study that employed computerised text analysis methods to examine gender differences in British, Irish, and American literary canons of the 19th and early 20th centuries, comprising c. 15 million words. Very large (Cohen’s d > 1) gender differences were found for article use, personal pronoun use, positive emotion words, social words, and words reflecting analytical thinking. Other psycholinguistic categories showed gender differences ranging from negligible to large (0 < d < 1). These quantitative findings on 132 novels provide further challenges to the gender similarities hypothesis whilst supporting the sex differences hypothesis arising from and supported by evolutionary science. The present findings extend existing scientific knowledge on human gender differences to psycholinguistic and biocultural domains.

Cheng Yen Loo

Ageing and quality of life in dissimilar housing arrangements: Comparisons between the lived experiences of older Chinese migrants from Malaysia and Singapore ageing in Australian home environments. This presentation outlines a Phd research project that will compare the lived experiences of elderly Chinese people ageing in different home environments. A four way comparison will be made of people ageing at home (alone or with family), in mainstream and ethno-specific assistive retirement homes in addition to ethno-specific independent retirement homes. I will explore how Chinese families negotiate the changing nature of care transactions within the family and how this influences elderly people's sense of home. Aspects to consider include notions of culturally appropriate care exchange between family members and the use of space and technology in the home as methods of care provision. I hope that this project will shed some light on how the home environment and associated features within can influence elderly people’s quality of life.

Akram Azimi

OWNING AUSTRALIA? Rising household wealth & proprietorial belonging in Australia’s ‘neoliberalising’ political economy. How, why and when do certain Australians, and not others, experience the nation as possessively belonging to them? To date, this privileged and proprietorial mode of belonging in Australia has predominately been studied in the context of ethnicity (i.e., ‘whiteness’). Drawing from the political economy tradition, I will adopt a broader, more class sensitive, theoretical framework. I will ‘study up’ the generally overlooked lived experiences of Australians who have materially benefited from the ‘neoliberalising’ changes in Australia’s political economy: the top 60% of Australians who own 95% of the national household wealth worth over $10 Trillion. My central question is whether, and if so how, this group has 'realised' the unprecedented increases in their household wealth as Australian proprietorial belonging.

Please join us to celebrate the life of Kofi Atta Annan, UN Secretary-General 1997-2006, and the legacy of his tireless work for Ghana, Africa and global affairs. The tribute will feature Ghanaian cultural traditions, video footage and remarks by speakers from the UN, government, communities and academics, followed by light refreshments.