News from Australasia

by Melissa Gregg

ARC Cultural Research Network

The big news in Australian Cultural Studies recently has been the successful bid for a federally funded Cultural Research Network convened by Professor Graeme Turner, Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland.

In 2003 the Australian Research Council introduced a new grant program specifically designed to support creative, interdisciplinary research with aims to move a field forward or develop novel research areas. Of the twenty-four research networks that were funded in 2004, three were in the Humanities, with one of those being Cultural Studies.

The Cultural Research Network boasts some of Australia's leading researchers in the Humanities and it will develop links from its initial disciplinary base of cultural, media, and communication studies into such areas as cultural geography, cultural history, cultural anthropology, and creative industries. Its research program is carried out through five autonomous nodes structured around the themes of Cultural Literacies, Cultural Technologies, Cultural Identities and Communities and Cultural Histories and Geographies. There is a further node dedicated to the development of postgraduate students and Early Career Researchers.

At both nodal and central levels, the Network is enabling researchers from different disciplines to come together and discuss the often similar work they are doing with a view to develop specific research projects that cross these disciplinary lines. While the Network is funded for five years, the collaborations and research outcomes are likely to survive for many years to come, providing ongoing benefits to researchers across the Humanities and social sciences.

Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Following on from the very successful and first ever CSAA conference to be held in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2003—marking the association's shift from `Australian' to `Australasian' members— the 15th Annual CSAA Conference was held in December 2004 at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia.

The theme `Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-First Century Quotidian' was addressed by keynote speakers including Dédé Oetomo from the University of Surabaya, Ben Highmore from the University of the West of England and television personality Andrew Urban, whose interview programme `Front-Up' is a collage of street stories featuring `everyday' Australians.

The conference was extremely well attended and included the inaugural CSAA address from Professor Ien Ang, Director of the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney.

Graeme Turner Elected President of the Academy

At its Annual General Meeting in Hobart, Tasmania in November 2004 The Australian Academy of the Humanities elected Professor Graeme Turner of the University of Queensland to be its new President.

This is the first time that a Fellow from Cultural Studies has been recognised in this way, and marks a significant achievement in the institutionalisation of the field in Australia. Yet the election of a Cultural Studies Fellow as President has occasioned at least one attack in the national press suggesting a takeover of the academy by the New Humanities in general and Cultural Studies in particular.

Battles With the Press

Indeed, Cultural Studies has faced a fair share of criticism from the mainstream press recently with a number of articles attacking individual researchers as well as the annual round of federally-funded projects.

This difficult climate has been all the more apparent in recent months with a number of newspaper articles attacking the reputation of well known Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri - an invited speaker for a conference which was to be held at the University of Sydney later this year. One of the articles, written by the controversial historian Keith Windschuttle, prompted Negri to write a detailed rebuttal of the charges calling the article `a scandalous and vulgar act of historical revisionism'.

These debates can be traced in the March archives of the CSAA-forum email list which all ACS members are welcome to join.

Recent Conferences

The Italian Effect: Radical Thought, Biopolitics and Cultural Subversion, September 2004.
After several decades during which the Humanities have been strongly influenced by French thought, in the new millennium the work of Italian thinkers is having a profound impact upon intellectual activity. The most notable signs of this “Italian effect” are the widespread interest in the work of Giorgio Agamben and the popularity of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire, but this is only to scratch the surface of the productivity of contemporary Italian thought across a wide variety of disciplines.
The Italian Effect addressed the current and potential international impact of radical Italian thought, focusing not only on Negri and Agamben but also on the work of Franco Berardi (Bifo), Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato and others. The conference enjoyed keynote speakers including Italian 'nomadic' cultural theorist and media activist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi and leading Italian feminist intellectual Ida Dominijanni.
Selected papers from the conference will appear in the September edition of Cultural Studies Review.

Dialogues Across Cultures, November 2004.
The Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University hosted a major international symposium focusing on cultural diversity and difference and their relationship to Indigenous culture and identity.
The main objective was to foster and encourage discussion about the relationship between various cultural identities and groups, and their place with the community and nation, with special emphasis on the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons, groups and cultures. The symposium drew together a broad range of prominent local, national and international scholars, cultural practitioners and community figures interested in cultural diversity, Indigenous and human rights, politics, education and development, history and literature, music, art and film.
Keynote speakers included Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Marcia Langton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mick Dodson, Rob Jahnke, Ghassan Hage, Nikos Papastergiadis, Jonathan Friedman, Sir Tipene O'Regan and Patrick Wolfe.

The Political Futures of Jacques Derrida, February 2005.
The Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University hosted a one day symposium honouring Jacques Derrida and reflecting on the political future and relevance of his work.
It was a free event and attracted over 60 people from varying academic disciplines as well as people from outside the academy. The feedback was extremely positive, with Nicole Anderson, Nick Mansfield and Joseph Pugliese securing agreement from Social Semiotics to edit a special edition on the symposium. The special edition will include papers from the symposium and will be published in late 2006.

See the upcoming conferences from News-page!

Best wishes to all ACS members,
Melissa Gregg
Organisational Secretary
Australia/New Zealand Representative