What's On at UWA

This talk presents original ethnographic material drawing on long-term fieldwork at the Indian Ocean coast of Northwest Australia. It highlights a particular aspect in a conflict situation over the construction of a $ 45 Billion AUD liquefied natural gas facility (LNG) on top of an Indigenous (...)

AIIA WA, together with the Perth USAsia Centre, have the pleasure to invite you to a pop-up panel event to discuss the controversy surrounding President Trump and his alleged connections to Russia. Our panel of experts on US politics, the intelligence community, and Russia will discuss the Trump (...)

This paper considers the ways that the genre of American film noir was adapted in “Nikkatsu Action” crime films to capture and convey some of the faultlines of rapid socio-economic and cultural change in 1950s/1960s Japan.

The term film noir was initially used by French film critics (...)

Impacts of national and regional policies upon the Bajau Laut who occupy the maritime border region shared by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

The Perth USAsia Centre together with the UWA Law School invite you to join us for a public lecture by the former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Hon. Robert French AC. Justice French will address the significant influence the political and legal architecture of the United States has (...)

In this presentation I examine the evolution of the digital economy in China from the early 2000s to now. The key idea behind this is the integration of technological innovation (science & technology) and cultural creativity (arts and culture). The emphasis within the 13th Five Year Plan is (...)

During planning for the aborted Roe 8 highway project in the Perth metropolitan region, Noongar Traditional owners and archaeologists became concerned about protection of Aboriginal heritage place DAA 4107, which extends along the north side of Walliabup (Bibra Lake), through the Roe 8 corridor (...)

In 2011 Dr Gaye Nayton gave a public talk at the “More than grass – Exploring the Esplanade” conference, organised by the History Council of Western Australia. Dr Nayton’s talk was entitled “Foreshore treasure: The potential archaeology of the buried Port of Perth” where she stated that (...)

Over the last two years and with the rise of the citizen photographer, there have been radical changes in how we respond to photographs and images, particularly those that reveal unimaginable suffering. Whether it is a photograph of the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi washed ashore near the Turkish (...)

Over 800 international governmental organizations employ thousands of civil servants. Whistleblowers in them confront problems common to their sovereign-level counterparts but also issues uncommon among their nation-state colleagues including a lack of whistleblower policy clarity, contractual (...)

Almost all of the beads found in Australian archaeological sites are made from marine shell or animal teeth and there is strong selectivity within these two classes of beads. Shell beads are dominated by three species and beads made from teeth are almost exclusively made from incisors of the (...)

The heritage of the novel as ‘the dominant form of narrative literature in the West’ was instrumental in the seminal work entitled ‘The Nature of Narrative’ by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg published in 1966. Their exploration of the meaning, character, plot and the point of view in (...)

Emigration from one’s country of birth is an inherently life-changing event which requires uprooting from all that is familiar. It is a complex and far-reaching phenomenon affecting all members of a specific social network – both those who leave and those who stay behind. The bulk of (...)

Contemporary Martu rarely harvest grass seeds but inadvertently foster patches of grass when they burn to hunt burrowed monitor lizards, demonstrating that grass seeds need only be by-products, rather than intended crops, of firestick farming. Nonetheless, repeatedly setting hunting fires in the (...)

Music and performance are universal human social activities, yet their ephemerality means they are often invisible in the material record. Even venues associated with performance are quickly repurposed for other uses.The heritage of music and performance is specifically tied to cities and towns (...)

This public event, hosted in collaboration with the Australia Korea Business Council of Western Australia (AKBCWA) and the Australia - Korea Business Council (AKBC) will examine the current political climate in the Korean Peninsula. Perth USAsia Centre CEO Professor L. Gordon Flake together with (...)

No one knows what the unexpected election of Donald Trump will mean for the broadly conceived Asia-Pacific region. What we do know, however, is that it is likely to be very different from what has gone before. At the very least it will draw a line under Obama’s ‘Pivot’ to Asia and to specific (...)

Livelihoods, Fire Regimes, and Novel Ecosystems in Indigenous Australia

We are currently experiencing what Elizabeth Kolbert calls the planet's sixth great extinction. Australia represents the largest contributor to the mammalian component of this catastrophe. This presentation explores (...)

Join Maïa Ponsonnet, from the University of Sydney, as she explores compassion in Indigenous languages. A number of Indigenous languages in the Top End display a highly conventionalised intonation contour that is used in emotionally tinted contexts relating in particular to compassion.

Rethinking Altered States of Consciousness in a Transforming World: Could Psychedelics be Vehicles for Change? by Alicia Wheatley

The recent renaissance into the study of psychedelic substances raises interesting and conceptually important issues for anthropologists and other academics (...)