Research Theme 7

Crossing cultures, crossing time

Convenors: Carolyn Strange and Helen Ennis

Description | Forthcoming events | Past events | Projects

Cultures may clash and time may divide but they also cross in relationships that invite interrogation and call for interpretation from multidisciplinary perspectives, incorporating insights from archaeology, anthropology, history, linguistics, literary studies, film and visual cultures, museum studies, geography, environmental studies, philosophy and the performing arts.

This theme encourages scholarship that is oriented towards patterns of transaction and translation between cultures around the globe. It has the world as its focus and encourages comparative, transnational, intercultural and translational modes of research in the humanities and the social sciences. While analysis of particular national, cultural, ethnic and religious imaginaries remains critical, comparative research that transcends conventional national and area studies frames of reference and that reaches across times will prompt fresh insights.

Cross-cultural research is especially timely in this era of global politico-cultural confl ict and unprecedented levels of cultural contact and exchange; but its relevance to studies of ancient and pre-modern worlds is equally signifi cant. Cultural interchange is not a new phenomenon. Its study in past and present, nevertheless, benefi ts from analysis informed by contemporary transdisciplinary fields such as postcolonial, globalization and diaspora studies.

Borders that traditionally divide disciplinary approaches will be crossed through theme activities designed to explore methodologies best suited to examine shifting expressions and meanings of culture across time. Both qualitative and quantitative methods will have a place, as will new modes of collecting, storing and analysing data, from prehistoric flints to pod-casts.

All activities undertaken through this theme will be linked to the university’s teaching activities and provide advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students opportunities to enrich their courses of study. Master classes, workshops, and visiting scholars programs will connect research and teaching and provide training opportunities for early-career researchers. In addition public outreach in the form of exhibitions, lectures by faculty and visiting fellows, as well as conferences will forge a dynamic connection to the wider campus and community.

Events

RSH Friday Forum
In 2008, many of the presentations will be co-sponsored under the Crossing Cultures, Crossing Times theme. The Friday Forum will resume on 1 August 2008. Please see the RSH website for up-to-date listings.

Forthcoming 2008

12 March 2008
Creating Cultural Citizenship out of Contemporary Art at the National Museum of the American Indian?
Speaker: Kylie Message, Research School of Humanities, ANU
This event is part of the Museums and Collections Seminar Series for 2008.
Convenors: Kylie Message and Caroline Turner
Time/Venue: 12.30pm-2.00pm, Conference Room, Old Canberra House

12 March 2008
Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergences Conference
Speakers and Program below

9 April 2008
Combating Prejudice and Rethinking Disability Representation in Museums
Speaker: Richard Sandell, Director and Head of the Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK
This event is part of the Museums and Collections Seminar Series for 2008.
Convenors: Kylie Message and Caroline Turner
Time/Venue: 12.30pm-2.00pm, Conference Room, Old Canberra House

7 May 2008
Using Objects to Remember the Dead and Affect the Living: The Case of a Miniature Model of Treblinka
Speaker: Andrea Witcomb, Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University
This event is part of the Museums and Collections Seminar Series for 2008.
Convenors: Kylie Message and Caroline Turner
Time/Venue: 12.30pm-2.00pm, Conference Room, Old Canberra House

15 May - 7 June 2008
Sesserae: The Works of Dennis Nona
ANU School of Art Gallery
Sesserae: The Works of Dennis Nona features more than 60 prints by the renowned Torres Strait artist made between 1991 and 2005. Dennis is currently completing a Master of Arts degree in Visual Arts at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane. In 2007 Dennis received the Telstra Award at the 24th Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.
Dennis Nona is widely acknowledged as one the most important Torres Strait Islander artists. Born on Badu Island in 1973 he was taught as a young boy the traditional craft of woodcarving. This skill has been developed and translated into the incredibly intricate and beautiful linocuts, etchings and sculptures created by the artist since the commencement of his art practice in 1989. These include ‘Sesserae’, the legend of the willy wagtail bird, which weaves a rich narrative about community, social and cultural life on Badu Island.
Dennis Nona is now regarded as one of the highest exponents of linocut printmaking in Australia with works acquired by state and national public collections in Australia and overseas, including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, British Museum, London Musee d’Histoire Naturelle de Lyon, France and he is to be included in several important international exhibitions in London, Paris and at the Queensland Art Gallery.
Sesserae is a Griffith Artworks travelling exhibition in partnership with Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA) and is toured by Museum & Gallery Services Queensland.

4 June 2008
The Role of Cultural Activities in Public Diplomacy
Speaker: Leilani Bin-Juda, Executive Officer, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
This event is part of the Museums and Collections Seminar Series for 2008.
Convenors: Kylie Message and Caroline Turner
Time/Venue: 12.30pm-2.00pm, Conference Room, Old Canberra House

9 July 2008
Migration Memories
Speaker: Mary Hutchinson, Research School of Humanities, ANU
This event is part of the Museums and Collections Seminar Series for 2008.
Convenors: Kylie Message and Caroline Turner
Time/Venue: 12.30pm-2.00pm, Conference Room, Old Canberra House

10-11 July 2008
‘Photographies: new histories, new practices’ conference and related programs
This event will coincide with the opening of the National Photography Festival, which will involve all the national institutions, public art spaces and commercial galleries in Canberra. More than 20 exhibitions will be on show over a three month period from 10 July until early October, accompanied by a huge range of public programs, artist’s talks and workshops. The focus will be on the Asia-Pacific region and both historical and contemporary material will be considered. The themes of the conference may include: photography and social space; photography and ethics; photography and war; photography and writing; photography and the 1970s; photography and Indigenous culture; photography and masquerade; photography and regionalism; photography and the museum. For further information contact the conference committee chair, Helen Ennis. For updates visit the National Photography Festival website.
Further details.

12 July 2008
Public Lecture, part of ‘Photographies: new histories, new practices’ and VIVID, the inaugural Photography Festival
Speaker: Gail Jones, Professor in Writing, University of Western Sydney
Convenor: Helen Ennis
Time/Venue: 4pm-5pm, National Library of Australia
Supported by the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences.

Winter (dates TBA)
Penny Cousineau – Master Class and Art Forum
Penny Cousineau-Levine is the author of the first book-length, in-depth study of contemporary Canadian art photography: Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination (McGill-Queens UP, 2004). Her latest project interrogates the concept of masquerade in photography and performance art by women and members of other disenfranchised communities. Cousineau-Levine is professor of Art History and Theory and chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. She has been awarded an HRC fellowship and will be at the ANU during July and August 2008. In addition to providing a keynote address at the conference, “Photographies: new histories, new practices.”

7 August 2008
Recovering Lives Conference
Convenors: Cassandra Pybus, University of Sydney and Caroline Turner, Research School of Humanities, ANU
Venue: ANU
Further details.

21-22 August 2008
Rethinking Late Style Conference
Convenors: Gordon McMullan, Kings College, London, Roger Hillman, Film Studies, School of Humanities, ANU, Sam Smiles, University of Plymouth and Caroline Turner, Research School of Humanities, ANU
Venue: ANU
Further details.

29-30 August 2008
Race, Nation, History: In Honour of Henry Reynold Conference
Convenors: Bain Attwood, Monash University
Venue: National Library of Australia
Further details.

11 July - 12 October
National Library of Australia Exhibition: "A Modern Vision: Charles Bayliss photographer 1850-1897"
Charles Bayliss was probably Australia’s greatest nineteenth century photographer whose outstanding skills were recognised during his lifetime. In contemporary terms, however, Bayliss has not yet received his due. This ambitious exhibition will be the first to examine Bayliss’s oeuvre in depth and place it in the context of late nineteenth century life and culture. It will feature the full range of his output – portraits, architectural photography, panoramas of Sydney and landscapes. Contextual material relating to Bayliss’s associate Beaufoy Merlin and his patron B.O. Holtermann will also be included. Bayliss brought to his work a keen photographic intelligence producing photographs distinguished by their insightfulness and sensitivity. His response to his enormously varied subject matter was never formulaic but always highly original and adaptive. Bayliss, who arrived in Australia in 1854 as a young child, was also one of the first photographers to interiorise what he saw in his environment through what David Malouf describes as an act of imagination. This may well have been Charles Bayliss’s most profound contribution, a crucial psychological stage in the colonisation of Australia. Guest curator: Helen Ennis.

August 2008
Drill Hall Gallery and School of Art Gallery Exhibition, ANU: Recovering Lives
Curators: Nancy Sever, Caroline Turner and David Williams

8-10 September 2008
Collective Biography Conference
Convenors: Jane Shaw, New College, Oxford and Paul Pickering, Research School of Humanities, ANU
Venue: ANU

November
National Library of Australia Exhibition - Griffith Taylor: Prophet and Pariah
Taylor (1880-1963) was a man of the world – a map-following traveler and a map-making analyst of the globe. His early training at the University of Sydney as a geologist earned him a position on Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition of 1910-13. Over the following half-century Taylor continued to explore, though primarily as a geographer, whose views of people and place earned him scorn and praise. As a professor of geography (at Sydney, as well as the Universities of Chicago and Toronto) Taylor promoted unpopular views, such as the heretical notion that much of Australia was climatologically unsuitable for European settlement. Equally iconoclastic was his pronouncement (counter to the ‘white Australia’ policy) that Asian immigration was desirable. At the same time, he espoused notions of racial hierarchy and environmental determinism that most anthropologists dismissed as outmoded. Many historians and geographers have caricatured Taylor as an old-fashioned determinist; others have embraced him as an early crusader against environmental mismanagement. This exhibit imposes no such judgments. Instead, it asks how this modern Australian thinker moved from his training as a scientist to fashion himself into an explorer, a climatologist, an ethnographer, a theorist of race and a philosopher of world peace. The answers lie in Taylor’s words, but even more so in his illustrations and the artefacts he left behind. Guest curator: Carolyn Strange.

Past events

26 February 2008
Writing for Newspapers: A Workshop and Masterclass in the Journalist’s Craft
Old Canberra House

The Research School of Humanities is offering a one-day masterclass and workshop designed to develop the skills required to write effective and marketable op-ed pieces with leader Professor Brooke Kroeger, currently the chair of New York University’s Department of Journalism.

The workshop is open to all College graduate students but places are limited. All interested students must register by 5pm, 8 February. Full details.

Enquiries and registrations to Dr Carolyn Strange.

February
‘Passing: Fraudulent Pasts’
This one-day event will explore, through fiction and history, and through multiple media, the phenomenon of passing. Rather than approach it exclusively in racial terms, which often serves to reify race and to impose unidimentional analyses, this symposium will emphasise its multiple meanings, including: the commodification of passing; passing through class boundaries; passing as a criminal offence; imposture; passing’s nostalgic appeal; performative passing; historically contingent perceptions of passing. The symposium will actively involve graduate students as participants. A full roster of participants will be available late in 2007. Convenors: Monique Rooney (English); Carolyn Strange (RSH).

8-9 November 2007
Graduate Workshop: Crossing Time as Crossing Culture?
Old Canberra House
Co-ordinated by Carolyn Strange (RSH) and Tom Griffiths (Graduate Director, RSSS)
This workshop will be based on pre-existing successful models of intensive graduate training (such as the “Using Lives” workshop on biographical writing, the “Challenges to Perform” workshop, run previously through the CCR, and the “Environmental History” workshop, run through RSSS). It will recruit students from across CASS who are working on projects that involve crossing time and address the challenges of bridging past and present without flattening difference or emphasising chasm. Most importantly it will bring together history students and students from other disciplines within CASS, whose projects involve historical analysis. One of this workshop’s key objectives is to develop students’ capacity to approach their research and writing as a way to perform the past, and to bring it alive in the present. Workshop leaders will work with students to develop the skills necessary to do so. Up to 20 students may enroll. The workshop will be open to ANU students as well as students from other universities if spaces remain open. For further information contact Carolyn Strange or Tom Griffiths.

29 October 2007
SchoolScapes
A new film by David MacDougall, launched by Dr Debjani Ganguly
5.30pm, The Theatrette, Old Canberra House
Inspired by the cinema of Lumière and the ideas of the 20th century Indian thinker Krishnamurti, David MacDougall explores in his new film a famous progressive school in South India, the Rishi Valley School. This is a film dedicated to the simple act of looking, in which each scene is a single shot.
Further details.

25 October 2007
ANU School of Art Annual Lecture: Dr Chris McAuliffe
Back formation and rediscovery: reflections on radical revisionism
6pm, School of Art Lecture Theatre
Further details.

28 September 2007
Workshop on Manipuri Dance from India
11.00am to 1.00pm, Old Canberra House Conference Room.
For further details see RSH website.

September 2007
“A Guide to Research in Indigenous and Isolated Communities”
Book Launch and Workshop
John Carty, a PhD student at the Research School of Humanities, has recently published a frank, lively, and insightful account of his own and other researchers’ experiences conducting field research. This guide will be invaluable to students about to leave for extended research, as well as their supervisors. A short workshop, headed by Carty, will be held for interested students across campus. The workshop will be followed by a launch.

19 September 2007
“The French Resistance: Between History and Memory”
Lecture and possible masterclass
Prof Olivier Wieviorka (Ecole Normale Supérieure-Cachan, France).
This event will be co-sponsored by the Departments of History and French as well as the National Europe Centre. Prof. Wieviorka’s visit is funded by the French Embassy.
For further details contact Prof. Ann Curthoys.

1-2 September 2007
Negotiating the Sacred IV: Tolerance, Education and the Curriculum
A two-day conference and edited collection
Convened by; Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Faculty of Arts Postdoctoral Fellow, Monash University; and Kevin White, Reader in Sociology, Australian National University
Keynote speakers: Professor Susan Mendus, Political Philosophy, University of York, UK; Associate Professor Philip Cam, Philosophy, University of New South Wales, President, Asia-Pacific Philosophy Education Network for Democracy; Professor James T. Richardson, Sociology and Judicial Studies, University of Nevada
Further details

17 August 2007
Classical Ballet in historical and transnational perspective
Time/Place: 1-2:30pm, Old Canberra House Theatrette
“A Museum of Props: The Imperial Russian Sleeping Beauty (1890), nineteenth-century French historiography and the balletic challenge to the historical text”.
Presented by Dr Helena Hammond, School of Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Warwick, UK, and HRC Visiting Fellow. Chaired by Prof David Williams, former director of the ANU School of Art and Adjunct Professor, Research School of Humanities.