What's On at UWA

The merchant vessel Edwin Fox was exceptional for being unexceptional. It was old fashioned even before its keel was laid down in Thomas Reeves’s shipyards near Calcutta in 1853. It was neither large nor fast, and had none of the prestige of the great tea and opium clippers that captured the public imagination in the mid-nineteenth century. The Edwin Fox was a small, ugly slowpoke in the heyday of the age of sail and a lonesome survivor in the age of steam, and from a mariner’s perspective it sat at the bottom of the hierarchy of opportunities. Yet the life and career of this undistinguished ship coincide with a pivotal era in globalization: the years between 1860 and 1890 that Jurgen Osterhammel calls the “inner focal point” of the 19th century. And the Edwin Fox participated in many of the developments that made these years so crucial: the rapid expansion and intensification of trade around the globe; the spread of industrialization to many regions; the great thrust of Western imperialism; the unprecedentedly large migrations of people, both free and forced; the large-scale and systematic dispossession of indigenous peoples and their replacement with settler populations; the integration of settler colonies into imperial markets; and environmental change on a massive scale. Beginning with the November 20, 1858 arrival of the vessel at Fremantle, Western Australia carrying 82 passengers and 280 convicts, this talk will combine archival research and Arc GIS mapping to reconstruct the many worlds of the Edwin Fox. Emphasizing stories of integration, interactions, and entanglements, this paper describes the ways in which the unique perspective of this single ship can provide to a more intimate understanding of the human agencies and the human costs involved in the most important period of globalization to occur prior to the one we have been experiencing since the 1990s.

Twelve years of collaboration between three Yimardoowarra Marninil, Nyikina sisters from the Lower Fitzroy River, and French-Australian filmmaker and PhD Scholar, Magali McDuffie, have revealed the Nyikina women’s determination to speak and re-affirm their Nyikina worldview into existence. Their voices, and those of other Kimberley Aboriginal people, demonstrate the strength and continuity of the women’s discourse, despite ever-changing government policies and strategies.

In her PhD thesis, Magali deconstructs the historical and historiographical discourses, anthropological data, legislative policies, development theory, as well as international Indigenous and non-Indigenous literature on agency and development as they relate to the Kimberley region of Western Australia. She investigates the impacts of the colonial state’s development project from colonisation onwards, and describe the Nyikina sisters’ complex interactions with the dominant discourse, bringing to the fore the Nyikina worldview. In privileging Nyikina voices, through film, her study reveals the often hidden flaws of an exclusively market-oriented capitalist economy.

Nyikina women’s voices have become a significant part of a global Indigenous discourse on development alternatives. Their continued agency on the local, national, and international stage, demonstrates the significance of booroo , Country, as a decolonising ground in the context of global development.

In her presentation, Magali will retrace the journey of her PhD thesis, using both film and chapter excerpts to illustrate her findings.

The theme is “Growing up African in Australia” and will feature an interactive panel discussion and Q&A followed by refreshments and networking. The event also serves as the WA launch of the recently published book by Black Inc. Books Growing up African in Australia. Copies will be available to buy on the night. The event is held in partnership with Black Inc. Books, the UWA African Students Union and the Organisation of African Communities in WA (OAC). We would also like to highlight OAC’s Africa Day 2019 Gala Dinner on 25 May. We hope to see you at both events!

The Reverend John Smithies arrived in the Swan River Colony in July 1840, and immediately established a residential mission to Noongar children in the centre of Perth. In 1845 the mission moved to Wanneroo, then in 1851 moved again, to York. By 1854 the mission at York housed only two children, and in 1855 was closed by the government, having ‘failed’. Many other church, government, and private institutions were also operating during the period of Smithies’ missions, and a number of Noongar children were moved between these institutions, both around the South West and across the country. Very little is currently known about the identities and life experiences of the Noongar people who were institutionalised in Smithies’ missions, the circumstances that led them there, or their lives after institutionalisation. This research seeks to discover what stories can be told about Noongar people who were associated with Smithies’ missions from the results of historical and archaeological investigation. As well as extensive historical and ethno-historical archival research into the written record relating to these missions, this project aims to survey and excavate at the two former Smithies mission sites still accessible to archaeological investigation; Wanneroo and York. It is hoped this research will contribute to a better understanding of these early missions, and the lives of the people associated with them.

The objective of this two day workshop is to enhance the skills of the faculty and postgraduate students in the assessment of student learning. The topics covered include; Writing test items, creating assignments, conducting pre and post examination reviews, assessment of professionalism, feedback and development of blueprints. This workshop is organised by Peers Learning Together: A Community of Practice for academics with an interest in assessment and feedback funded by the Educational Enhancement Unit at the University of Western Australia

Professional development certificate provided by the School of Social Sciences, the University of Western Australia.

Features presentations by leading academics from UWA, UNSW, Monash University and ANU, as well as presenters from NSW DoE, WA and ACT school.

Registration and participation is FREE.

Refreshments, lunch and workshop dinner set at the University Club included in the registration.

Why sign up?

A two-day workshop designed to provide you with a solid overview of Korean society, culture, history, politics, popular culture and Australia-Korea relations. All presentation materials have been designed to address the ‘Asia priority’ curriculum, and will be free for you to take and use in your own teaching practice in classroom.

Q&A session on funding and further curriculum development opportunities.

Workshop dinner hosted at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, featuring Korean cuisine and a traditional music performance by Jocelyn Clark and Choi Jinsook.

Register through the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfD_kY51EUDdiY7O2xrIvaYT18laKCLu8eje1x06Bk3Gc19Jg/viewform

Click on the following link to view the detailed program and speakers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oL0wSax9tJ0qm9yn07sHjJSXI4UC7tH_/view

For information regarding the venues and parking, please click on the following link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tAp8XvZ31MHcQa2aaXyrLBkFRhaa71Cx/view

Times are different on both days, please click the above detailed program link for the time details.

This presentation examines the spectacular emergence of Islamism in the twenty-first century in the island nation of the Maldives, where Islam has existed for about 800 years. It problematizes the conventional view that political Islam is the other of the modern state or an outcome of an aberrant understanding of Islam. As counterintuitive as it is, the chapter argues that the genealogy of Islamism goes back to the institutional and discursive politicisation of Islam through modern nation building since 1930s by state actors with Islamic modernist orientations. Those nation building projects transformed Islam into a modern religion in two primary ways. First, instead of jettisoning Islam from the polity, Islam was institutionalised into modern institutional forms – constitutions, codified laws and rules, centralised state authority, a bureaucratised judicial system. Second, Islam was also transformed into an extra-institutional public political discourse of collective national identity. Both forms of statist political Islam in many ways conformed to the liberal expectations and sensibilities consistent with Islamic modernist orientations. However, instead of weakening Islam in the polity, it was deeply embedded in the political domain. The paper shows that Islamism in the twenty-first century was unwittinglynourished by those forms of political Islam in the polity, as Islamism finds the right ‘language’ already in the political domain. While Islamism agrees with the modalities of the forms of political Islam that emerged through modern nation building, it deeply contests the content, as it were, of them. Oppositional Islamism wants more substantive institutionalisation of Islam and more substantive religious identity for the people, threatening even the liberal aspects of statist political Islam.

With increasing public scrutiny of agricultural practices in food and fibre production, rebuilding trust between innovative primary producers and ethically informed consumers is becoming more important than ever before. Join us for a lively discussion on finding common ground and moving forward together.

The event program is as follows: 1.30pm Registration and refreshments, 2.00pm Event start, 5.00pm - 6.30pm Sundowner

For more details, view the flyer: http://www.ioa.uwa.edu.au/publications/industry-forum

As cities across the world endure increase extremes of heat, indoor comfort has become a key vector in the debate about sustainability and energy consumption. Across Asia the carbon footprint of buildings continues to rise because of the widespread adoption of air conditioning. Current trends are unsustainable, and alternative, less energy intensive comfort regimes need to be maintained or cultivated.

This presentation examines such challenges as a thermal complex, an approach that seeks to move the debate beyond questions of engineering and smart-city solutions. In this informal presentation we want to outline our struggle at conceptualising a book, and the challenges of imparting socio-cultural histories and political analyses into a domain dominated by techno-scientific discourses.

Jiat Hwee Chang is Associate Professor at the School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore, and is author of a number of books, including A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience. He is also co-founder of Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative (SEAARC).

Tim Winter is ARC Professorial Future Fellow in the School of Sciences, UWA and was Lead CI on 2 international research collaborations on air conditioning and urban development in Southeast Asia (ARC DP) and the Middle East (QNRF).

This talk aims to offer an analytical framework to make sense of the abundant empirical materials regarding the Christianity related protests in contemporary China. It argues that the inherent ambiguity in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) religious policy is fundamentally responsible for the many Christianity-related protests in contemporary China. However, while many Christianity-related protests in contemporary China are closely associated with the clash of ideologies, the specific causes of protests differ significantly among Catholic churches, Protestant churches, and Christian-inspired groups. The ideological incompatibility between the ruling CCP and the Catholic Church in China is epitomised by their struggle for authority and influence over the Chinese Catholic community. On the contrary, some influential Protestant church leaders have turned their progressive theology into social activism since the turn of the 21st century, leading to various forms of protests against the authoritarian policies and politics in contemporary China. In addition, ideological and theological conflicts between different religions or religious schools may also trigger the CCP’s suppression of certain religious groups and activities, which often in turn cause protests.

Dr Yu Tao teaches and researches contemporary China at the University of Western Australia. A political sociologist by training, he conducts theoretical and empirical analysis into the intersections and interactions among religious groups, civic organisations and local state agencies in contemporary China and overseas Chinese communities.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often portrayed in the West as hostile towards religion, and the Party indeed still prohibits its members from joining any religion. How should we understand the apparent incompatibility between the CCP and religion? Is the CCP hostile towards religion because of the atheist ideology of a Communist Party? Or is the CCP, as an ‘organisational emperor’, is concerned with the strong organisational capacity that religious groups have in mobilising contentious politics? Moreover, if we were to study this topic through direct interviews, could we believe what Chinese cadres tell us in the first place? In this work-in-progress presentation, we will report findings revealed by a simple, yet sophisticatedly designed, list experience with 170 junior CCP cadres in Beijing. Our result demonstrates that the problem of social desirability exists in some, but not all, dimensions of the perceptions that Chinese cadres have on religion. We also revealed that Chinese cadres tend to perceive different religions with different levels of concerns, while in general they have much stronger concern over the frequency of religious congregation (i.e. the organisational aspect of religion) than over individual religious participations (i.e. the ideological aspect of religion).

In this presentation, I examine the activities of a group of heritage enthusiasts in Iran. Grass-roots heritage activism is a relatively recent phenomenon that appeared in Iran since the late 1990s. Activists often operate collectively, as NGOs that focus on heritage. They represent a range of cultural and socioeconomic origins with different political views. However, they share a certain ambivalence towards and critical approach to official, state definitions of heritage and identity. By referring to data collected through fieldwork I argue that these activities constitute a form of heritage movement and outline some of the characteristics of this movement.

Ali Mozaffari is a Fellow of the Australian Research Council with the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. Through his research, he seeks to understand the uses of the past in contemporary discourses of heritage and built environment in Iran and West Asia. His publications include Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place (2014) and World Heritage in Iran: Perspectives on Pasargadae (2016), and “Picturing Pasargadae: Visual Representation and the Ambiguities of Heritage in Iran” (Iranian Studies, 2017).

This conversational presentation will consider both the process and the implications of intermittent research conducted by Associate Professor Yamanouchi since 2009 in the vibrant, northern, coastal town of Broome, in Western Australia's Kimberley region. Via a focus on emphases such as a Japanese diaspora, identity, history, ethnicity, food, place‐naming and making, the complex extent to which Indigenous Australians and persons with Japanese heritage identify and interact in Broome, will be explored, alongside an interest in theories of contemporary identity.

Dr Yuriko Yamanouchi is an Associate Professor at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). She finished PhD (Anthropology) at the University of Sydney. She has been visiting Broome and conducting research with Indigenous people who share a Japanese heritage since 2009. Dr Yamanouchi lectures in Oceania Studies Course at TUFS (The Tokyo University of Foreign Studies).

Populism is popular but generally gets a bad press—for good reasons. But could populism actually be a progressive force in domestic and even international politics? Recent movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the abortive Arab Spring suggest it might. This presentation previews my forthcoming book and considers—more in hope than expectation—whether a populist upsurge could actually mobilise around the issue of climate change. We will undoubtedly be forced to respond to climate change eventually, but thoughtful, constructive responses may no longer be possible by the time we do. Yet public pressure to make policymakers act in environmentally sustainable ways is still just about possible. Progressive forms of populism, especially in democratic states, could compel even the most conservative politicians to take climate change seriously before it is too late. As Mrs Thatcher might have said, as far as the majority of us who have no influence over policy are concerned, there really is no alternative. This presentation is based on Mark’s new book of the same name.

In recent years, scholarship on international student mobility (ISM) has proliferated across various social science disciplines. Of late, an interest in the ethics and politics of ISM seems to be emerging, as more scholars begin to consider critically questions about rights, responsibility, justice, equality, etc., that inhere in the thorny relationships between ISM stakeholders. To date, however, these discussions remain largely scattered. Bringing together these scattered conversations in literature, this paper outlines elements of a framework for (re)thinking the ethics and politics of ISM. The proposed framework identifies eight key ISM actors between whom various ethical and political relationships arise, where these relationships range from the social to the institutional. Furthermore, the framework discusses four sets of concepts from the literature deemed pertinent in thinking further about ISM ethics and politics. This proposed framework is aimed at stimulating further conversations and efforts to make ISM more socially equitable and sustainable.

Dr Peidong Yang (DPhil Oxford) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies Education at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. With a background in sociology of education, Dr Yang’s research interests are mainly located at the intersections between education and migration/mobility. He is the author of International Mobility and Educational Desire: Chinese Foreign Talent Students in Singapore (Palgrave, 2016) and various international peer‐reviewed journal articles and book chapters.

This paper explores the archaeological evidence for the making of baler shell (Melo spp.) knives found in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene deposits in Boodie Cave on Barrow Island, northwest Western Australia. While such knives have been reported in surface midden contexts the archaeological signature of baler shell knife manufacture as not been described and these artefacts are rare. This study aims to determine how the knives were made, characterise the manufacturing debris and investigate how they were used using three sets of data – Barrow Island knives, knives made by Kaiadilt people and experimentally made knives. This presentation will discuss these three data sets in detail. In the 1960s Tindale both filmed and collected knives and their manufacturing debris made by the Kaiadilt on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In late 2018 Fiona Hook and Sean Ulm recorded the collected knives held in the South Australian Museum. Using this ethnographic information, a series of knives were made by Kim Akerman. The experimentally made knives were used in butcher and woodworking experiments to capture usewear patterns. The ethnographic and experimental data was then compared with the Boodie Cave knives. This paper will discuss the initial results of the analysis showing that the experimentally made knives have been key to understanding manufacturing debris patterns, providing the basis for possible identification of shell knife manufacture in the Boodie Cave deposits where whole knives were not found.

This talk investigates the process of creating a 24-lesson syllabus for a secondary school linguistics course. Doing this has required a fine balance between student needs, student interest, availability of existing materials, teacher skillset, and the requirements of the language curriculum.

Initially, materials from the yearly OzCLO competition — the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad — were selected for their wide availability and appeal. This appeal, while evident in a competitive situation, has not translated to the classroom. Speedy analysis is one useful skill in linguistics, but other skills have taken precedence in this curriculum, including knowledge about language, code-switching, and the ability of students to analyse their own language behaviour.

Daniel is working on this project with Amy Ward, a teacher at Scotch College.

This paper deals with causes and impacts of casual teaching staff exploitation at Australian Universities, with a case study from UWA. Casualisation of employment relations is a measure of improving economic efficiency and profitability of businesses. The number of unstable jobs has been increasing globally across industries for the last ten years and resulted in a new socio-economic class, precariat (Standing 2011). At the same time the pressure on the remaining permanent staff to perform increases without any guarantees of continuing job security. Ironically, top management and a growing class of technocrats are the main beneficiaries of this organisational restructuring with seven figures salaries at the VC level becoming the standard. The impact of these new employment arrangements for the precariat is often devastating at various levels: financial, professional, social, personal and health-related. Paradoxically, the long-term impact of growing work casualization has a negative effect on the restructuring organisation: high employee turnover, loss of knowledge and skills, and poor consumer (students) satisfaction.

Dr Andrzej Gwizdalski is an independent researcher and multi-award winning ‘freelance’ lecturer who explores global issues related to the impact of emerging technologies and politics on work, economy and society. Andrzej has been involved in supporting and representing casual teaching staff at various levels of industrial dispute resolution at UWA since 2013.

This presentation will consider some of the emerging challenges for official development assistance (ODA) in Africa. After a brief overview of three bilateral donor programs (Australia, Denmark and UK), the new frameworks for supporting economic development will be presented. These frameworks present new challenges to donors, development partners and recipient countries, which will be discussed.

Simon White obtained his PhD from the UWA School of Political Science and International Relations in 2005. For the last 30 years he has worked as an independent consultant in economic and business development in Australia and throughout Africa and Asia.

On 5 August 2019, in a highly controversial decision, the Indian government revoked the special status given to the Indian-administered, Muslim-majority Kashmir. This move brought an end to the internal autonomy given to this disputed region under the Indian Constitution, sparking fears of increased instability, if not confrontations, in the region. This seminar by Professor Samina Yasmeen, Director at the Centre for the Muslim States and Societies, will assess the implications of revoking special status for Kashmir for regional and global stability as well as militancy in the region.

Professor Samina Yasmeen AM is a teacher and researcher in UWA’s School of Social Sciences, and director and founder of the University’s Centre for the Muslim States and Societies. She focuses on understanding perceptions of and by Muslims and Islam around the world and seeks to make an impact on Australian and global politics. She is a specialist in political and strategic development in South Asia and the role of Islam in World Politics. She has published articles on the position of Pakistani and Middle Eastern women, the role of Muslims in Australia and India_Pakistan relations.

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