Disconnections 2012 Program

DIS/CONNECTIONS
Inaugural FASS Postgraduate Conference 2012
Artwork: Angophora mandala by Belinda Allen: http://belindaallen.wordpress.com/about/
15-16 November 2012

Robert Webster Building, UNSW
Rms 137, 138, 139
Web: http://dis-connections.arts.unsw.edu.au/
Featured events
Going Public:
Intellectuals, Transformations, Responsibilities
Keynote panel
Featuring Michael Leunig, Raewyn Connell, James Arvanitakis
15 November 6pm (5.30pm for drinks)
New South Global Theatre
Fielding Interdisciplinarity
Roundtable and drinks
FASS luminaries talk about the dis/connections between arts, humanities
and social sciences
16 November 5pm
New South Global Theatre
Welcome to DIS/CONNECTIONS!
Dis/Connections is the inaugural postgraduate student conference of the Faculty of Arts and
Social Sciences at UNSW. It has been organised by student volunteers through the FASS
postgraduate student committee with the support and assistance of Will Balfour from the
FASS events team, FASS Director Postgraduate Research Stephen Fortescue, Associate
Dean (Research) Kristy Muir and the FASS Dean, Professor James Donald. Finally, many
thanks to Belinda Allen and to Michael Leunig for providing artwork for conference
promotional materials.
The FASS postgraduate student committee has three areas of focus:
• Student Networking
• Student Support
• Student Intellectual Development
Dis/Connections is an interdisciplinary event aimed at creating a supportive and stimulating

environment to share ideas. The conference is the first major part of the committee’s efforts
to create a research culture in the Faculty.
The conference will feature two exciting events.
Going Public
The first night, Michael Leunig, Professor Raewyn Connell, Dr James Arvanitakis will discuss
the role of the public intellectual in a panel discussion facilitated by A/Prof Sarah Maddison.
Fielding Interdisciplinarity
The second night, we finish the conference with a roundtable discussion between FASS
luminaries. Dr Paul Dawson, Dr Kath Albury, Dr Jo Faulkner and A/Prof Laura Shepherd will
discuss the potentials and problematics of transdisciplinarity in a roundtable hosted by Dr
Chris Danta. Then we will celebrate with drinks and nibblies.
We hope you have a great conference!
Best wishes,
The DIS/CONNECTIONS conference team:
Elizabeth Adamson
Emilie Auton
Ashley Barnwell
Roanna Gonsalves
Rosemary Grey
Andrew McNicol
Anisha Gautam
Rebecca Pearse
Kenneth Yates
Ian Zucker
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Reconnections - Call for contributions
As a follow-up to our DIS/CONNECTIONS conference we will publish a zine, titled
RECONNECTIONS, reflecting on the conference.
We invite FASS students and staff to contribute:
Critical reviews
Reflections
Photographs
Artwork
Letters
Tweets
These contributions should be a maximum 600 words and be directly related to the
conference - be it a specific paper you heard or a more general aspect of the event.
The due date for content is 24th November 2012. All submissions can be sent to
dis.connections.abstracts@gmail.com.
Image: 'Bunker' © Michael Leunig (used by permission of the artist).
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Thursday 15 November 2012
Time/ Panel 1 Panel 2 Panel 3
Session Rm 137 Rm 138 Rm 139
8.30-9.30 Registration in foyer
Dialectics Education
9.30-11
Prue Gibson Elizabeth Drumm
Session 1 Margo Adams Angela Smith
Belinda Allen
Chair: Chair:
Mary Zournazi Matthew Clarke
11-11.30 Morning tea in foyer
Disconnection Space/Time Musicality
11.30-1
Yuzhou Yang Miriam Jassy Rhonda Sui
Session 2 Helen Rydstrand Melanie Robson Daniel Bangert
John Severn Zoe Baker
Chair: Chair: Chair:

Vanessa Lemm Andrew Metcalfe Paul Evans
1-2 Lunch served in foyer
Writing Learning/Teaching
2-3.30
Lynne Broad Kaori Shimasaki
Session 3 Jackie Bailey Lin Feng
Andrew McNicol Tetsushi Ohara
Chair:
Sean Pryor
3.30-4 Afternoon tea in foyer
Landscape Advocacy
4-5.30
Hannah Brundson Carolyn Jackson
Session 4 Joseph Cummins Inara Walden
Gerry O Nolan Elizabeth Adamson
Chair: Chair:
Elizabeth McMahon Kylie Valentine
5.30-7.30 Going Public
Keynote panel in New South Theatre, drinks in courtyard
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Friday 16 November 2012
Time/ Panel 1 Panel 2 Panel 3 Rm
Session Rm 137 Rm 138 139
Crisis Bodies
9-10.30
Andrei Miroiu Tanya Thaweeskulchai
Session 1 Mark Steven Jayne Chapman
Fernando Antonio Dena Pezet
López Karen-Anne Wong
Chair: Chair:
TBA Helen Pringle
10.30-11 Morning tea in foyer
Community Inter-disciplinarity Relationality
11-12.30
Benjamin Hanckel Kenneth Yates Anisha Gautam
Session 2 Ashley Barnwell Tiffany Hambley Ariella Meltzer
Jan Idle Michael Peters Isobelle Barrett
Meyering
Chair: Chair: Chair:

Melanie White Toby Lea TBA
12.30-1.30 Lunch served in foyer
Global Representations
1.30-3
Ellie Martus Rabia Ali
Session 3 Yvette Selim Kelly Royds
Rebecca Paredes- Rodney Wallace
Nieto
Chair: Chair:
Kristy Muir Zora Simic
3-3.30 Afternoon tea in foyer
Environment Dialogues
3.30-5
Jane Gleeson-White Michelle Jamieson
Session 4 Rebecca Pearse Rebecca Oxley
Abbie White Florence Chiew
Susie Pratt
Chair:
Matthew Kearnes
5-7 Fielding Interdisciplinarity
Roundtable discussion in New South Theatre, drinks in courtyard
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Abstracts - Thursday 15 November
Dialectics
Session 1 – Panel 1 – Rm 137
Chair:
Mary Zournazi
The love reflection and soul split in visual art

Prue Gibson
School of the Arts and Media
pandmgibson@bigpond.com
For this paper, I aim to establish a connection between the human condition of yearning
love, when engaged by an artwork, and the Aristophanes myth of split beings. This concerns
the endless search for our other spiritual half. The mutualism of the loving gaze, the
exclusive mirror relationships between viewer and artwork (and endless reflections within
artworks) are at the paper’s heart.
A discussion of split beings is not a retreat into correlational dyads. Instead, it raises the
fundamental nature of longing and it opens up the idea of multiple reflections or
reverberations to explain the plausibility of contingency, chance and the likelihood of
experiencing love. I only hope that the ancient myths or legends, such as Aristophanes’ split
being and Naricssus’ reflection, might satisfy Meillassoux’s after-finitude urgings to take up
his idea of ancestral things, in order to understand a non-anthropocentric view.
I will draw on the writings of Peter Sloterdijk and the new philosophies of Quentin
Meillassoux, to develop a cross-disciplinary context for the art-specific concepts of spirit
daemons, doubles, reflections, mutual love and the desire to remain whole. This will include
an evaluation of the video work of artists Martin King, John Tonkin, Silvana and Gabriella
Mangano.
Bio
Prue Gibson is a freelance art writer and author of The Rapture of Death 2010. She lectures
at COFA, UNSW, in the School of Art History and Theory. For her PhD at School of the Arts
and Media, UNSW, she is writing a novel and her dissertation, The Passions, investigates
the aesthetics and phenomenology of love and art, in an era of speculative realism.
Children's Yoga: Connecting with Self and Other

Margo Adams
Sociology
margo@lfg.com.au
Work-in-progress paper
The aim of my study is to explore the problem of maternal ambivalence, which are the loving
and hating feelings that mothers have toward their children. I assert that feelings of maternal
ambivalence are universal and that an acknowledgement, rather than a denial, of the
negative side of her ambivalence, can help a woman to become more comfortable with her
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mothering. I propose that this more honest appraisal of her mothering will help to assuage
her feelings of guilt and anxiety and promote a more authentic relationship with her child.
Background:
Through my personal experiences and clinical work I have wondered about mothering and
developed a sense that there is some part of the puzzle of mothering that is missing, that's is
its not as it seems. After a lot of reading I encountered Parker's book about maternal
ambivalence and it became apparent to me that this concept reveals a lot about mothering.
A cultural taboo exists around the exposure of maternal ambivalence from both society and
the mothers themselves.
Literature Search:
I have applied the theories of Winnicott and Klein to develop a framework to analyse
maternal ambivalence. Winnicott’s concept of the ‘good enough’ mother provides a model for
the mother that empowers her to be satisfied with her own ‘less than perfect’ mothering. It
presents both a social and intrapsychic perspective. Melanie Klein’s model of love and hate
and the subsequent merging of the two is a theory for the application of ambivalence.
Bio
I am a first year part-time phd student in the Sociology department. I am a psychotherapist in
private practice and I have a research MSW from this university titled 'Coping with Infertility'.
I have an interest in womens' issues and in particular issues around mothering.
Education
Chair:
Matthew Clarke
Literature in a Predisciplinary Age: The Lunar Society and the Romantic Novel
Elizabeth Drumm
School of the Arts and Media (Literature)
bdrumm@pubint.com
‘[In the future] all knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowledge, as Lord
Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will, in fact, be increased; nature, including
both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in
this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence
in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more
disposed) to communicate happiness to others.’ Joseph Priestley, (1768)
Scientist and educationist, Joseph Priestley encapsulated the Enlightenment belief in the
power of knowledge pointing ahead a century to the development of disciplines within the
sciences and humanities that marked the late Victorian era. Priestley’s vision of the future
was one of enormous optimism but the span of his working life was decidedly pre-
disciplinarian and marked by the idiosyncratic research interests of polymaths such as
himself. The Lunar Society of which Priestly was a member, were an eclectic group of
northern English intellectuals and industrialists in the latter decades of the eighteenth
century. Central to the Society was a focus on applied sciences coupled with an active
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interest in education as part of a broad humanist social philosophy. Coinciding with this
embryonic stage in the development of the sciences was the protean form of the novel. The
Romantic era saw the novel begin to take the shape that would evolve in its nineteenth-
century flourishing. Drawing on the literature of Anglo-Irish novelist and educationist, Maria
Edgeworth and her intersection with the Lunar Society, this paper will explore the porous
nature of knowledge and its application in a predisciplinary age. Edgeworth embraced
Enlightenment philosophy, Romantic pedagogy and evolving ideas on psychology with their
unifying preoccupation with identity formation and the imaginative space this uncovered.
This convergence of literature and applied theory brought an unexpected focus to bear on
the child and childhood as a critical developmental stage consequently highlighting, I will
argue, the distance between progressive scientific inquiry and its uncertain outcomes.
Bio
Elizabeth Drumm is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Arts and Media. Her research
investigates representations of the child in nineteenth-century British fiction with a focus on
evolving theories of psychology and the themes of abandonment and memory and how
these shape social identity. Elizabeth has worked in the book publishing industry in New
Zealand and Australia for a number of years.
Creative teaching and learning in higher education

Belinda Allen
School of Education/Learning & Teaching Unit
belinda@unsw.edu.au
As universities prepare students to be able to manage professional life and ongoing learning
in a fast-changing and demanding world, creativity is often included in institutional graduate
attributes and learning outcomes. Creativity is a dispositional outcome rather than a skill,
and is associated with such qualities as preparedness to take risks, propensity for
collaboration, and ability to make unusual and unexpected connections. In disciplines not
traditionally considered as 'creative', graduate capabilities relating to professional practice,
such as independent learning, critical reflection and evaluation skills, collaboration and
communication skills and interdisciplinary practice, represent aspects of a creative
disposition.
It has been suggested that an effective way to teach creativity is to model creative practice
(Sternberg, 1996), so university teachers as well as students need to engage with what it is
to be creative in their discipline and in their practice. Creative dispositional qualities, as well
as a creative approach to 'designing' the learning environment and activities, can be brought
to the teaching situation. Teachers, no less than students, may need to transform their
pedagogical practice.
This paper explores some ideas around transformation of practice for creativity in university
learning and teaching, including transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991), praxis for teacher
development (Carr & Kemmis, 1983) and curriculum as praxis (Grundy, 1987).
Bio
Belinda Allen is an Educational designer, Academic developer and Adjunct lecturer at the
University of New South Wales. As an artist and designer she is interested in exploring the
creative dimensions of learning and teaching, and is engaged in doctoral research around
technologies that can support creativity in curriculum in higher education. Her background is
in visual art and graphic design. http://research.unsw.edu.au/people/ms-belinda-allen
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Disconnection
Chair:
Vanessa Lemm
Contextual Dimension of 明 (Illumination) as an Epistemological Concept in

the Zhuangzi
Yuzhou Yang
Philosophy
yuzhou.yang@student.unsw.edu.au
The concept of 明 in the Zhuangzi, translated as illumination, clarity, enlightenment, bright

etc., is believed to refer to the epistemological ability of a sage. Moreover, this concept is
often compared to light. This paper discusses two possible analogies of 明 associated with
light, with the caution, on the other hand, that the luminary analogies are probably
inadequate to capture the full picture of 明 in Zhuangist epistemology. The luminary
analogies, arguably, provide a picture of knowledge expansion, but the Zhuangzi seems to
have more to offer. To illustrate this point, a third analogy will be made in order to reflect that
the view that the author(s) of the Zhuangzi are pushing epistemological boundaries.
The third analogy implies an interpretation of Zhuangist epistemology from a contextual

perspective. This new approach suggests that the question(s) of “what do we know?” are not
of the central interest of the Zhuangzi. Rather, attention should be shifted to the question of
how to position oneself at a contextually advantaged epistemological pivot where known/
knowable and unknown/unknowable can meet each other and be dealt with simultaneously.
Various passages from the Zhuangzi will be discussed in order to support my argument.
Bio
Yuzhou Yang is a PhD student in Philosophy at the School of Humanities. His research
interest is on pre-Qin Chinese philosophy. He attempts to plumb the sensitivities and deeper
meaning of Chinese philosophy through exploration of its themes and concepts via a
framework of ‘practical contextualism’.
Katherine Mansfield’s Poetic Prose in Context

Helen Rydstrand
h.rydstrand@student.unsw.edu.au
During the first decades of the early twentieth century, there was a great deal of discussion
in Anglo-American literary circles of the relationship between prose and poetry. In general,
ideas about the possibilities of the forms were influenced by nineteenth-century notions,
which defined the two categories by their supposed nature or essence, rather than by form
— prose is the language of the everyday, direct, objective, plain, while poetry is the
language used for higher purposes — obscure, emotional, beautiful. The rise of ‘new’
genres, such as the prose poem and free verse, challenged the formal distinction between
the genres but not, I argue, the dichotomy between these underlying categories. This paper
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will establish a conceptual connection between the modernist short story, a genre often
described as ‘poetic’, and these radical poetic forms. To test this idea, I will analyse a piece
by modernism’s arch-short-story writer, Katherine Mansfield, paying close attention to
notions of rhythm and mimesis as crucial aspects of the prose/poetry conversation. For this
paper, I have chosen one of KM’s New Zealand stories, ‘At the Bay’, as amongst her oeuvre,
this is one of those most often singled out for its ‘poetic’ atmosphere.
Bio
Helen Rydstrand is a second-year PhD student in English at UNSW. Her thesis explores
how the modernist short story was influenced by contemporary discussion of the relationship
between poetry and prose. She is interested in the ways that the short stories of Katherine
Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence respond to various aspects of this debate,
especially notions around rhythm and mimesis. She has presented on the modernist short
story at conferences in Australia and the United Kingdom.
Operatic Adaptation and/as Shakespeare Criticism

John Severn
jrsevern@hotmail.com
Although adaptation and literary criticism have significant points in common, productive
interplay between adaptations of Shakespeare and literary-critical studies of the plays has
generally been slight. This is particularly so when the adaptation reconfigures Shakespeare’s
theatrical writing in another medium, such as opera, whose conventions and meaning-
making tools may be unfamiliar to literary critics. Taking as a case study two operatic
adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, this paper explores the potential
for an interdisciplinary critical discourse that might usefully circulate among opera studies,
adaptation studies and literary criticism.
The Merry Wives of Windsor contains a number of features that make it unusual within
Shakespeare’s dramatic output and that thus render problematic the idea of a unified
‘Shakespearean’ canon. Until very recently, literary-critical approaches within Shakespeare
studies have marginalized The Merry Wives, a sustained interest in the play’s unusual
aspects – particularly its portrayal of female agency, family relationships and the natural
world – only consolidating in the early twenty-first century. However, two operatic
adaptations, Salieri’s Falstaff (1799) and Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849)
demonstrate a longstanding engagement with exactly these issues. This paper suggests
how formal features of operatic adaptation in these operas bring to the fore aspects of The
Merry Wives that literary criticism has traditionally ignored. The paper concludes with an
exploration of the practical challenges that face attempts to create and sustain a circulating
interdisciplinary discourse, as well as suggesting the wider benefits such a discourse might
bring.
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Space/time
Chair:
Andrew Metcalfe
Where the F*** is Finnegans Wake? Measuring Place to the South of Obscenity
Miri Jassy
School of Arts and Media
m.jassy@unsw.edu.au
Henri Lefebvre’s question in the 1985 preface to The Production of Space aptly applies to
the crafting of space in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: ‘How could a space obey common rules,
constitute an 'object', and disintegrate, all at the same time?’ A partial answer is that space is
altered perceptively before it is plastically.
The “Occupy” movement replaced the debate on wealth accountability by physically

displacing the finance industry of that well-known place, Wall Street. This location (with its
blocked access to social transparency as a ‘walled street’) is named in Finnegans Wake to
describe “a once wallstrait oldparr”. Finnegans Wake charts the great fall from wall to earth,
with shattered faith in global finance a grim prophesy inscribed on Humpty Dumpty’s
shattered shell.
The up-rushing ground, the gravitational pull between high and low and the historical axis
between global hemispheres are the topoi of this tour through Finnegans Wake’s financial
district. The obscenity of post-imperial power is reflected in the book’s deliberately obscuring
language in which the intercourse of exploitation is off-stage, unseen: obscene. Joyce’s
personae in Finnegans Wake dream, root and drop themselves through space.
Through Lefebvrian spatial analysis, flashes of performance and readings of the book’s deep
South, the practice of defining space and measuring place in Finnegans Wake will be
exhibited to locate where Humpty has made landfall.
Bio
Miri Jassy is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Global Irish Studies at UNSW. Her PhD
thesis is on the antipodes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Miri produced the 2011 and
2012 Bloomsday events on behalf of the CGIS.
‘A Collector of Vanished Gazes’: The long take in Theo Angelopoulos’

Landscape in the Mist
Melanie Robson
School of Arts and Media (Film)
z3252725@student.unsw.edu.au
This paper examines the aesthetic, political and ethical implications of the long take in Theo
Angelopoulos’ Landscape in the Mist (1988). It explores how these decisions regarding the
long take have influenced Angelopoulos’ directorial style. Since cinema’s infancy, the long
take has played an important role in the development of film style. Notably, it was a
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significant stylistic technique of the pre- and post-war European films on which Andre Bazin
based his theories of cinematic realism. The long take has been crucial in defining the
spatio-temporality of these films and the artistic movement to which they belong. Over the
past twenty-five years, however, the long take has adopted a new role in European cinema
that involves not only expressions of realism, but also modernism, self-reflection and
experimentation with new technology.
The film, Landscape in the Mist, is a culmination of these forms of cinematic expression. The
narrative traces the journey of two children, Alexandros and Voula, as they run away from
their home in Greece to find their father in Germany. Their travels, which involve a series of
betrayals and violations, are told through Angelopoulos’ signature rhythmic, dedramatised
aesthetic. This paper argues that Angelopoulos’ use of the long take allows him to
stylistically engage with artistic movements of the past, forging a vital link in his films
between history and the present. This realist style also allows him to uniquely express not
just the narrative of the children, but also expose the nature of being a child. Finally, this
paper argues that Landscape in the Mist can be seen, stylistically, as a turning point in
Angelopoulos’ career.
Bio
Melanie Robson is a Ph.D candidate in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW. Her
thesis, "Tracking the real: The long take in contemporary European cinema", explores the
use of the long take in the films of Theo Angelopoulos, Bela Tarr, Michael Haneke and
Aleksandr Sokurov.
Abstracted and embodied sublime landscapes on the Camino de Santiago

pilgrimage
Zoe Baker
(Sociology and) Anthropology
zoembaker@gmail.com
In most pilgrimages, the sacred centre - the object of the ritual - is the destination, the shrine
or monument. On the Camino de Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage, the Camino (the Way)
itself is the sacred centre, with contemporary pilgrims focusing on the journeying, the path,
the transformative being connected to practice rather than arrival. This journey-taking is
practiced increasingly by secular pilgrims, who take increasingly individualistic, internally
positioned and constructed pilgrimages. In lieu of a blanket collective religious understanding
of the practice or space, themes of landscape and nature claim prominence as part of
reorientations of the sacred.
This paper uses the pilgrim narratives gathered during ethnographic anthropological
research on the trail in France and Spain, to weave the themes of solitude, the
open/outdoors, nature, scale, and awe. In these themes, the relationship between the pilgrim
and space reveals tension – between landscape as an abstraction or image, and the lived or
experienced space; and between ideals, projections, understandings, performances, and the
embodied, enrapturing experience.
The aesthetic of the sublime flows through the romanticism of landscape and nature
uncovered in these reorientations of the sacred. At the same time, touching on the sublime
imbues the experienced and embodied profane practice of the space with a grandeur and
possibility of transcendence, confirming the sacred in a secular practice, even as the pilgrim
confronts the tensions between the abstraction and the experienced, between disconnecting
and connecting with (potentially infinite, potentially unframed) space.
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Musicality
Chair:
Paul Evans
Where Music meets Philosophy: Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysics of Music”

Rhonda Siu
Philosophy
rhonda.siu@gmail.com
Music and philosophy have usually been considered somewhat disconnected, rather than
interconnected, disciplines. As a result, and to a greater extent than the other creative arts,
music’s presence in the philosophical literature remains limited. In general, music’s largely
abstract and ineffable nature often means that it resists the attempts of traditional
philosophical frameworks to define its meaning, value and properties. Consequently, music
is often overlooked as a proper subject of philosophical investigation.
In light of the above, this paper aims to reconsider the notion that music and philosophy are
disparate disciplines by exploring their crucial interconnections in Schopenhauer’s
“Metaphysics of Music”. In his aesthetics, Schopenhauer makes the central claim that,
unlike the other creative arts, music is a “copy of the will itself” and is thus able to express
the elusive “thing-in-itself” or the “essence” of the world.1 As evidence for this key claim,
Schopenhauer establishes analogies between the various movements and characteristics of
the musical elements (e.g. melody, harmony, rhythm, etc.) and those of the “will” as the latter
manifests itself in human existence. Hence, instead of neglecting music because of its
inherent ineffability, Schopenhauer endows it with a unique metaphysical status in his
aesthetics and thereby reinvests it with the crucial philosophical significance that it deserves.
Bio
Rhonda Siu is a PhD candidate in Philosophy in the School of Humanities, UNSW. Her
thesis examines the relationship between music and existence from the viewpoint of
Continental philosophy. It examines the works of theorists such as Adorno, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz.
The intuitive performer: Processes of musical decision-making

Daniel Bangert
School of Arts and Media
danielbangert@gmail.com
Performers often discuss the importance of musical intuition, but the role of intuitive
processes within artistic practice can be difficult to articulate. This paper models the role of
these processes by drawing on insights from three studies that examine how professional
musicians experience intuitive and deliberate decision-making.
Data on types of decision-making were collected though interviews, an experimental sight-

reading study and a case study, with a focus on musicians that perform eighteenth-century
Western classical music on early string instruments. Findings and themes from these studies
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show how performers make musical decisions within a continuum from intuition to
deliberation. This continuum is developed into a spiral model by considering how the
proportion of intuitive and deliberate decision-making changes over time. Insights from
performers are discussed in relation to theories proposed by musicologists and
psychologists, including the encircling approach to musical understanding developed by
Eggebrecht, the concept of informed intuition as discussed by Rink and various dual process
theories of cognition.
This paper aims to clarify the processes that result in music performance by examining how
professional period instrument performers make musical decisions. The significance of the
theoretical model put forward in the paper is its attempt to explore how performers think
about and develop their understanding of a range of interpretative issues.
Bio
Daniel Bangert is a member of the Empirical Musicology Group in the School of the Arts and
Media and has recently completed his doctoral research, jointly supervised by A/Prof
Dorottya Fabian and A/Prof Emery Schubert. He is a freelance violinist and has taught
courses in musicianship and the performance of eighteenth-century music at UNSW.
Writing
Chair:
Sean Pryor
Chris Marker’s Inter-Media Essays: The Photobook Connection

Lynne Broad
lynne.broad@bigpond.com
The origin of the essay form is commonly located in the sixteenth century essays of Michel
de Montaigne (1533-1592). A sceptical mediator and royal advisor during France’s religious
civil wars, Montaigne rejected received wisdom and examined topics through his personal
understanding of them, an unorthodox formal method for the time. Today, while the written
essay has continued to flourish it has also been reworked in various other mediums, artistic,
photographic, musical and audiovisual. In our era of representational innovation in both
written and audiovisual media, Chris Marker (1921-2012) stands out as an exceptional inter-
media essayist concerned with documenting and remembering contemporary history. His
prodigious output includes essays in the form of photobooks, films, videos, a television
series, exhibitions, installations, and the CD-ROM Immemory. However, the field of Marker
studies has been largely defined by its focus on the development of form in his film and
audiovisual essays, while the contribution made by his photobook essays has been largely
overlooked until now.
My thesis aims to enrich our understanding of Marker’s contribution to the essay form by
focusing, first, on the formal development in Marker’s photobooks, and second, on the
nature of the formal interaction between his photobooks and his films and other audiovisual
works. Given that the poetics of Marker’s photobooks contain elements from both film and
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literature, in this paper I will consider what formal terms can be borrowed from those fields to
explain poetic equivalents in the photobook form.
Bio
Lynne Broad has been fascinated by Chris Marker’s work since first viewing Sans Soleil
(Sunless) in 1992. Completing her MA by Research, Chris Marker: A Stylistic Analysis of his
Film and Media Work at UNSW in 2008, she is now undertaking a PhD on Chris Marker’s
Inter-Media Essays: The Photobook Connection.
The gift of interdiscplinarity to the "gift"

Jackie Bailey
School of the Arts and Media (English)
jackie@thosecreativetypes.com
The concept of the gift has been approached from multiple disciplines: it seems that
everyone, from philosophers, to economists, to social theorists, has had something to say
about it. Anthropologists like Mauss and Levi-Strauss have examined the gift as a system of
social relations dating from archaic societies. Literary theorists and philosophers such as
Derrida have posited that the gift is an impossibility; social theorists like Bourdieu have
emphasised the "misrecognition" which allows for people to believe in "disinterested" giving.
Cixous and Bataille, from their alternately feminist and French philosophical and sociological
backgrounds, have argued that the gift is a necessary expression of expenditure of the
energy which drives creation. More recently, Osteen and Radin have argued for a more
fulsome idea of "human flourishing," and encourage us to see the gift as an instance of
giving-whilst-keeping - that is, the possibility of inalienable possessions in a market-driven
world.
I would like to present a work-in-progress about the interdisciplinarity of the gift. I hope to
present the "gift" of interdisciplinary to our understanding of this phenomenon which is
social, philosophical, psychological and perhaps even biological. By exploring this "gift" of
interdiscplinarity, I hope to also present a few humble offerings to the Conference's
discussion of experiential interdisciplinarity, its benefits and realities.
Bio
Jackie Bailey is a PhD student in Creative Writing. Her dissertation looks at the place of the
gift in creative writing. Jackie has a University Medal, BA (First Class Honours) from the
University of Queensland and a Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Media from the University of
Melbourne. She has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, journals International
Peacekeeping, Australian Journal of Human Rights, Mots Pluriels and Cultural Trends, and
arts industry publications Arts Professional UK and ArtLook. Jackie has been awarded
Screen Australia documentary funding and a Varuna Writers Centre fellowship for her
creative work.
Prewriting history: The influence of adopted systems on public archives and

thought
Andrew McNicol
School of Arts and Media (Media)
a.mcnicol@unsw.edu.au
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It is often said that 'History is written by the winners'. Last year I heard an interesting revision
that instead asserts 'History is written by its authors'. This got me thinking about the
concepts of power dynamics relating to archives and memory that I discuss in my own work.
My academic background led me to recognise what I believe to be important social concerns
that result from digital systems design and how the rules that define data collection play an
increasing role in framing the content of our collective memory. Recognising this
phenomenon, I offer an alternative, compelling revision to the opening phrase: 'To a
significant degree, history is written by digital system designers – in advance!'
Supporting such an argument is not easy. I would need to look at related conversations that
have happened in various fields that are not native to me. How do I choose the best
conceptual framework to encapsulate my argument when there is so much I could draw
from? This is exactly the sort of problem one should usually encounter when writing a thesis,
of course, but what happens when such complications arise frequently in your research, and
when they tend to only influence small arguments? Sometimes it's just easier to choose that
approach you are most qualified to make.
This paper discusses some of the complications experienced as a media student whose
work is largely 'interdisciplinary'. In doing so it more broadly discusses the role established
academic disciplines might play in influencing and limiting questions that are asked within an
academic context.
Bio
Andrew McNicol is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales whose studies
focus on 'digital profile systems', such as social media profiles and census forms, and how
their design choices affect issues of equality and freedom. Andrew can often be observed
reading about digital security, listening to 8-bit music, and perusing updated privacy policies
of popular social networking sites.
Learning/teaching
This panel is introducing an analysis of learning processes in three different learning

communities related to Japanese language education (an undergraduate classroom
community, a student community outside the classroom, and a learning community for
research students) at an Australian university. While each presentation is focusing on
different aspects of learning and development due to differences among the communities, all
three presentations share a basic concept of sociocultural theory concept which is ‘learning
and development occur as people participate in the sociocultural activities of their
community’ (Rogoff 1994: 209). Through the three presentations, this panel intends to draw
connections among a variety of aspects of language learning in diverse communities.
Discussions in this panel could be also applicable to other disciplines.
Participating in a learning community outside the classroom through

Overlapping Broad Interface (OBI) zone
Kaori Shimasaki
School of International Studies
k.shimasaki@unsw.edu.au
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Language learners spend most of their time outside the classroom. In the area of second
language acquisition, however, language learning outside the classroom has not been
studied in great detail (Benson 2008). This research examines how second language
learners are learning Japanese in Communities of Practice (CoP) outside the classroom.
The concept of CoP views learning as an aspect of any activity people are involved in.
Consequently this research sees participation in a CoP as part of the language learners’
overall learning process.
I am currently conducting participant observations and interviews at the Nippon Students

Associations (NSA). The NSA is an association at the University of New South Wales for
students who are interested in Japanese language and culture. In this presentation, I would
like to show my preliminary findings, in particular how the NSA works as a CoP. I have
summarized my research findings about the NSA under a concept I call Overlapping Broad
Interface (OBI) zone. The OBI zone allows potential members to have a closer look at the
CoP, its members and activities. They are more than welcome to become NSA pre-members
without any obligations or roles and can start networking with CoP members. Members also
benefit from the OBI zone; for example, they can assess potential members early, protecting
the CoP from unsuitable or harmful members.
Bio
Kaori Shimasaki is a PhD candidate in the School of International Studies. She has just
completed her third semester. She is mainly interested in Japanese language education.
More specifically, her work examines how second language learners are learning Japanese
in Communities of Practice outside the classroom.
Benkyokai: A learning community for research students

Lin Feng
l.feng@student.unsw.edu.au
A variety of support communities are available for undergraduate students studying

Japanese language at Australian universities (Thomson 2007). However, it is often argued
that postgraduate research students at Australian universities tend to be isolated when they
work on their own research. This presentation describes a learning community for research
students majoring in Japanese Studies at an Australian university as a case of improvement
of research environment for postgraduate and honours students.
A group of research students majoring in Japanese Studies at an Australian university has

organised a learning community named 'Benkyokai' (study group) with their academic
supervisors. Benkyokai aims to improve their research by sharing their experiences and
information regarding their research, and by supporting each other in various aspects of their
research career.
The members are diverse in terms of their language background (native/non-native speakers
of Japanese), research careers (Honours, Masters, or PhD), off-campus and on-campus
enrolment status, and other factors such as teaching/learning experiences. This diversity
creates multidimensional interactions among the Benkyokai members. Currently, there are 7
on-campus and 2 off-campus members in Benkyokai under two academic supervisors.
Benkyokai operates with two main instruments, the weekly meetings and the website.
Benkyokai is a place where the research students help each other when they face difficulties
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in their research. On the website, they report their ongoing findings on a weekly basis, share
academic resources, and keep records of the weekly meeting by producing weekly reports.
Through the instruments and with the member diversity, Benkyokai works as a community of
practice (Lave & Wenger 1991) for the research students to improve their research
environment and productivity.
Bio
Lin Feng, currently enrolled in the MA program in Applied Linguistics specialized in
Japanese, doing a research project on active learning outside the classrooms. NAATI
accredited translator.
Learner agency and participation in a Japanese language classroom as a

community of practice
Tetsushi Ohara
t.ohara@unsw.edu.au
My PhD research focuses on learner autonomy in the fields of second/foreign language

education. In this presentation, I focus on the analysis of learner agency in Japanese
language classrooms because exercising one’s own agency is closely related to the
development of learner autonomy. As a concept of sociocultural theory indicates, I assume
that ‘learning and development occur as people participate in the sociocultural activities of
their community’ (Rogoff 1994: 209). A Japanese language classroom could be considered
as a ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger 1991). In order to examine how each student
exercises his/her own agency and participate in a Japanese language classroom
community, I have carried out the observation of Japanese language classes at an
Australian university and conducted interviews with students and teachers in the classes.
The preliminary results indicate that students’ participation into the classroom community is
related to how they create a subject position in the classroom community. Students exercise
agency in forming and reforming their identities of competence in different contexts. As a
process of moving from peripheral to full participation in the classroom community, students
develop a subject position, which helps them create intersubjectiviy with their teacher and
classmates. If students could exercise agency to form and control their subject position with
an identity of competence according to the contexts, they can change their intersubjectivity
in the classroom community by accessing different resources available in the classroom
community. Consequently, students create a way of fully participating in the classroom
community and learn Japanese more effectively through the development of learner
autonomy.
Bio
Tetsushi Ohara is a PhD candidate in the School of International Studies at the University of
New South Wales. His research interests include learner and teacher autonomy, pedagogy
for Japanese as a second/foreign language, and sociocultural theory.
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Landscape
Chair:
Elizabeth McMahon
Transatlantic Dis/connections: The local and the global in the novels of

Thomas Hardy and their adaptations
Hannah Brunsdon
h.brunsdon@unsw.edu.au
In two recent film adaptations – The Claim (2000) and Trishna (2011) - director Michael
Winterbottom translates nineteenth-century English author Thomas Hardy’s deeply local and
regional novels to settings that are modern, postcolonial and global. In doing so,
Winterbottom arguably dislodges Hardy from everything that gives his literature meaning.
This paper will trace the numerous dis/connections that result from the historical, cultural and
geographical shifts between Hardy’s original texts and Winterbottom’s adaptations. It will
begin by stating that Winterbottom forges initial disconnects from Hardy’s literature by
resituating The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the Sierra Nevada in North America, a
decade after the California Gold Rush (1848-1855), and moving Tess of the
D’Urbervilles(1891) to the rural province of Rajasthan in contemporary India. Yet, it will claim
that, rather than proving debilitating, these disconnections open up dialogic networks in
which key thematic concerns that lie at the heart of Hardy’s fiction – place, dislocation, loss,
and change – are brought to the fore via the cinematic depiction of landscape and
local/global spaces. Furthermore, this paper will suggest that Hardy’s literature anticipates
Winterbottom’s films by addressing the author’s own engagement with an increasingly
transglobal world at the fin de siècle. Here I will draw upon Genevieve Abravanel’s claim that
Hardy defines the local space in opposition to a growing network of transatlantic exchange
(2005). In charting the myriad of dis/connections that define these four texts we can gain an
appreciation for the vital role that interdisciplinary research must play if we are to glean their
full potential for meaning.
Bio
Hannah is a second-year PhD candidate at UNSW working in the School of English. She is
currently conducting research into the novels of Thomas Hardy and their contemporary
adaptations. Of particular concern to her project are questions of intermediality, modernity,
gender, local/global and landscape.
Australian Outsiders: Connecting the Convict to the Terror Suspect in the

music of The Drones and Gareth Liddiard
Joe Cummins
josephalcummins@gmail.com
One of the most culturally resonant figures to emerge out of the violent and repressive
mythic space of Australia’s colonial history is the convict. This paper will examine the
contemporary reinscription of this national myth that is performed by Australian band the
Drones, as well as the solo work of the Drones central creative force Gareth Liddiard. The
Page | 17
particular focus of the paper will be to explore links between the figure of the convict, as
represented in the Drones song “Sixteen Straws”, and “D”, Liddiard’s reimagining of the
terror suspect David Hicks in his solo composition “The Radicalisation of D”. The use of
abject lyrical imagery in both songs positions “D” as the modern incarnation of the 19th
Century convict, while also opening a space within the Australian convict mythology for the
abject outsider, a move against the fascistic tendencies of nationalism.
Connections: art and ideas along the Silk Roads

Gerry Nolan
Philosophy
gonolan@gmail.com
For millennia, the Silk Roads have played an important role in connecting the art and ideas
of many generations of people spanning from China in the east and India in the south, to the
Middle East and Mediterranean countries in the west.
As well as silk, spices, medicinal herbs, perfumes, metal works, ceramics, jewellery, horses
and rhubarb travelling along the routes of the Silk Road, connections were made between
artworks, music, religions and philosophy.
It has been found that much of the technology that Westerners claimed to have invented was
actually invented in China and that there is a possibility that philosophical ideas were
exchanged between Ancient Greece and China, specifically between Heraclitus and Lao-tzu.
Could it be that connections were made, the ideas exchanged and then, much later, the
connections broken?
In the 4th Century BCE, Alexander the Great founded several Greek settlements in Central
Asia, resulting in connections between the art of Ancient Greece, the Middle East and
Mediterranean countries with Southern Asia.
The dis/connect created by the extreme geography and topography that the Silk Roads
traversed, profoundly influenced the art that accompanied the spread of Buddhism and on
the impact of Confucianism and Daoism on Buddhism itself.
In the brief time available, my talk will consider the influence of the geography and
topography of the Silk Roads on the art that accompanied the spread of Buddhism and the
connections between the philosophies of Heraclitus and Lao-tzu.
Bio
Gerry gained a BA with Honours in Philosophy from UNSW in 2006. He has travelled
extensively on the Silk Road and has tutored on the “Along the Silk Road Course” summer
school at UNSW since 2004. He is currently doing an MA Philosophy by Research.
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Advocacy
Chair:
Kylie Valentine
Keeping the regulatory faith: Stakeholder perceptions of what it really takes to

be an independent regulator
Carolyn Jackson
School of Social Sciences
carolynjackson@bigpond.com
Independent regulation is the new orthodoxy. We believe in the power of independence. So

much so that we cannot have good governance or international best practice without it. But
despite this acclaim there is very little agreement on what independence actually is and in
practice what it means to be an independent agency. This presentation will explore legal,
political and sociological understandings of regulatory independence through the
examination of the practices and relationships of so-called independent regulatory agencies
in the fields of privacy protection and child welfare in Australia. My analysis will draw on a
qualitative study that incorporates the experiences and observations of agency
commissioners, policy departments, citizen advocacy groups and regulatees to build a
practical understanding of what it means to be an independent agency. The findings suggest
that stakeholders understand independence as encompassing behavioural qualities such as
impartiality, public advocacy and integrity alongside the more conventional criteria of legal
protection and structural separation. These dimensions resonate with classical notions of
freedom, liberty and autonomy. The presentation will highlight the importance of a cross
disciplinary approach to conceptualising independence and provide an opportunity for further
discussion of these fundamental ideals.
Lost in translation? Addressing 'wicked problems' via collaborative policy

work
Inara Walden
Social Policy Research Centre
i.walden@unsw.edu.au
First defined by Rittel and Webber in 1973, the concept of a wicked problem has been
applied in a variety of scholarly disciplines, from political science to natural resource
management, urban and regional planning, and from cybernetics to public policy (Head
2008). Wicked problems are multidimensional, with no definitive formulation nor solution. In
relation to public policy, key features may include: social complexity with many stakeholders,
responsibility stretching across many organisations or agents, and solutions may require
behaviour changes from citizens and stakeholder groups (APSC 2007). Climate change and
Indigenous disadvantage are cited in the literature as prime examples of wicked policy
problems facing Australia today. Water management in the Murray-Darling basin is another.
In each case it seems clear that authoritative top-down decision-making by government,
scientific, technical or policy experts simply will not cut it. Such complex policy dilemmas
seem to demand deliberative, participatory processes, to enable input from concerned and
affected citizens, and from key stakeholders whose 'buy-in' is required. Stakeholders will
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often have radically different worldviews and value frameworks for conceiving and
understanding policy problems. Ideally, processes of information sharing, dialogue and
deliberation will narrow the distance between policy experts and citizens, helping to bridge
stakeholder positions and broker broad agreement on goals, toward negotiating preferred
strategies and solutions. In cross-cultural contexts, for example in the area of Indigenous
policy engagement, it is also worth considering the type of high order capabilities that may
be required of facilitators in participatory processes.
Bio
Inara Walden was a curator of documentary photography and social history for more than a
decade before joining the Social Policy Research Centre in 2012 to pursue her passion for
social policy research. She has an academic background in history, researching race-
relations and protest movements. Her PhD research investigates community engagement in
Indigenous policymaking.
In-home child care in liberal welfare states: Emerging disconnections in Early

Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy and discourse
Elizabeth Adamson
e.adamson@unsw.edu.au
Governments around the world have placed increasing emphasis on universal, high quality,
professional early childhood education care (ECEC). Despite the increased emphasis on
participation in formal ECEC services, many parents still rely on informal care by
grandparents, other relatives and friends and, increasingly, non-relative in-home carers as
their primary or supplementary choice for care and, perhaps more surprisingly, some
governments actively support such forms of care. In the three liberal countries chosen for
my research – Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada – policy mechanisms have been
introduced in the last two decades to support and facilitate the use of in-home child care. We
know little about why in-home child care arrangements are supported by governments who,
at the same time, advocate for increased ‘social investment’ through public investment in
high quality, universal ECEC services. ECEC has gained a central position on liberal
governments’ policy agendas based on evidence of the benefits of increased public
expenditure on high quality care – a body of research which largely excludes home-based
care.
This paper will present emerging findings from policy analysis and interviews conducted with
key policy stakeholders in the three countries. It will touch on three themes explored in the
study, where connections and disconnections in discourse and policy have emerged: i) a
common discourse of social investment, yet a disconnect with actual policy mechanisms; ii)
Divergences within each country with respect to support for in-home child care; and, iii)
Similarities and differences across the countries with respect to discourse and policy support
for different types of ECEC.
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Abstracts - Friday 16 November
Crisis
Chair:
Julian Murphett
Population Control, Intelligence and Operations: British Counterinsurgency in

Malaya
Andrei Miroiu
andrei_miroiu@yahoo.com
While much of the old and new literature on counterinsurgency (COIN) dwells on intelligence
and population control as main ways to defeat politically-inspired rebellions, there is little
emphasis on the connections of the two with military operations. Going beyond the
politically-centred approach of "hearts-and-minds" in COIN, this paper discusses the British
campaign in Malaya (1948-1960) focusing on population control, intelligence and military
operations as the keys for military, if not political, victory in these conflicts. The main
dimensions analysed concerning population control are deportations, re-education,
propaganda and the formation of political coalitions against the rebels. In what regards
intelligence, the focus is on the organization of security agencies, the collection and analysis
of tactical and operational information and its use in operations. Main types of operations
considered include the use of patrolling, cordoning, sweeps, ambushes, deep strikes, the
use of special forces and native units, as well as the use of surrendered and captured
enemy personnel and counter-gangs; a main theme in this context will be the importance of
intelligence in the pursuit of these operations. The sources of this research are governmental
and military documents, grey literature, memoirs of high-ranking officers and political
representatives as well as those of soldiers and policemen, recollections of guerrillas and the
vast secondary literature on the topic.
Bio
Andrei Miroiu (MA, Indiana University – Bloomington) studies early post-war Western and
Eastern counterinsurgencies. His work has been published in the Cambridge Review of
International Affairs and The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. He previously worked for the
Romanian Ministry of Defence.
The Market for Gunnery: Political Munitions in Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Mark Steven
mr.m.steven@gmail.com
This paper accounts for the political transformation of Ezra Pound’s poetry during the 1930s
and 40s. In this period the political ideology of The Cantos appears to have abandoned its
flirtations with communism so as to become dominantly and decisively fascist. As Ronald
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Bush has put it: “After 1930, not only parts but the whole of The Cantos seemed to express
Pound’s growing fascist inclinations.” The paper explores the extent to which communism
persists into the poetry composed during these two decades and demonstrates that it lives
on in Pound’s understanding of and engagement with epic form. My argument will be that
there are two distinct modalities of the epic operating simultaneously in the middle to late
cantos and that by examining their formal interchange we will also come to grasp the
ideological disagreement between communism and fascism as it permeates the verse. I will
also argue that mediating between political ideology and literary form in this instance is the
historical actualization of military force and the industrial production of military technology.
Bio
Mark Steven has taught media, popular culture, and cultural theory at the University of
Sydney and is now conducting doctoral research at the University of New South Wales. His
current research focuses on the relationships between modern poetry, industrial technology,
and world communism.
The Cóndor Plan and the “ External front” in “World War III”: the transnational
networks for the defence of human rights in South America
Fernando Antonio López
School of Humanities - History
fernando.lopez@student.unsw.edu.au
On November 25, 1975, the military intelligence services of Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay,
Uruguay and Argentina met in Santiago Chile to formalize what became known as Operation
Cóndor. This was a secret plan elaborated by these services, with direct backing from their
respective juntas’ command, to kidnap, torture, murder or make to disappear opponents to
these regimes in South America and other parts of the world. After the new military
governments consolidated their power, tens of thousands of South Americans went into
exile. Some were forced by the security forces while others fled to avoid capture and certain
death. Many more opted to leave as consequence of the severe economic difficulties that
had emerged as result of these dictatorships’ economic policies. The military juntas,
particularly those of Chile and Uruguay, expected that the exiles would remain silent.
However, this was not the case. The South American exiles received immediate and
unprecedented support and solidarity from the international community. From 1973 onwards,
they joined forces with an emerging strong transnational network for the defence of human
rights in South America and other parts of the world. Their activities and campaigns
generated numerous headaches for these military governments. In what can be described
as a desperate attempt to silence this global network, the regimes’ intelligence services
resorted to the transnationalization of state terrorism within and beyond the Southern Cone
of Latin America. In other words, they launched Operation Cóndor. The transnational
networks for the defence of human rights became the “external front” of what the regimes
described as World War III. The South American dictators and their supporters portrayed this
“War” as a legitimate pre-emptive crusade to save “Western civilization” and “Christian
values” from the perils of Communism. In reality, it was an elaborated, secret and multilateral
state terrorism campaign that sought to spread fear among their opponents and disarticulate
these global networks.
Bio
I completed my Bachelor of Arts (Major in Human Resource Management) and Honours in
History at UNSW in 2007. My honours thesis was entitled [short title: The Origins of the
Page | 22
Uruguayan National Liberation Movement-Tupamaros (MLN-T)]. At the moment I am
undertaking my PhD studies on Latin American history, with emphasis on Operation Cóndor.
Bodies
Chair:
Helen Pringle
Generative tensions
Tanya Thaweeskulchai
School of the Arts and Media (English – Creative Writing)
trace_th90@hotmail.com
This paper will examine the conflicted writings of embodiment in Virginia Woolf’s novels, and
argue that this results in the emergence of the ‘gestural’ in literature. This concept of gesture
will be developed through the theories of Giorgio Agamben and Jean Francois Lyotard.
Agamben defines gesture as an action which ‘carries’, ‘endures’ and ‘supports’, as distinct
from the Aristotlean action where a thing is produced or enacted. That is, gesture is a means
without ends which suspends binary oppositions in midst of their operating in language. This
suspension offers insight into the ways in which binaries operate in tension with each other.
Recent critical work on Woolf’s writing of embodiment that focuses on her representation of
the feminine and the female body seems to have reached an impasse on whether the nature
of Woolf’s writing is feminist, or detrimental to feminism. On one hand, Patricia Moran argues
that Woolf writes Mrs. Ramsay as the repressed and silenced mother, who in turn silences
her daughter by raising her into a starved and selfless woman that feeds the men in the
family, but refuses to feed herself. On the other, Lisa Angellela states that Woolf gives her
characters agency and mobilises their desires by allowing them to engage in socially
undesirable activities for women, such as eating meat alone, an act which nourishes the self
and is seen as masculine. The paper intends to investigate the diverse representations of
the body, both troubled and celebratory, and to use gesture—a gender neutral term—as a
method to analyse Woolf’s writing of embodiment in a framework that is unconstrained by
assumptions of gendered identities.
The Literary Hand

Jayne Chapman
jayne.chapman@student.unsw.edu.au
The central aim of this paper is to engage in a generative discussion of the literary hand and
its interconnections with nineteenth-century and modern values. The paper traces the
privileging of hand over machine historically, presenting an anti-history to the one promoted
by Elizabeth Eisenstein in her seminal work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. It
suggests that certain changes in the nineteenth-century lead to the cultivation of a new
aesthetic appreciation for handwritten/hand-crafted literary works, creating a certain
fetishization from writers, readers and editors. The changes that will be discussed include:
the rise of the Pre-Raphaelites and their resistance to the mechanistic aspects of artistic
Page | 23
objects, including books and illuminated manuscripts; the emergence of superior printing
technologies which were threatening to occlude writers; and the dichotomous establishment
of handwriting and print as social opposites. The paper questions the use of this dichotomy
as it is simultaneously relied upon for this paper’s assertions, while also being unsettled by
writers who were using both to their advantage. It also aims to question the previous and
current investment in handwritten objects which stems from different mythologised qualities
such as the capacity to retain a trace of authorial presence and the ability to express doubt,
emotion and a type of personalised aesthetic. Finally, these issues will anticipate a
discussion of the decline of handwriting and the paper argues that this decline is occurring in
direct proportion to the fetishization of the literary hand.
Bio
Jayne Chapman is a first-year PhD candidate at UNSW. Jayne has studied literature, music,
arts and psychology in her undergraduate degree and is now researching nineteenth-century
methods of literary publication and circulation. She has published poetry and has an up-
coming article in the Emily Dickinson Journal.
Monkey, Cunt, Nigger; Careful she bites: the role of animality in the
oppression of beings
Dena Pezet
Women's and Gender Studies
nick.dena@bigpond.com
During the 18th and early 19th century European and American anthropological ‘human
zoos’ staged human collections procured from the New World as part of the classification
and presentation of other races and species in a testament to the superiority of the
European over the ‘savage beast’ and the success of imperialist expansion. From
approximately 1810 to 1815, African woman and ex-slave, Sarah Baartman was exhibited in
a cage as ‘the missing link’ between animals and humans. Her animal trainer owner
objectified and commodified her as ‘The Hottentot Venus’, because of her racial features,
especially her large bottom and ‘deformed’ vagina (the ‘veil of shame’). However, Sarah’s
vagina was only displayed post mortem, after excision and storage in a jar, along with her
brain and anus respectively.
Using the story of Sarah Baartman and Positioning Theory, I argue that not only is the
animal-human distinction and concepts of animality central to many forms of oppression,
additionally I argue that Sarah’s vagina signified to 18th century European civilization a
monstrous confluence of animality, sex and race: the mark of the dangerous beast, hyper-
sexual woman and wild savage, which could only be revealed once completely and finally
‘othered’ by death, excision and presentation as inert object rather than living subject.
I argue that an appreciation of the linkages between concepts of animality and oppression
and the role of the vagina as a core locus of animality are essential to the praxis of
contemporary debate surrounding difference based identity politics.
Bio
Dena Pezet is a barrister and solicitor, Associate Fellow of the Oxford Center for Animal
Ethics, fiction writer and animal activist. She has just commenced her PhD candidature at
UNSW, within WGS. Her thesis will consider animality and the linkages between
oppressions.
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Children's Yoga: Connecting with Self and Other
Karen-Anne Wong
Gender and Cultural Studies – University of Sydney
karen@flyingdragonyogis.com.au
In this presentation I will discuss my research on children practicing yoga using my

participant observations as a children’s yoga teacher. I will begin with a broad outline of how
my research addresses current literature in the field and its focus on practice. By looking at
some of the discourse on children's yoga I will address the need for a theoretical
consideration of how and why these practices affect children in certain ways. After explaining
my major research questions I will focus on the issue of connection as an example for how I
interpret the ways in which children relate to themselves and others in a yoga class. We will
consider how students use spaces and their bodies to dis/connect. I will interpret my reading
of these children’s practices using Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s theories of the body.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, I will suggest that children produce certain
becomings during their yoga practice which make connections between themselves and
others.
Throughout my research I draw on the practice of teaching children’s yoga classes as

source material. I aim for a creative form of ethnography to breathe real bodies into life on
the page and screen. The reader is invited to both conceptually intellectualise and creatively
experience – in a deliberate reconstruction of the balance between educational structure and
imaginative space that is aimed for in a children’s yoga class.
Bio
Karen-Anne Wong is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at
the University of Sydney. Karen graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (English) Hons 1 and
Bachelor of Art Theory from the University of New South Wales in 2010. In 2011 Karen
qualified as a vinyasa and children's yoga teacher.
Community
Chair:
Melanie White
Contesting and addressing experiences of marginality: an exploration of the

role of queer youth online communities
Benjamin Hanckel
benjamin.hanckel@gmail.com, @benhanckel
This working paper is an exploration of the way that queer online communities provide
spaces for young people to shape and reshape their local lived experiences of
marginalization. Previous research has explored how queer young people engage in online
spaces to come to terms with, and understand, their queer identities. These spaces provide
queer young people with a sense of belonging, connection to others and resources in safe
and anonymous online spaces. There is, however, little known about how online spaces
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bring these young people together to address local structures of heteronormativity and lived
experiences of homophobia. This working paper draws on research undertaken in 2011 with
the Minus18 online queer community. The paper considers the role these online
communities play in facilitating political action to address lived experiences of marginality
and reduce local exclusion. The paper locates these political actions within the broader
context of the queer movement and considers the implications this may have for our
understanding of queer activism.
Bio
Benjamin Hanckel is a PhD candidate at UNSW. His research interests are focused on the
role technology and digital media play in providing opportunities for identity exploration,
political engagement and social change.
Ordinary Paranoia: Vigilance as a Response to Everyday Precarity in Kathleen

Stewart’s Ordinary Affects
Ash Barnwell
ashbarnwell@hotmail.com
Recent arguments against critique characterise scholarly suspicion and the desire to
demystify as irrelevant modes of social inquiry, unable to register the affective texture of
people’s lives. Criticism is cast as a negative mode of engagement, a tired and repetitive
motion that has no relevance to the unpredictable fluidity of daily life. Its perfunctory
suspicion is assumed to preclude generosity, or the ability to engage a subject with genuine
concern or curiosity. Theorists such as Rita Felski and Bruno Latour argue that a dismissal
of critique and its negative affects - suspicion, judgment, and paranoia - will result in a true
engagement with “common sense” or “matters of concern”. It remains unclear however, just
how such disavowal could feasibly be an act toward generosity. In this article I argue that the
nullifying characterisation and hasty dismissal of suspicion as a mode of inquiry actually
limits the very generosity these scholars wish to open because it denies suspicion itself a
generous reading and ignores the enduring commitment to truth-seeking in everyday life.
Indeed, rather than affirming a division between scholarly and quotidian concerns, the
recuperation of suspicion in the turn against critique highlights their congruency. To make
this argument I turn to a close-reading of Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). A
reading of Stewart’s work is of particular salience here because although she subscribes to a
pejorative definition of critical hermeneutics, her ethnography strangely leads us toward a
more textured understanding of vigilant, wary forms of attention and their ongoing pragmatic
purchase.
Bio
Ash is a PhD student in the School of Social Sciences. Her research is about narrative
ethics, genre, and truth. She also works as a Peer Writing Assistant at the UNSW Learning
Centre and serves as the student representative on the FASS Higher Degree Committee.
Conceptualising community
Jan Idle
j.idle@unsw.edu.au
Page | 26
How we write, think and analyse social policy programs are embedded within an
understanding of the concept of community. National and state government agreements
refer to community engagement and partnerships without the term itself being clearly
defined. Here discussions are often tied to an overarching or generalised meaning of what
‘we have in common’ and to spatial or virtual geography. Community as a concept is
liberally used but not always unilaterally understood and forms a basis for policy that
promotes or enacts a process of social exclusion instead of the intended social inclusion and
citizenship. Clark (2009) maintains that current use of ‘community’ in social policy is ‘only
precariously linked to the creation of social capital’. As such it is an ill-defined or mis-defined
concept.
This paper considers two theories of community, Jean Luc Nancy’s (1991) notion of
community, as a sharing of the inevitability of death and negotiating difference; and Roberto
Esposito’s (2010) thoughts of community as a gift that must be given, in or through obligation
and responsibility. It draws on Mary Graham’s (1999) work on the philosophical
underpinnings of Aboriginal worldviews of interconnectedness and responsibility as a way to
bring these concepts together. The paper sets out to propose, discuss, and develop
understandings of community through the ideas of Graham, Nancy and Esposito that
responds to social policy in the Australian context.
Interdisciplinarity
Chair:
Toby Lea
“I Can’t Say Social Science Sounds Much Like Real Science”: Disconnections
and Scientism (or How to Stop Apologising for your Arts degree and Start
Living)
Kenneth Yates
National Centre in HIV Social Research
kenneth.yates@student.unsw.edu.au
One of the driving forces of “physics envy” in non-physics/non-science disciplines,

particularly those investigating human affairs, is the implicitly ideological assumption that a
particular understanding of scientific practice can and should form the basis of all forms of
disciplined inquiry - if not all forms of human intellectual activity. As Midgley has cogently
argued, this particular notion of omnicompetent, imperialistic science, what might be labelled
“scientism”, is misplaced. Alternatively, Midgley argues for an acknowledgement of not only
the diversity of sciences in the plural, but also the possibility that not all intellectual
endeavours can or even should appropriate “scientific” approaches.
This paper will sketch an outline the disconnection within and between the social sciences,
the humanities, and the natural sciences through the philosophical consideration of the
notion of “science”. It will draw on the work of Midgley, Flyvbjerg and Manicas, among
others, to argue that the equivocation of (hard) science with legitimate knowledge is not only
a historical contingency, but incoherent and intellectually destructive. The paper will then
consider the value of coming to terms with philosophies of science, and how this might
support those who wish to “stop apologising for Arts degrees” and start living.
Page | 27
Relationality
Chair:
TBA
Writing the Self: Situated Knowledges within the Academy

Anisha Gautam
Women’s and Gender Studies
a.gautam@unsw.edu.au
Feminist and postcolonial theorists have long engaged personal experience in their
philosophical analyses of the world at large. Some of the most insightful and influential works
within both ‘disciplines,’ for example the works of Emma Goldman and Franz Fanon, are
simultaneously personal and political, experiential and theoretical.
Nonetheless in recent decades, scholarly recourse to ‘identity politics’ – and concomitantly

the ‘evidence of experience’ – has been critiqued for perpetuating essentialist notions of
subjectivity and for colluding to silence those who do not or cannot occupy the subject
position in question. For those of us who continue to write in a tradition that embraces
personal narrative as a political and philosophical tool of analysis, questions are regularly
raised about the efficacy our work in ‘truthfully’ and justly exploring larger philosophical
questions.
In this paper, employing a creative and personal mode of philosophical reflection, I will argue
that the socio-political situation does not yet allow for the abandonment of identity politics.
Nonetheless, it does demand its reconceptualization so as to make it more relevant to
contemporary debates on racism, sexism and homophobia amongst others. Here I will
attempt to do so by engaging the works of theorists such as Lewis R. Gordon, Trinh T. Minh-
Ha and Jasbir Puar.
Bio
Anisha Gautam is a PhD candidate in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of
New South Wales. Working from within a postcolonial framework, her research examines
contemporary feminist theories of temporality and history in an effort to understand how such
understandings create and sustain differences between women.
“Common differences”: Exploring relationality for young people with

disabilities and their siblings without disabilities
Ariella Meltzer
a.meltzer@unsw.edu.au
A key relationship for many young people is the sibling relationship. During young adulthood,
siblings may share similar social and developmental experiences, transitional steps towards
adulthood and experiences within schools, communities and other sites of youth culture. Yet
current research tends to view young people with disabilities and their siblings without
Page | 28
disabilities very separately – separate research about each has acted to split issues of
inclusion and exclusion for young people with disabilities and of care and family for siblings
without disabilities. Yet this stands in stark contrast to the potential for similarity in siblings’
experiences during young adulthood. What would happen if the framing was shifted to
recognise similarity across their different experiences?
This presentation draws on discussions of ‘relationality’ to explore what these can offer for
bridging the research about and experiences of young people with disabilities and their
siblings without disabilities. By engaging the relational concept of ‘common differences’
(Ayvazian and Tatum, 2004), this presentation takes experiences of disability,
independence, service systems and youth culture for each, and explores how processes of
glossing over, totalising characterisations, and shifting and getting stuck between competing
influences might be common experiences for both young people with disabilities and their
siblings without disabilities. The presentation asks what relational theory and these kinds of
relational framings can offer to disability studies, a field that emphasises the social, cultural
and political character of disability, but has as yet rarely considered relationality.
‘But I was there’: Generational Disconnect in Feminist History

Isobelle Barrett Meyering
School of Humanities
isobellebm@gmail.com
Generational division features prominently in contemporary feminist debate. Since the mid-
1990s, Australian second-wave feminists such as Anne Summers have routinely criticised
younger women for failing to take up the cause. Younger feminists in turn have claimed to be
misunderstood by their feminist ‘mothers’.
In this paper I explore how perceptions of a generational divide have shaped the way young
historians write about second-wave feminism. My own research documents the lifestyle
politics of the Australian women’s liberation movement, which first emerged in late 1969 as
the radical wing of second-wave feminism. In undertaking this project, I have become
increasingly conscious of how my own feminist politics are perceived by my historical
subjects.
The paper will reflect on a series of moments during my PhD candidature when I have
personally witnessed a generational disconnect: for example, when terminology has been
contested as anachronistic or historical claims have been disputed with the rejoinder, ‘But I
was there’. Dealing with disgruntled subjects is arguably part of the job of any historian
writing about recent events. In this case, a joint allegiance to feminism complicates the
situation: there is a personal – as well as an academic – interest at stake.
I invite those engaged in other forms of feminist scholarship to consider how their work has
similarly been influenced by generational disconnect. When and why have generational
differences become apparent in your research? What has helped you to manage these
differences? What impact have they had?
Page | 29
Global
Chair:
Kristy Muir
Do Concepts Travel? Russia caught between area studies and political science
Ellie Martus
elliemartus@hotmail.com
The study of Russian politics has long been dominated by a debate between scholars
working in core social science disciplines, such as political science, and area study
specialists. Social scientists, often working comparatively, seek to apply the tools and
concepts of their discipline to the Russian system, while area studies specialists argue that
the Russian case is unique and requires contextualised knowledge. One of the key issues
raised by this debate is concerned with the idea of whether or not it is possible to take a
concept from one discipline or society and transfer it to another.
This paper seeks to question this idea with the help of two examples. The first examines the
adoption of Western pluralist approaches in the study of Soviet interest groups in the 1960s
and 1970s. This paper will evaluate the utility of this concept in the Russian context, and
demonstrate some of the problems that arose. On the one hand, pluralist approaches
challenged the dominance of thetotalitarian model and opened up the Soviet system for
investigation. However, on the other hand, important features such as the degree of
centralised power were overlooked.
The second example relates to the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in
which political science concepts of democratic transition and consolidation were applied to
the former Soviet Union. The apparent failure of comparative political scientists to explain
subsequent events forces us to question how well concepts travel from one discipline or
society to another, and prompts a broader discussion about whether we are rational or
cultural beings.
Bio
Ellie Martus is a doctoral candidate in the School of Social Sciences, investigating the nature
of the industrial network in Russia and its influence on the environmental policy process. She
holds a Master of Philosophy in Russian Studies from the University of Oxford and a
Bachelor of International Studies from UNSW.
The opportunities and challenges of participation in Nepal’s transitional justice

process
Yvette Selim
yvette.selim@gmail.com
In recent years, a growing number of academics, practitioners and policy-makers have

advocated for the adaptation of participatory methods from development studies to
transitional justice. Generally, openness to participatory methods have coincided with
Page | 30
criticisms of the dominant transitional justice agenda which is deemed to be overly legalistic,
‘one-size-fits-all’ top-down imported blueprint which focuses on state-centric measures,
processes and institutions. These criticisms of transitional justice open up space for
integration of participatory methods to enable inclusion. Thus analysis of the use of
participation in transitional justice is necessary. Participatory approaches have the potential
to provide victims, survivors and other community members a way to ensure/strengthen local
ownership of transitional justice processes in post-conflict societies. However, issues of
agency, voice and power abound and to date these participatory approaches have
encountered a number of challenges. This article critically analyses participation in
transitional justice and argues that a long-term, deliberate and considered approach that is
sensitive to differences, context and political interests is required. Using Nepal as a case
study this article highlights the opportunities and challenges of implementing such
approaches in practice.
Bio
Yvette Selim is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she
also lectures and tutors in International Relations and Development Studies. She holds a MA
in Conflict Resolution, a MA in Bioethics, a Bachelor of Law and a Bachelor of Medical
Science. She has worked as a lawyer at an international law firm, as a legal counsel in Sri
Lanka as part of the International Development Law Organization's post-tsunami project and
has been an intern with the UN in the Office of Legal Affairs and the Department of
Disarmament Affairs. Her research focuses on peacebuilding, transitional justice, conflict
resolution, human rights and Nepal.
Revisiting the socio-cultural turn in Interpreting Studies: towards

inter(sub)disciplinarity?
Rebeca Paredes-Nieto
r.paredesnieto@unsw.edu.au
In line with the general opening-up of social sciences in the post-war era, Interpreting
Studies (IS) have gradually experienced a paradigm shift and a methodological reorientation
towards a more interdisciplinary and interpretive research. Traditionally focused on the study
of conference interpreters´ cognitive performance and mental processes, interpreting
scholars have in later years focused on community interpreting and are progressively
expanding their research topics to include cultural, social and other variables that are crucial
to understanding interpreting as an activity and its role within the wider society. Yet
interdisciplinary dialogue is still not widely practised. This is partly due to a certain degree of
closure within the IS community in its attempt to become a (sub)discipline in its own right. On
the other hand, interpreting scholars often borrow concepts and methods from cognate fields
of study and apply them to IS without clear conceptualizations of the key terms and
forgetting about the related network of concepts, which in turn leads to unclear
metalanguage in IS.
The present paper explores some of the challenges in seeking interdisciplinarity in

Interpreting Studies, namely that of adopting theories and methods from related disciplines.
In particular, I will present some of the challenges I have so far encountered when
developing the theoretical and methodological framework of my research where, adopting an
inter(sub)disciplinary approach, I seek to identify the main cross-cultural issues interpreters
encounter in community settings.
Page | 31
Representations
Chair:
Zora Simic
Rethinking identity: representation, power and auto-ethnography

Rabia Ali
rabia.aly@unsw.edu.au
The paper addresses the issue of representation by tracing my personal experience from the
field. Engaging in reflexivity about my own life during the research process defined my
role/identity as a researcher and framed the vantage point through which I came to
understand the community. The paper explicates two inter related sets of problems
suggested by my experiences and informed by the research questions; first, I unravel the
dilemmas involved regarding my role as insider and outsider during the research process
and how it was entangled with the question of representation. Here, I also address the
connection between the researcher and the field - as a locus of power - and contextualize
the issue of representation as a process of education and empowerment. Second is the
issue of power; I posit that the act of negotiating empowerment and the meaning of
empowerment among different personalities (as persons and roles) brought forth conflicts
and power asymmetries. I also explore how my presence in the field affected the power
dynamics and I revisit the paradoxical positions I had to seek to minimize such situations of
power. The perpetual analysis of these two sets of questions allows me to argue in this
paper that the positionality of the researcher in relation to the subjects in a field setting is a
significant component of the trajectory of contemporary feminist experience, and its
description.
Bio
My PhD focuses on women’s experiences of change and empowerment in Northern
Pakistan. My major is Anthropology and I am in School of Social Sciences and International
Studies at UNSW. Previously I have worked as Lecturer at Allama Iqbal Open University
Islamabad, Pakistan for three years, where I taught a course on poverty alleviation and
research methods. I was also extensively involved in coordinating Masters by research
students. I have also worked as gender consultant with Abt. Associates Inc. a US funded
Project, in Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa Province of Pakistan.
Creating connections through participatory video with children from Majority

and Minority Worlds
Kelly Royds
JMRC
kelly.royds@gmail.com
Child-centred NGOs are increasingly responding to a view of children as ‘actors in their own
right, contributors and moral interpretors of the world’ (Smith and Powell 2006). However,
children’s increased participation in development work has largely been through preferred
adult mediums, methodologies and contained spaces, demarcated ‘for children’s voices’
Page | 32
(Mand 2012, Alderson 2009, Hill 2006). Drawing on a global participatory video program and
wider debates within the field of Children’s Studies, this paper will explore the benefits and
challenges of engaging children and young people in participatory video projects to learn
about ‘others’ from Majority and Minority Worlds.
This paper will reflect on child-led participatory videos, children’s own evaluations and the
author’s own field-experience, to explore how participatory processes ‘can help make the
invisible barriers to participation visible’ (Kina 2012:216). In particular, this paper will
highlight how children manipulate the medium of film, away from adult-mediated spaces, to
communicate and connect with children, living in different communities and countries, in
ways that are comfortable and appropriate for them. In doing so, this paper will add to
current debates in Children’s Studies, that call for deeper analysis of the concepts of
children’s agency, participation and perspectives (Tisdall and Punch 2012, Mayall 2012).
Importantly, this paper will reflect on the need for a greater focus on the complexities and
interconnections of childhoods in a globalizing world (Tisdall and Punch 2012:260).
Conceptions of Israel in American Cold War cinema: National identity in The Ten
Commandments and Ben-Hur
Rodney Wallace
School of the Arts and Media (Film)
rodney.bwallis@gmail.com
In the wake of the groundbreaking work of Edward Said on the concept of Orientalism an
abundance of literature has been produced on the ‘Othering’ of the figure of the Arab
throughout the various cultural productions of the West. However, to date there has no major
analysis produced that looks at the ways in which Hollywood cinema has contributed to the
framing of the Arab-Israeli conflict for a Western audience, despite the centrality of that
conflict to the conflict currently being staged between the West and elements within the Arab
and Islamic world. Doubtlessly, a major reason for this lack of analysis is the relative paucity
of Hollywood films that deal directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nonetheless, a number of
films, and indeed film genres, can be understood as providing an indirect framing of the
conflict. For instance, the Biblical and historical epic – in particular the genre’s most iconic
productions, such as Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959),
and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) – has generally been discussed by film critics and
academics in accordance with the historical determinants of the Cold War. However, this
cycle of films, when viewed through the prism of political and cultural history, can be clearly
understood as lucidly promoting a pro-Israeli position through a combination of their
narratives’ fundamental championing of the Zionist ideology, and the explicit conflation of
modern-day Americans and ancient Hebrews within the context of the social conjuncture of
the Cold War. Only through such an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis does this
political undercurrent reveal itself.
Page | 33
Environment-society
Chair:
Matthew Kearnes
‘Not a treatise on the economy’: Economics and the ecology of indigenous

Australia in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the heart
Jane Gleeson-White
School of the Arts and Media (Creative Writing)
janegleesonwhite@iprimus.com.au
Indigenous writer Kim Scott’s award-winning novels Benang: From the heart (1999) and That
Deadman Dance (2010) have established him as one of Australia’s most prominent
contemporary fiction writers. But Scott writes from outside Australia’s literary canon and
mainstream national narrative of whiteness. This national narrative is predicated upon an
alien conception of the Australian land, dictated by globalizing capitalism, which has
dispossessed its original inhabitants and disrupted their traditional ways. And yet this ancient
indigenous culture – whose remnants are traced in Benang – embodies a complex
understanding of and relationship with place which echoes cutting-edge economic thinking in
response to the environmental crisis, such as the green economics of Molly Scott Cato.
This paper will offer an interdisciplinary study of Benang by exploring the previously
unexamined connections between the new literary field of ecocriticism and the social science
of economics. Ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s in response to the contemporary
environmental crisis and intends specifically to address it from a literary perspective. This
paper will argue that not only are ecocriticism and economics linked etymologically, but that
unless we consider ecocriticism in concert with economics we will overlook the critical
relation of economics to the environmental crisis when considering literary texts. Through an
ecocritical analysis of Benang I will argue that it offers us ways into a more ecological future.
Bio
Jane Gleeson-White is a PhD student in creative writing at UNSW. Her dissertation is on
ecocriticism and the novels of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott. She has degrees in literature and
economics and is the author of Double Entry: How the merchants of Venice shaped the
modern world, Australian Classics and Classics.
Reading Karl Polanyi in a time of climate crisis

Rebecca Pearse
rebecca.pearse@unsw.edu.au
The metaphor of ‘double movement’ is the driving dialectical tension playing out in Polanyi’s
(1944) most celebrated work - The Great Transformation. This concept has captured the
imaginations of more than one generation of social and political theorists interested in
understanding both the resilience of and resistance to the commodification of various arenas
of social and ecological life. Competing interpretations abound. Should we understand the
double movement as a kind of safety valve for market society, or a symbol of the Marxian
Page | 34
contradiction? The category of difference between these interpretations is their depiction of
social and ecological agency behind the causes and resolutions of conflict. This is
understandable, since Polanyi’s work is limited in this regard. This problematic is a common
bugbear for scholars of critical political economy, particularly works theorising climate crisis.
The debate within ecological Marxism over O’Connor’s second contradiction thesis is a case
in point. Whilst fruitful discussion has been had within Polanyian and Marxist political
economy, only a deeper engagement with social theoretical approaches to social/ ecological
agency can furnish a (neo)Polanyian dialectic which explains the struggle over marketisation
in a time of climate crisis.
Bio
Beck Pearse is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Sciences. Her thesis is on political
contestation and the process of deciding to install a carbon trading market in Australia. Like
her thesis, this paper sits somewhere between political economy and environmental
sociology.
Toxic Experiments: Art and public participation in environmental health

Susie Pratt
susie.pratt@gmail.com
A large chemical spill is typically met with an outcry from citizens, both those that are
affected and those that witness it in the media sphere. People speak up, demands are
made. Who will be accountable? Who will pay the price of the clean up? What are the health
risks? In contrast, the day to day leaching of chemicals and pollutants into the atmosphere,
and bodies (whether through the form of bisphenol A (BPA) leached into water ways or fire
retardant chemicals, known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), cropping up in
bodies) often gets buried underneath other issues, unless interventions are made to re-
highlight this environmental and social concern. This paper explores how artists are staging
'public experiments', combining art and science, to re-animate discussions around
environmental and human health. Drawing on a range of artist’s practices, such as
Jeremijenko's 'Environmental Health Clinic', this paper will explore how these artists adopt
material forms of participation and speculative and critical design strategies to highlight the
socio-material entanglement of pollutants and bodies
Bio
Susie Pratt is an artist, educator and PhD Candidate in the School of Arts and Media,
UNSW. Her work questions the way (some) humans endorse a nature / culture dichotomy
and explores the consequences of this perceived separation. She views art as a form of
knowledge production and investigates methods of production that can foster critical
reflection to re-imagine our collective entanglement in ecological, social and economic
practices.
Climate change adaptation and social justice

Abbie White
abbie.white@student.unsw.edu.au
Page | 35
Anthropogenic climate change can be seen as an environmental problem, but it is
embedded with wide ranging social issues. The results of climate change will impact the
poor and vulnerable the most, affecting their ability to maintain sustainable livelihoods.
Although they may be the most affected, poor and disadvantaged groups in developing
countries are, in most instances, responsible for far less of the greenhouse gas emissions
that are causing climate change. The disconnect between those who are most responsible
for climate change and those facing the greatest impact, is a social justice issue. This is the
concept of the climate justice. To date, the issue of climate justice has been focused at an
international level and on mitigation. There is, however a need to explore the social justice
aspects of adaptation, and in particular at a community level. This paper will explore
disconnections in climate justice and differing notions of justice and fairness, with a focus on
the community level.
Bio
Abbie is a first year PhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences, with a background in
human and physical geography. Her thesis topic is “Climate change adaptation and social
justice: A case study of a mountain community in Lamjung District, Nepal.”
Dialogues
How is there an object? Dis/connections in discipline and reflections on the

question of method
Rebecca Oxley, Florence Chiew, Michelle Jamieson
oxleyrm@gmail.com
mmjamieson@gmail.com
florenceclare@gmail.com
What constitutes a method of inquiry? What defines an object that is deemed proper to a
discipline’s mode of interrogation or frame of reference? Implicit in the conventional view of
method is a disconnection between the knowing (human) subject and the object to be
known. This view rests on the assumption that the method used to study an area of interest
can be ‘applied’ to a pre-defined or pre-existent object whose location is both stable and self-
evident. However, the growing currency of interdisciplinary studies that seek to reconcile
perceived disparities in research aims across the human, social and natural sciences
complicate this neat containment of a given discipline’s object of analysis. Indeed, these
approaches point to a growing awareness of the ways in which methods of knowing are
deeply entangled with their objects of investigation, and thus to the wider implications of
what it means to know. This panel offers three lines of inquiry that problematise the received
tradition of conceptualising method as a separation between subject and object, human and
nonhuman.
Page | 36

Disconnections 2012 Program

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DIS/CONNECTIONS

Inaugural FASS Postgraduate Conference 2012

Artwork: Angophora mandala by Belinda Allen: http://belindaallen.wordpress.com/about/

15-16 November 2012

The FASS postgraduate student committee has three areas of focus:

Dis/Connections is an interdisciplinary event aimed at creating a supportive and stimulating

The conference will feature two exciting events.

We hope you have a great conference!

The DIS/CONNECTIONS conference team:

We invite FASS students and staff to contribute:

Image: 'Bunker' © Michael Leunig (used by permission of the artist).

Chair: Chair: Chair:

Chair: Chair: Chair:

The love reflection and soul split in visual art

Children's Yoga: Connecting with Self and Other

Creative teaching and learning in higher education

Contextual Dimension of 明 (Illumination) as an Epistemological Concept in

The concept of 明 in the Zhuangzi, translated as illumination, clarity, enlightenment, bright

The third analogy implies an interpretation of Zhuangist epistemology from a contextual

Katherine Mansfield’s Poetic Prose in Context

Operatic Adaptation and/as Shakespeare Criticism

The “Occupy” movement replaced the debate on wealth accountability by physically

‘A Collector of Vanished Gazes’: The long take in Theo Angelopoulos’

Abstracted and embodied sublime landscapes on the Camino de Santiago

Where Music meets Philosophy: Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysics of Music”

The intuitive performer: Processes of musical decision-making

Data on types of decision-making were collected though interviews, an experimental sight-

Chris Marker’s Inter-Media Essays: The Photobook Connection

The gift of interdiscplinarity to the "gift"

Prewriting history: The influence of adopted systems on public archives and

This panel is introducing an analysis of learning processes in three different learning

Participating in a learning community outside the classroom through

I am currently conducting participant observations and interviews at the Nippon Students

Benkyokai: A learning community for research students

A variety of support communities are available for undergraduate students studying

A group of research students majoring in Japanese Studies at an Australian university has

Learner agency and participation in a Japanese language classroom as a

My PhD research focuses on learner autonomy in the fields of second/foreign language

Transatlantic Dis/connections: The local and the global in the novels of

Australian Outsiders: Connecting the Convict to the Terror Suspect in the

Connections: art and ideas along the Silk Roads

Keeping the regulatory faith: Stakeholder perceptions of what it really takes to

Independent regulation is the new orthodoxy. We believe in the power of independence. So

Lost in translation? Addressing 'wicked problems' via collaborative policy

In-home child care in liberal welfare states: Emerging disconnections in Early

Population Control, Intelligence and Operations: British Counterinsurgency in

The Market for Gunnery: Political Munitions in Ezra Pound’s Cantos

The Literary Hand

In this presentation I will discuss my research on children practicing yoga using my

Throughout my research I draw on the practice of teaching children’s yoga classes as

Contesting and addressing experiences of marginality: an exploration of the

Ordinary Paranoia: Vigilance as a Response to Everyday Precarity in Kathleen

One of the driving forces of “physics envy” in non-physics/non-science disciplines,

Writing the Self: Situated Knowledges within the Academy

Nonetheless in recent decades, scholarly recourse to ‘identity politics’ – and concomitantly

“Common differences”: Exploring relationality for young people with

‘But I was there’: Generational Disconnect in Feminist History

The opportunities and challenges of participation in Nepal’s transitional justice

In recent years, a growing number of academics, practitioners and policy-makers have

Revisiting the socio-cultural turn in Interpreting Studies: towards

The present paper explores some of the challenges in seeking interdisciplinarity in

Rethinking identity: representation, power and auto-ethnography

Creating connections through participatory video with children from Majority