Cultural Research Conference for Postgraduates and ECRs 2010

May 2nd, 10 / 0 Comments

The Next Generation of Cultural Research:
Building New Cultural Intelligence for 21st Century Problems

20-21 September 2010,
University of Western Sydney, Parramatta

SPONSORED and SUPPORTED by:

Centre for Cultural Research, the University of Western Sydney
ARC Cultural Research Network
Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

HOSTED by:

Postgraduate students from Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

This conference aims to gather postgraduate students and early career researchers from Australia, New Zealand and Asia to explore both what it means when we call ourselves cultural researchers and how people coming from different academic backgrounds see the nature and challenges of conducting cultural research in the 21st century. We encourage participants from all cultural-focused perspectives, including (but not limited to) cultural sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, media studies, museum studies, heritage studies and art history.

Papers are invited on individuals’ projects, and presenters will be asked to reflect on how their research contributes to strengthening the agenda of cultural research. As a starting point for participants, it is suggested that in a world that is increasingly globalised, diverse and technologically mediated, new knowledge practices are required to address the cultural challenges and contradictions that exist in the 21st century. In particular, focus for this conference will be on generating genuine solutions to social and cultural problems through forging accessible, transparent and practicable forms of cultural understanding.

Topics, for example, may include:

  • intercultural dialogue and interaction;
  • community collaborations;
  • innovative methodologies for cultural research;
  • virtual, digital and new media communications;
  • new knowledge production and scholarly work;
  • problematising nature vs. culture;
  • practising social and cultural inclusion;
  • cultural research beyond national borders;
  • knowledge exchange between scholarly and policy arenas;
  • the empirical turn in cultural research; cultural flows;
  • the critique of identity;
  • processes of critique and their relationship to cultural change;
  • interdisciplinarity and cultural research;
  • globalization and cultural research;
  • professionalization of cultural research;

KEYNOTE ADDRESS AND OTHER FEATURES

  • Keynote address will be presented by Professor Tony Bennett (CCR).
  • All sessions will be chaired by respondents from academic staff in the field of cultural research and cultural studies
  • All participants will be invited to a workshop on the second morning of the conference, provisionally titled: “Forging our future: how we see cultural research going forward”.

APPLICATIONS DUE 10 MAY 2010

See the Conference Website for details.

Events

2010 Conference Announcement

Apr 29th, 10 / 0 Comments

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia National Conference

hosted by Southern Cross University
venue: Byron Bay Community and Cultural Centre

‘A Scholarly Affair’
7-9 December 2010

ECR and PG Pre-Conference Day 6 December
This conference focuses on the contribution that Cultural Studies makes as an interdisciplinary space for reflexive, critical and empirically based research to the project of higher education, pedagogy and social justice. Susan Giroux and Norman Denzin have recently argued that the work of the scholar is to subject structures of power, knowledge, and practice to critical scrutiny, what Paul Gilroy has referred to as principled exposure. In contrast, it is salient to recall Toni Morrison’s view that ‘racism is a scholarly affair.’ This inherent tension about what a scholar does – and what is expected of/from them – goes to the heart and relevance of Cultural Studies scholarship. Given the present instrumentalised and corporate university environment with its dominant values of standardisation and emphasis on an audit-based culture  - there is a compelling and urgent need to re-imagine the space/place of the contemporary scholar and their role in society. In the age of Obama and Rudd, Cultural Studies, as a discipline that uniquely responds to the pull of the relevant, the imperatives of socially inclusive practices and communities of engagement, needs, as Catherine Burnheim puts it, to go ‘beyond corporatism into the wilds of the knowledge economy.’

Featured Speakers:

Vinay Lal, UCLA and University of Delhi
Gerard Goggin, University of New South Wales
Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney
Melissa Lucashenko, author
Catherine Manathunga, University of Queensland
Deborah Bird-Rose, Macquarie University
Trevor Gale, University of South Australia
Katrina Schlunke, University of Technology, Sydney

Some of the key issues and themes to be considered:

*   new qualities of scholarly enquiry
*   cultural studies scholarship in the 21st century
*   discovering and sustaining ethical cultural space in higher education
*   innovative relationships between scholar and community
*   sustaining healthy, creative and principled scholarship
*   cultural studies as ethical foundation
*   relevance scholarship (such as ecocultural studies)
*   pedagogy as an affair to remember
*   negotiating the audit-based culture
*   scholarship on the margins
*   scholarship and diversity
*   narrating communities and cultures
*   disciplining innovations: TEQSA and ERA
*   scholarship and its relationship to discovery
*   new media, digital communication and the borderlands of scholarship
*   responding to an ethics of scholarship
*   socially and culturally inclusive practices
*   research/writing as ‘ethical intervention’
*   engaging with indigenous and majority-world scholarship
*   creative and critical knowledge production
*   value of non-corporate scholarship

Conference Website:
http://www.scu.edu.au/research/cpsj/asa/index.html

Host
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Southern Cross University
http://www.scu.edu.au/ <http://www.scu.edu.au/>

CSAA Conference