19 – 20 September 2016
HRC Conference Room, A.D Hope Building
ANU PARTICIPANTS / § Jacqueline Lo, Associate Dean (International), CASS
§ Ann Evans, Associate Dean (Research), CASS
§ Paul Pickering, Interim College Dean, CASS
§ Catherine Waldby, Director, Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS), CASS
§ Will Christie, Interim Director, Research School of Humanities and the Arts (RSHA), CASS
§ Amanda Laugesen, Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, CASS
§ Paul K Jones, School of Sociology, CASS
§ Laurajane Smith, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, CASS
§ David Bissell, School of Sociology, CASS
NTU PARTICIPANTS / § K.K. Luke, Associate Dean (Research), College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Andres Carlos Luco, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Lisa Onaga, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Yong Wernmei, Division of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Wang Jue, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir, Division of Sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Natalie Pang, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
§ Elke Reinhuber, School of Art, Design and Media, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
ANU College of
Arts & Social Sciences
Monday 19 September 201610.00 – 11.00
Chair: Ann Evans / Workshop opening and Introductions
Paul Pickering
K.K. Luke
11.00 – 11.30 / Morning tea
11.30 – 1.00
Chair: Ann Evans / K.K. Luke - Talking, Thinking and Doing things: A unified approach to the study of language and communication
Will Christie - ‘Gratifying a liberal curiosity’: James Wathen’s Journal of a Voyage, in 1811 and 1812, to Madras and China (1814)
Amanda Laugesen - Dictionaries and Lexical Heritage
1.00 – 2.00 / Lunch
2.00 – 3.00
Chair: Lisa Onaga / Yong WernMei - “Quiet Dream”: Vietnamese Women and Marriage Migration
Elke Reinhuber - Counterfactuals in Media Arts
3.00 – 3.30 / Afternoon tea
3.30 – 4.30
Chair: Lisa Onaga / Paul K Jones - Rethinking Populism and Demagogy
Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir - The September 11 Generation, Hip Hop and the Pursuit of Authenticity
ANU College of
Arts & Social Sciences
Tuesday 20 September 20169.00 – 11.00
Chair: Jacqueline Lo / Wang Jue - A tale of two cities: innovation in Singapore and Hong Kong
David Bissell - Robotics, AI and employment futures in the Asia-Pacific
Catherine Waldby - Global oocytes: medical tourism and the transaction of fertility
Lisa Onaga - Blueprints for Biocurating Laboratory Life in Asia
11.00 – 11.30 / Morning tea
11.30 – 12.30
Chair: Kamal Nasir / Andres Carlos Luco - Reasons Pluralism and the Functions of Normative Systems
Natalie Pang - Different platforms, different uses, different implications? Social media in social movements and civic engagement
12.30 – 2.00 / Lunch
2.00 – 3.00
Chair: Kamal Nasir / Laurajane Smith - Visitor Emotion, Affect and Registers of Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites
Yujie Zhu - The politics of cultural heritage in China
3.00 – 3.30 / Afternoon tea and close
Ann Evans and KK Luke
ANU College of
Arts & Social Sciences
K.K. Luke
Talking, Thinking and Doing things: A unified approach to the study of language and communication
Talking, thinking and doing things are often thought of as distinct processes, and in a sense they are. However, there are at the same time fundamental connections that bind them together into a unitary whole. In this talk, I will explain how talking, thinking and doing things work together in everyday conversations. Using Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis as a distinctive research method, and video recordings of naturally occurring interaction as data, I will show how language, thought and action can be investigated within a unified framework through careful observation of the details of word choices, grammatical structures, prosody, tone of voice, gesture, eye gaze, body postures, and the totality of the communicative situation.
Will Christie
‘Gratifying a liberal curiosity’: James Wathen’s Journal of a Voyage, in 1811 and 1812, to Madras and China (1814)
Given the severe limitations on access to China imposed by the Qing government in the eighteenth century, ‘Sino-European encounters in this period were mediated more by things than by people’, as Kristel Smentek has remarked. The rare sociable encounters between Chinese and Europeans that did take place, however, still mattered and offered insights that often ran counter to the official narrative as it developed over the decades in the lead up to the outbreak of the Opium War in 1839. When the artist and pedestrian, James Wathen, published his account of his travels to India and China in 1814, the reviewers made much of his generosity of spirit and disinterestedness. By then, the popular account of China written by John Barrow in the wake of Lord Macartney’s anti-climactic embassy had conditioned the British reading public to expect tales of inhumanity and dishonour. What they got instead was thoughtful deference towards the unfamiliar and a rare essay in affection and respect. This paper, part of a larger effort to recover and interpret individual encounters between the British and the Chinese, offers a close reading of Wathen’s account of his sojourn in the East India Company factory outside Canton in the opening months of 1812, including his relationships with the Chinese merchants he met.
Amanda Laugesen
Dictionaries and Lexical Heritage
Dictionaries are currently in a state of transition. As print dictionaries increasingly disappear, digital platforms offer a means of not only delivering lexical information in a variety of innovative ways but also making such information accessible to a broad audience. Quality lexical resources remain of vital importance to the survival of languages. Yet there are real issues in the world of lexicography. Aside from the problems of financial support, delivering sustainable resources that can assist in the documentation of languages, including varieties of English, remains a challenge, especially in a culture that increasingly devalues the dictionary, and when there is a dominance of large publishers/lexical resources based in the UK and US. This paper draws on lexicography, information history, and cultural heritage to explore some of the issues scholarly lexicographical projects face, and argues the importance of thinking about lexicography as a form of cultural heritage.
ANU College of
Arts & Social Sciences
Yong Wernmei
“Quiet Dream”: Vietnamese Women and Marriage Migration
My presentation will focus on two aspects of Oh’s photographs: the technique of stitched photography, and the composition of the photograph, particularly the choice of dress worn by the subject. Half of the portraits are stitched photographs, a technique that merges together several photographs to form a unique piece, with the aim of providing a wider view of the environment of the subject. This method of stitching also bears testimony to the stitched futures of these women; the hopes and dreams they harbor as foreign brides, as well as the familiar landscapes and identities they leave behind, all “stitched” together as it were, to constitute a hopeful, but also unsure and resigned, imagined future.
Elke Reinhuber
Counterfactuals in Media Arts
The concept of counterfactuals, which has appeared in past decades in science and humanities, has become popular as a genre in fictional time-based and non-linear media and the fine arts. Therefore, I intend to expand the term, which describes retrospective considerations after turning points in life, in order to include the fine arts and encapsulate the research with the expression counterfactualism as a hypernym for a contemporary phenomenon, which is inherent for a society satiated with abundant choices for nearly everything in life.
As the term cannot be generalised, I have devised three categories which describe the relationship between artist, counterfactual thoughts and audience. With this presentation, I will provide an overview of my research and its influences on not only my artistic practice.
Paul K Jones
Rethinking Populism and Demagogy
Populism, famously, is a phenomenon that refuses left/right compartmentalization. The recent resurgence in academic interest in populism has largely followed the rise (and rise) of rightwing European parties rather than the sense of ‘people’s power’ sometimes invoked in social movements and democratic transitions such as the 1986 overthrow of the Marcos regime in the Phillipines. Latin America has provided many enduring ‘classic’ cases, and, in Argentina, some would say, the paradigmatic case of ‘modern populism’.
Yet the very use of the term ‘populism’ to signify both social movements and parties is usually sourced to the progressive ‘producerist’ Populist movement of the 1890s in the USA. Until very recently, the international scholarly orthodoxy – dominated by US scholars – held that while European and many other populisms were democratically problematic, the US case was not. To put this another way, US populism was often ‘present in its absence’ in the pathologization of populisms.
In this paper I’ll outline this curious doubletake that has been achieved by the expenditure of enormous intellectual energy in quarantining any suggestion that the USA has a ‘problematic’ populist legacy. The key, I suggest, both conceptually and to some extent practically, is the recognition of the significance of not just ‘modern populism’ but ‘modern demagogy’.
ANU College of
Arts & Social Sciences
Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir
The September 11 Generation, Hip Hop and the Pursuit of Authenticity
This presentation discusses the culture and consciousness of a particular generation of Muslims, termed as the September 11 generation. Specifically, it deals with Muslim hip-hop’s struggle for authenticity. At one level, hip-hoppers struggle with the authenticity of their Islamic piety. Does practicing hip-hop make an individual less Islamic? Hence, summoning the images of courage from personalities in Islamic history in their music, for example, confers upon the youth a symbolic status and a legitimacy derived from a connection with a glorified Islamic past. Secondly, the conflicts over authenticity also exist in the form of hip-hop that is produced and consumed. Hip-hop jargons are thus mainstreamed to take a more “authentic” connotation both at the level of satisfying Sunni Muslim requirements or even made ambiguous to refer to a plurality of religions. Muslim or “Islamic” hip-hop, as seen from its Nation of Islam and Five Percenter beginnings has been co-opted by young Muslims from a movement that is subversive even within the domain of Islamic theology to a more consumerist and palatable medium to voice their discontent.
Wang Jue
A tale of two cities: innovation in Singapore and Hong Kong
Government is a key player in the innovation system and its involvement takes various forms including directive intervention by actively advising industrial policy and investing in selected areas, and facilitative intervention by creating positive environment and providing public goods for industry. This study uses Singapore and Hong Kong as two cases to explore the influence of government intervention on innovation dynamics. Singapore is known as a government-made city with strong government intervention while Hong Kong is famous for its positive non-intervention policy that minimizes the power of government in influencing the market. Using USPTO patent statistics as evidence, the study found that innovation activities in Singapore are largely policy driven and dominated by big players, while in Hong Kong industry innovation is not active but the local industry has a dynamic innovation base contributed by small firms. The comparison could shed light on the implication of government involvement in innovation.
David Bissell
Robotics, AI and employment futures in the Asia-Pacific
From driverless lorries to self-driving cars, and from automated surgery to robotic solicitors, we are presently on the verge of a technological revolution like no other. Doom-laden predictions warn that almost 50% of current jobs are at risk of replacement by robotics and automation technologies. Unique to this ‘third’ round of automation is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Yet current debate on the social and cultural impacts of robotics on work remains limited. Against this looming spectre of mass unemployment, and renewed social struggles, the purpose of this paper is to suggest ways in which sociologists might contribute to debates about the relationship between robotics and labour along more nuanced lines. Its aim is to suggest how sociologists are well-placed to unpack the complexities and richness of the relationships of robotics and labour, emphasising the value of dwelling with their ambivalences, rather than slipping into the easy caricature of overdetermined moral panic.
ANU College of
Arts & Social Sciences
Catherine Waldby
Global oocytes: medical tourism and the transaction of fertility
Since the early 1980s, IVF procedures allow one woman to donate her oocytes (eggs) to another, and so enable women with poor fertility to conceive. As IVF treatment becomes more and more common and global, the demand for fertile oocytes has expanded dramatically. However different jurisdictions adopt widely different approaches to regulation, ranging from complete prohibition (e.g. Germany), through strictly altruistic gifting (e.g. Australia), to regulated and unregulated markets (e.g. United Kingdom/Spain and USA). As a consequence, oocytes have acquired enormous scarcity value and developed a complex social and economic life. The ways they are produced, circulated and negotiated has become an important dynamic in considering the ways reproductive capacities are distributed and biomedically enhanced, and the ways power relations between different groups of women play out.
In this paper, I will present some fieldwork interviews with Australian and British women who have travelled overseas to purchase oocytes. Like the more notorious practice of international surrogacy, this kind of fertility tourism allows women and couples to circumvent regulations and obtain kinds of third party fertility services that may be illegal in their resident jurisdiction. I will focus in particular on the ways the women negotiate the issue of the donor’s legal and biological identity in the process of assisted family formation. I will discuss the imperative to ‘match’ the donor with the recipient’s ethnicity, and hence to conceal the donation, and the emergence of an alternative ethic among Australian couples that publically celebrates the trace of the south-east Asian donor in the formation of a ‘rainbow’ family.