NEWS
Dear colleagues and friends
Our Gender Institute Signature event last week on
Excellence and Gender Equality was a great success with stellar keynotes by international speakers from Harvard, Columbia and the University of British Columbia and a series of very high quality panels exploring gendered notions of excellence across several disciplines and the progress of equity, diversity and inclusion schemes like Athena-Swan in UK and SAGE in Australia. It was gratifying to see strong engagement from staff and students from so many colleges across the ANU and to see supportive Deans at the public lecture. We also appreciated the warm and witty Welcome to Country by Aunty Matilda House and the supportive opening words by our DVC-RI Professor Keith Nugent.
This was the culminating event of the ARC Discovery project
Gendered Excellence in the Social Sciences involving Fiona Jenkins, Marian Sawer, Helen Keane, Rebecca Pearse (now of the University of Sydney) and Claire Donovan (now at Brunel University, London). Congratulations to all involved in that project which has been immensely productive. Warm thanks to all of the conference team, especially Fiona Jenkins the main organiser, Liliana Oyarzun who produced a great program and organised the live streaming and Mitiana Arbon and Tasnia Alam who assisted with logistics during the event.
Please remind any HDR students or ECRs who might be interested in the Sara Ahmed masterclass on December 5 to submit an expression of interest by the
deadline of July 31. As well as a host of forthcoming events at ANU over the winter period, there are many job opportunities, calls for papers and events beyond the ANU in the space below the GI banner.
Yours,
Margaret Jolly, Gender Institute Convenor
MASTERCLASS
In December 2019, the ANU will welcome
Professor Sara Ahmed on a short visit sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre. On the evening of December 5, she will deliver a public lecture prior to the HRC conference on
Crisis. The Gender Institute is delighted to host Professor Sara Ahmed in leading a masterclass on her work earlier on December 5 from 10 to 12, focused on her book
Living a Feminist Life and her
feminist killjoys blog. We are calling now for expressions of interest from HDR students and Early Career Academics at ANU to participate in that masterclass.
If you are interested, please send us an application with a short CV (two pages) and a paragraph articulating how your research interests link to her work. Please direct this to
admin.genderinstitute@anu.edu.au by
July 31. Those selected will be advised and sent suggested readings by August 30
BOOK LAUNCH
Event date: 12.30pm-1.30pm, 4 July
Venue: Molonglo Theatre, Level 2, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU
For feminist international law scholars, practitioners, and advocates, the first two decades of the new millennium have produced moments of elation and disenchantment. In the Research Handbook on Feminist Engagement with International Law, a network of scholars and practitioners from a diverse group of countries contemplate the future of feminist engagement with international law.
Can international law increase its relevance, beneficence, and impact for women in the developed and developing world? How can international law deal with a much wider range of issues relevant to women’s lives than it currently does? What are the next frontiers for gender and international law making, law reform, and the beneficiaries of international law? The diverse global contributions to this Research Handbook delineate a future where feminist engagement with international law is robust, diverse, inclusive, influential, and leads to positive change in women’s lives.
The Research Handbook addresses larger themes of feminism and international law that will interest international law and gender studies scholars as well as HDR students. Additionally, this exploration will prove to be an asset to UN and INGO networks, regional organizations, and NGOs and social movements. The book will be formally launched at the 27th ANZSIL Conference by Professor Dianne Otto from the University of Melbourne. The book’s editors, Associate Professor Susan Harris Rimmer (Griffith University) and Kate Ogg (Australian National University) will discuss the contributions the publication makes to international law scholarship.
Please register for the event via this link.
This book launch is hosted by the ANU College of Law
SYMPOSIUM
Event date: 12.-00pm-14.00pm, 11 July
Venue: Finkel Lecture Theatre, John Curtain School of Medical Research #13, ANU
In 2019, the theme for NAIDOC Week is
Voice. Treaty. Truth. These were three key elements to the reforms set out in the Uluru Statement from the Heart and represent the unified position of First Nations Australians. We invite you to attend this Symposium to hear four presentations as we share our knowledge through our voice:
- A One Health approach to animal health and management in a remote Northern Territory community - Tamara Riley
- The Mayi Kuwayu National Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing - Jan Chapman
- The Family and Community Safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (FaCtS) Study - Shavaun Wells
- Food Security and Nutrition in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander - Amanda Wingett
This NAIDOC Week Event is presented by the Research School of Population and Health, ANU College of Health & Medicine
LECTURE
Event date: 4.30pm-6.30pm, 15 July
Venue: Australian Centre on China in the World, Building 188, Fellows Lane, ANU
In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favour of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to U.S. and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In
Trans*, Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future. (Information about Professor Halberstam’s new book is taken from University of California Press)
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of six books including:
Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995),
Female Masculinity (1998),
In A Queer Time and Place (2005),
The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and
Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012) and, most recently, a short book titled
Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled
Wild Thing: Queer Theory After Nature on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.
Please register for the event via this link.
This seminar is hosted by the School of Sociology, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
LECTURE
Event date: 4.30pm-5.45pm, 16 July
Venue: Theatrette (2.02), Sir Roland Wilson Building, Building #120, McCoy Circuit, ANU
Professor Christie's presentation seeks to contribute meaningfully to the ANU Humanities Reseach Centre’s 2019 theme, “intellectual history of crisis”. It cites the example of American author and humanitarian, Pearl S. Buck, at the height of her influence prior to the Second World War. Raised in Anhui province as the child of Christian missionaries, Buck, the celebrated author of
The Good Earth trilogy, had returned to the United States from China at middle age. Buck’s epic fictions depicting Chinese peasant life succeeded in placing “China” on the map, in English, for middlebrow, mainstream readers worldwide whose notions of east Asia, up until that point, had remained largely confined to racist caricature. Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the struggle to establish a modernizing China within the geopolitical imagination acquired greater urgency and mandate. But for whom and on whose behalf? That Buck emerged as China’s main spokesperson in the popular imagination of North America, Europe, and anglophone Australasia—and not Chinese state or other political actors—was an irony not lost upon her contemporaries. I argue that Buck anchored a key, transitional moment prior to China-based advocacy after 1949, whether Marxist or Kuomindang, as the Chinese rose to speak on their own account. Specifically, Buck’s remarkable displacement from prevailing norms of literary value, national identity, and gendered labour secured for her what theorists today call “intersectional” agency. Buck achieved a multi-directional, transgressive, and globally-informed optics which sought to read across policed boundaries of nationalist discourse on behalf of the marginalized. She brought welcome visibility to people of colour in dire straits, most prominently Asian women and orphaned children, whose causes she advocated tirelessly. A proud American, who considered herself bicultural, Buck ultimately paid a heavy price for her intersectional striving at a time of international crisis.
Stuart Christie is a literary historian currently serving as professor and head of the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is presently working on two projects which offer analysis of twentieth-century modernism. The first, on ‘immersive modernism’, explores how English writers and artists established footholds in media beyond writing; the second documents the literary afterlives of Chinese-born Americans who faced unique (and sometimes challenging) circumstances when attempting to assimilate back into their home culture.
This seminar is hosted by the Humanities Research Centre, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
LECTURE
Event date: 12.00pm-13.00pm, 18 July
Venue: National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Level 3 Conference Room, John Yencken Building 45 Sullivans Creek Road
The respect for human rights in international law entails a basic principle for our existence in a globalised world where socio-legal, economic, cultural and physical boundaries are polarised and fluid. Innovative concepts and new developmental approaches are emerging to augment gender equity and equality for all. The growing recognition of women’s leadership roles in diverse sectors at local, regional and international levels is indicative of a need to bridge the chasm by prioritising the gender justice agenda, especially regarding the effect and role of international law on Indigenous women. This specifically refers to the efforts made by Indigenous women in the Global South (which includes Africa, Asia and South Africa) who are charting their own course in international law while resisting Western hegemonic dominance to engineer social change, warrants examination, support and understanding. Referencing the effect of colonial history on Indigenous feminists in the Global South, this lecture adds to existing discourse on the prospects of Indigenous women’s engagement with international law. It concludes that while their future in international law is grim, a focus on creating a new generation of young leaders is recommended.
Veronica Fynn Bruey is an award-winning scholar with an extensive interdisciplinary background in law, public health, and forced migration. She has published two books, several book chapters and peer-review journal articles. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the
Journal of Internal Displacement, the founding editor-in-chief of the University of Cape Coast Faculty of Law Journal, the founder of the Law and Society's Collaborative Research Network (CRN 11) called “Displaced Peoples”, and the co-founder and Executive Director of Tuki-Tumarankeh, a non-profit organisation focused on forced migration issues. She sits on the Board of the Public Health Association of British Columbia and the World Computer Exchange, Canada branch. She is the Director of Flowers School of Global Health Sciences; an affiliated faculty of Seattle University School of Law; a Module Convenor with the School of Advanced Studies (Human Rights), University of London; and a senior researcher at the Centre for Policy in Liberia, the only policy think-tank in Liberia. Currently, she lectures at the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Coast. Fynn Bruey is a born and bred Liberian war survivor.
This presentation is hosted by the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, ANU
LECTURE
Event date: 4.30pm, 19 July
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Australian Centre for China in the World ,188 Fellows Lane, ANU
In the last part of volume 3 of
On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues against the moral relevance of such deontological distinctions as harming versus not aiding, harming persons as a mere means versus as a side effect, and others. He also tries to reconcile concerns about self-sacrifice, pursuing the greater good, and morality.
Frances Kamm will consider how he argues for his conclusions and whether his arguments succeed.
Professor Frances Kamm is one of the most innovative and influential moral philosophers in the world. She is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, where she holds the Henry Rutgers University Professorship in Philosophy. Her many books include
Morality/Mortality, Volumes I and II, I
ntricate Ethics,
Ethics for Enemies, Bioethical Prescriptions, and the
Trolley Problem Mysteries.
She has given the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and the Uehiro Practical Ethics lectures, and published many articles in the profession's leading journals, many of which, along with her books, have shaped how contemporary moral philosophers understand normative and practical ethics in general, and nonconsequentialist ethics in particular.
Please register for lecture here.
The Jack Smart lecture is the flagship annual event of the ANU School of Philosophy
LECTURE
Event date: 2.00-3.30pm, 12 August
Venue: PSC Reading Room 4.27, Hedley Bull Centre #130, Garran Road, ANU
The year 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of the adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution 1325, the first resolution to be adopted by the Council under the title of ‘Women and Peace and Security’ (WPS). With the subsequent adoption of eight further resolutions, WPS now represents a significant and well-established thematic agenda for the Council, and its relevance as an area of political practice extends well beyond the Council Chamber at United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in New York.
This seminar focuses on the stories that are told about the WPS agenda, by the organisation that claims to be its institutional ‘home’ – the United Nations – and those who work in and around this organisation. Presenting a thematic analysis of a new corpus of narrative data, the seminar examines the ways in which various dimensions of WPS are narrated over time, and explores the political implications of these narrative constructs. I use narrative and discourse theory to interpret textual and interview data, where the latter represents narratives of WPS engagement co-produced with research participants who have experience of working on WPS in and around UNHQ. I draw together insights from the ways in which narrative approaches have been deployed to good effect by, inter alia, feminist institutionalists in Political Science, and feminist security studies scholars in International Relations, to develop a theory and method of encountering narrative that reveals the political affordances that are created through storytelling. In the case of the WPS agenda, the tensions, absences, and disjunctures that are revealed through narrative analysis have an impact on the mobilisation of support for, and the successful implementation of, the agenda, both at UNHQ and elsewhere.
Laura J. Shepherd is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney. Laura is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security in London. Laura’s research focuses on gender politics, international relations and critical studies of security and violence. Her primary research focuses on the UN’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda. She has written extensively on the formulation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and subsequent Women, Peace and Security resolutions. Laura has published many scholarly articles, and is author/editor of ten books.
This presentation is run by the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
CONFERENCE
Questions of sexuality and refugee or migration status remain on the margins of queer and refugee movements, policy and support services.
The first of its kind in Australia, this conference aims to bring together academics, practitioners and LGBTIQ+ people seeking asylum and refugees to discuss pertinent issues of queer forced displacement and foster dialogue between official and unofficial groups invested in research and practice for coordinated solutions and better support of affected populations.
The Humanities Research Centre invite proposals for papers and panels that will respond in diverse and interdisciplinary ways to the questions of an intersection of sexuality with a refugee status, including situations when queer people fall through the cracks of common refugee or migration pathways.
Queer people with the lived experience of seeking asylum are especially encouraged to apply.
Proposed papers may respond to the following topics or identify other areas to address:
- Queer forced displacement and the law;
- Policy, advocacy and activism;
- Health, sexuality and forced displacement;
- Social welfare and wellbeing;
- Identities, communities and questions of belonging;
- Art, history and heritage;
- Intersectionality;
- Trauma and testimony.
For further details on each of the topic listed above, please see the
conference call for papers.
Deadline for proposals is 1 September 2019.
This conference is hosted by the Humanities Research Centre, ANU College of Arts and Social Science and co-funded by the Gender Institute
