What's On at UWA

Ever since the birth of Pakistan and India as independent nations after the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, Indo-Pak relations have been vexed to say the least. The nations have fought three accepted wars; two unacknowledged wars; and is still in the throes of insurgency and counter-insurgency operations. The divergent socio-political direction that the nations have taken in the post-independence age have vitiated their bilateral relationship.

This presentation provides a brief background to the relationship between the two nations; examines the fundamental reasons for the animosity that prevails most of the time in the official relationship of the two nations; and analyses the current situation. It will also pay particular attention to the ‘Kashmir Issue’ and consider the impact of the result of the on-going Indian elections.

Dr Sanu Kainikara is the Air Power Strategist at the Air Power Development Centre of the Royal Australian Air Force and also a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of 11 books: Papers on Air Power, Pathways to Victory, Red Air: Politics in Russian Air Power, Australian Security in the Asian Century, A Fresh Look at Air Power Doctrine, Seven Perennial Challenges to Air Forces, The Art of Air Power: Sun Tzu Revisited, At the Critical Juncture, Essays on Air Power, The Bolt From the Blue, and From Indus to Independence Volume I. He has presented extensively in international forums and published numerous papers on national security, strategy and air power. He is the recipient of the RAAF Chief of Air Force’s Commendation.

Dr Kainikara is a former fighter pilot of the Indian Air Force who retired as a Group Captain after 21 years of commissioned service. During his service career, he has flown over 4,000 hours on a number of modern fighter aircraft, commanded an operational fighter squadron and held various other command and staff appointments. He is a Qualified Flying Instructor, and a graduate and instructor of the IAF Fighter Weapons School, the National Defence Academy, the Defence Services Staff College, and the College of Air Warfare. He is a recipient of the IAF Chief of Air Staff Commendation and the Air Force Cross.

After retirement from active service, he worked for four years as the senior analyst, specialising in air power strategy for a US Training Team in the Middle East. Prior to his current appointment he was the Director Wargaming and Strategic Doctrine in the Strategy Group of the Department of Defence. He has also taught Aerospace Engineering at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne. He has two Bachelors degrees, a Masters degree in Defence and Strategic Studies from the University of Madras and his PhD in International Politics was awarded by the University of Adelaide.

Is Archaeology a tool – or even pathology – of European colonisation? Does it have liberatory potential? Can there be an archaeology of today and of tomorrow?

Increasingly, archaeologists are becoming aware of the discipline’s history and the need to de-colonise much of its theory and praxis. One strategy is to work with and even to incorporate Indigenous understandings of the past. Another move is studying ‘contemporary archaeology’ to reverse the gaze so that it is less ‘us’ studying ‘them’ than ‘us’ studying ‘us’. But such a move can be indulgent; so we need to examine what is at stake in studying ‘contemporary pasts’. Archaeological analysis of battlefields, prisons, homelessness, and garbage disposal have proved insightful in bringing marginalised people and pasts to the fore. In this spirit I use archaeological and rock art techniques to examine graffiti. Superficially understood as a modern language of the poor and peripheral; archaeological analysis shows graffiti to continue an ancient tradition of politically-engaged place-marking and making. I illustrate this point using case studies from southern Africa and Western Australia. I conclude by considering the definition and legal status of graffiti, heritage management implications, and the ethics of contemporary archaeology studies.

This seminar is a trial run for paper to be presented at the International Sociological Association conference in July. The paper considers differences in articulations of belonging in Australia generated using three different methodologies among different populations. Results from face to face interviews plus a photovoice exercise among refugees settler are compared and contrasted with data generated in 20 focus groups with migrants and non-migrants across Australia using a set of images designed to elicit discussion around national, transnational and postnational identities. Membership Categorisation Analysis is used to interrogate the presumptions included in the prompts used to generate the data (interview questions, themes for photographs, and images for focus group discussion) and the results. The range of parameters of belonging from the political (civic and ethno belonging) to the interpersonal (family, friends, place) are noted, as well as the limits to belonging, particularly the category work done discursively to identify insiders and outsiders. The paper concludes that each method is useful in different ways to gain access to different experiences of belonging and unbelonging.

This study proposes to contribute to techniques and methods for recording underwater archaeological sites by testing and refining a methodology for accurate and affordable image-based 3D modelling of shipwrecks in Western Australia (WA). Ultimately, providing a detailed, accurate and informative digital representation of a site for archaeological interpretation and dissemination of information to peers and public. Until recently, acquiring photographs of an underwater site and processing them into a 3D reconstruction was time consuming and required specialist skills. Advances in algorithms for computer science and machine vision now allow raw images to be quickly processed and 3D reconstructions automatically derived. Both legacy data (data previously collected) and new data (collected during this research) will form the basis for the project. Photographic recording of underwater sites and the application of modern 3D reconstruction software will fulfil essential archaeological requirements of recording a site quickly and accurately, potentially becoming a primary tool for underwater archaeological recording.

It began with chimney sweeps and is now publicly funded universal education. In this and other stories, this WXED talk will trace several pillars of today's Education system that arose from an adventurous Christianity. Is there today a potential for teachers and students in a new ongoing, adventurous and open conversation towards a transformative learning. This event is an experiment in thinking beyond the silos and we are looking for you to join the conversation.

In the penultimate chapter of The politics of suffering, Peter Sutton offers some examples of what he considers to be true reconciliation between Aboriginal and White Australians, sharing experiences and entering into the life worlds of each other. His examples are of anthropologists and key informants, ‘Unusual couples’, the title of that chapter.

In this paper I outline a long standing and ever growing project that has involved teams of Aboriginal people and White field workers – rangers, linguists, anthropologists and ecological and physical scientists – which, I argue, extends Sutton’s ‘Unusual couples’, demonstrating reconciliation and cooperative recognition on a much larger scale. The theatre is Arnhemland, Western Arnhemland in particular, and the subject is how we Whitefellas have learnt from, and adapted, Aboriginal technologies without misappropriating them.

This cooperative venture has its origins in the early 1970s when, as a young forestry officer, I found Aboriginal resistance – hardly surprising we can say in retrospect – to the forestry program at Maningrida, initiated in the 1960s to bring wild Arnhemlanders into the modern world, to assimilate them into Australian society. The project, again not surprisingly, failed, for several reasons. Not the least of these was its explicit objective to suppress manwurrk and thus, supposedly, create vast fields of regeneration of native cypress pine.

Yet, all was not lost. Out of that failure came the vast learning experience for Whitefellas, some of which I describe, and another practical project, largely directed and operated by Aboriginal people themselves. That began as a locally oriented conservation and cultural maintenance operation but, in being able to take advantage of carbon farming credits, has now become part of global environmental improvement.

Much of this has been well recorded and analysed in recent years and my purpose here is not so much to rehash already published work as to illuminate the importance of the teams of Blackfellas and Whitefellas working together, thus producing the discourses that come out of common experience; and ‘unusual teams’ that point to the practical reconciliation of which Sutton writes.

Reconciliation is “a journey”. The destination is a state of being where “understanding, unity, trust and respect” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is the norm (http://www.icv.com.au/). Reaching this state, however, is hampered by many things including the widespread belief among the “broader Australian community,” along with most of the Western World, that oral cultures are inferior to modern cultures of literacy. It is time to remind literary cultures of their debt to an oral past and to find ways to increase respect for Indigenous people and cultures. Perth researchers found that a functioning art gallery for Indigenous art and artists gave rise to informal “ceremony[ies] of elevation” where “respect for Indigenous people and cultures” improved day to day relations (Trudi Cooper, Susanne Bahn and Margaret Giles, Edith Cowan, 2012 http://www.dia.wa.gov.au/Documents/ReportsPublications/Art_centre_report.pdf ).

In this paper I work with a set of case studies, works of Indigenous excellence arising from and circulating in an inter-cultural mediascape. As a group these works are analogous to a functioning gallery of art works but it is details of the works themselves that I take as raw data. The paper begins by applying the work of Stuart Cooke on the Songpoetry of Paddy Roe and Stephen Meucke. Cooke finds in Roe’s poetry techniques that serve Indigenous Australian oral poetics and are recognisable as elements of the ancient rhetoric that underpins western notions of high literature. I give examples of skilful use of these techniques from my audiovisual case studies then go on to examine the works as Fourth Cinema as envisioned by Barry Barclay. In particular I identify ways the film makers speak in to Aboriginal groups even as they speak out to wider audiences. The final section discusses contexts of production where community involvement respects guardianship of stories, places and culture resulting in what Faye Ginsberg calls “embedded aesthetics”, and the use of “immersive aesthetic” that counters or renders impossible the neo-colonial gaze. The paper concludes that the growing number of popular audio-visual works by Indigenous writers and directors provides opportunities for non-Indigenous researchers to initiate small ‘ceremonies of elevation’ both in providing an audience and in offering informed critique of the works.

Sarah Knuckey (incoming director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University, New York) will speak on “Law, Drones, and Targeted Killing” at 12 noon on Tuesday 24 June, in room 294 in the Old Econ and Commerce Building. All welcome.

Salamat Ali Khan is one of the leading exponents of the genres of Ghazal and Thumri. Primarily trained by his father Ustad Sharif Khan at the age of 14, Salamat Ali Khan has been able to carve an independent identity in light classical singing.

He has remained for years a dedicated learner in the company of Great Ghazal Singer Mehdi Hassan Khan and accompanied him a number of times during live international concerts.

In 1971, Salamat Ali Khan had his debut performance on Radio Pakistan Karachi as a Ghazal & Thumri singer. Later on, Khan sahib produced a wide range of his musical albums with his own compositions. Khan sahib with his family are primarily based in America and have performed along with his talented wife during many live concerts on the international arena.

Tickets: $15 Limited tickets are available from www.cmss.uwa.edu.au/events.

News media often portray Canadian Muslim youth as alienated from society and prone to radicalisation. This lecture focuses on a more complex reality of alienation and engagement, seen through the lens of perceptions of political participation. Using qualitative interview data from 30 Muslim youth in the Greater Toronto Area and London, Ontario, the findings demonstrate a similar pattern to other Canadian youth with respect to political participation, but surprisingly with very high participation rates in the voluntary sector.

Katherine Bullock is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto at Mississauga. She sits on the boards of The Tessellate Institute and the North American Association of Islamic and Muslim Studies. She is also President of Compass Books, dedicated to publishing top-quality books about Islam and Muslims in English. Her teaching focus is political Islam and her research focuses on Muslims in Canada, debates on the veil, and media representations of Islam and Muslims. Originally from Perth, she lives in Oakville, Canada with her husband and children. She embraced Islam in 1994.

Join in the conversation with exhibition curator Barbara Bynder as she discusses the exhibition Wildflower Dreaming: Shirley Corunna and the Coolbaroo League 1952-1962.

The exhibition presents a snapshot of Shirley’s personal journey, following a move from her home in Three Springs in the Wheatbelt region.

Shirley lived and worked in Perth in the 1950s during which time she attended the Coolbaroo League’s weekly Friday night dances.

Visit the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery website for more information. This talk is free to attend, however, RSVP is essential.

New agriculture is believed to play a crucial role in the regional transformation of northern Western Australia. There is significant potential for Asia-focused food production and industry to diversify northern Australia’s economy, trade and sustainable use of natural resources over the long term; and to benefit Indigenous communities, which have a significant presence in the region. It is timely to engage in a discussion on the feasibility and likely effectiveness of new agricultural development projects in this unique region of Australia, where the challenges are magnified compared to southern Australia.

For catering purposes, please RSVP by 21 July 2014 to [email protected]

Matthew Sawyers, UWA: Constraining cyber-warfare: prospects for a normative prescription

Andrew Chubb, UWA: Chinese nationalism, CCP legitimacy and maritime disputes in the Internet era

Although the women’s driving movement in Saudi Arabia has gained tremendous visibility in recent years, it has failed to meet its basic objective: winning women the right to drive. While there is no question that the movement has encountered sustained resistance to its agenda, resistance alone does not determine failure. Instead, Dr. Foley argues that we should look at how the movement’s leaders understand the principles that guide politics in the Kingdom, since it is that understanding which shapes the strategies that they employ to bring about change.  He concludes by discussing alternative approaches that might work for Saudi women in the future, approaches based on the success of the Saudi artistic movement and the insights of one of the Kingdom’s foremost Western-educated women who is not a member of the movement: Thuraya al-Arrayed.

Dr. Foley is an American professor of Middle East and Islamic studies in Tennessee and is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australia National University. He speaks Arabic, has published widely, and has delivered public presentations to audiences around the world.  He has also held Fulbright fellowships in Syria, Turkey, and Malaysia. From April 2013 until February 2014, he lived and researched extensively in Saudi Arabia for a new book on the Kingdom entitled A Kingdom of Many Colors. His website is www.seanfoley.org.

Contemporary Performance Masterclass

UWA students in masterclass with Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick. This Masterclass is open to the public, all welcome. THIS IS A FREE EVENT

Described as “brilliant and searching...beautiful and impassioned...lustrous at the keyboard” by The New York Times, Lisa Moore’s performances combine music and theatre with expressive and emotional power - whether in the delivery of the simplest song, a solo recital or a fiendish chamber score. Pitchfork writes "She's the best kind of contemporary classical musician, one so fearsomely game that she inspires composers to offer her their most wildly unplayable ideas". Having won the silver medal for her solo piano performances in the 1981 Rockefeller-Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition Lisa Moore moved to New York in 1985. From 1992-2008 she was the founding pianist for the Bang On A Can All-Stars - the New York based electro-acoustic sextet and winner of Musical America's 2005 Ensemble of the Year Award.

COMPOSITION MASTERCLASS

UWA composition students present their current composition for work-shopping, followed by a brief presentation by Bresnik on My Twentieth Century and ***Trio and Ishi's Song. This Masterclass is open to the public, all welcome. Martin Bresnick is Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the Composition Department at the Yale School of Music. Mr Bresnick’s compositions cover a wide range of instrumentation, from chamber music to symphonic compositions and computer music. He has received many prizes, among them: Fulbright Fellowship (1969-70), three NEA Composer Grants (1974, 1979, 1990); ASCAP Awards (1975-present); “Charles Ives Living” award, American Academy of Arts & Letters (1998), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2003), and was elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006). THIS IS A FREE EVENT

The archaeology of the Burrup Peninsula is best known from its rock art. However, the area is also distinctive in the occurrence of a wide range of site types, many of which are associated as site complexes. Surface artefact scatters on the Burrup, which have received little attention in the past, are primarily manufactured from granophyre – a local and common raw material. In this presentation we discuss a preliminary analysis of the assemblages associated with the Phillip Point Stone Arrangement. This unusual complex stone arrangement is associated with several discrete flaking floors. A radiocarbon determination of about 400 BP came from charcoal associated with a circle of stones near the major feature at the site.

The site complex provides an opportunity to study flaked stone assemblages from what can arguably be interpreted as a ceremonial site and compare them with assemblages from sites showing evidence of a broader range of functions. Since one function of the activities at ceremonial sites in the Pilbara is to transmit cultural knowledge, we also explore whether the discrete flaking floors could represent the work of novice knappers. This paper is part of a larger study of Burrup flaked stone assemblages which will assess whether assemblages associated with secular and non-secular contexts can be differentiated from one another.

A public lecture and performance by Martin Bresnick

Brought to you by the UWA Institue of Advanced Studies

"Listening to Images, Hearing the Text: new music that engages the visual and the literary"

The art of music has always had an unusual ability to be united with other arts - poetry, dance, theater and cinema. In our own time, the association of music, words and images has been expanded and enhanced by computers and other technologies. In this lecture-performance Martin Bresnick will show excerpts from several of his works to demonstrate this:

For The Sexes: the Gates of Paradise (William Blake) Caprichos Enfaticos (Francesco de Goya) A Message from the Emperor (Franz Kafka)

Psychic unity is a fraught concept in anthropology and related fields, yet, I argue, even those of us who doubt the existence of a shared human nature carry an expectation of it into the field. (Or, I might add, into almost any interaction with someone who is not our self.) Empathy, which necessarily depends on a degree of psychic unity, has long been a critical tool for doing ethnography though our recognition of this fact comes and goes in the anthropological canon. Can we, as Clifford Geertz once did, dismiss the empathy we draw upon as we strive to understand other ways of being and experience as merely our projections onto an ‘Other’ that by their very nature entirely miss the mark? Or is it an empathy that connects in some ways with the known, the familiar? In this experientialist approach to personhood, I draw on an example of emotion talk from the remote Aboriginal community of Numbulwar to begin exploring my intuition that the women I know there are, in spite of our difference, very much like me. In this effort, I am largely guided by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s ideas about primary metaphors and the bodily experiences that underlie them. I focus, in particular, on an Aboriginal woman’s experience of anger and shame, and on why I think I can understand not just what is being said to me but something of the experience behind what is being said.