20TH ANNIVERSARY COLLOQUIUM THE ACADEMY’S CULTURAL & COMMUNICATIONS SECTION Overview 9:30am—4:30pm Wednesday 14th November 2018 Social Sciences Building, A02, Lecture Theatre 200, Science Road, University of Sydney This Colloquium celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Cultural and Communication Studies Section of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. That establishment was preceded by a campaign led by the late Professor Ken Ruthven, a key moment of which was a symposium on the topic ‘Beyond the Disciplines: The new humanities’ held in 1991. We revisit some of the key topics discussed in that symposium –the discipline of cultural studies, multiculturalism, cultural policy studies, feminist/gender studies, post-colonial/subaltern studies, and legal studies – and discuss how our disciplines have moved on since then. Our focus will be on the theoretical, political, and institutional challenges they have confronted, the changing contexts in which they have evolved, and the directions in which we think they are headed. Our presenters will include some of the founding members of the section, some newer members, and some young colleagues who do not as yet belong to the Academy. Convenors: Professor Tony Bennett FAcSS FAHA, Professor John Frow FAHA, Professor Elspeth Probyn FASSA FAHA and Associate Professor Chris Healy FAHA. We acknowledge and thank the University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communication, the University of Sydney's Department of Media and Communications, and Western Sydney University' Institute for Culture and Society for their generous support of this event. Join the conversation via Twitter @HumanitiesAU and #AAHColloquium Program 9:30am REGISTRATION AND MORNING TEA 10:00am INTRODUCTION Welcome to Country: Uncle Allen Madden Welcome: Professor Umberto Ansaldo (University of Sydney) Introduction: Professor Tony Bennett FAcSS FAHA (Western Sydney University) 10:30am SESSION 1 Chair: Professor John Frow FAHA (University of Sydney) Professor Meaghan Morris FAHA (University of Sydney) Learned Academies: Why Bother? For seven years before the establishment of the Cultural Studies and Communication section of the Australian Academy of the Humanities I had, on the instigation of the late Professor Ken Ruthven, a close involvement in the various kinds of lobbying, both public and private, that ultimately led to the section’s acceptance. It was hard work and my peers and colleagues in the field would sometimes ask, “why bother?”. In this paper I will review the debates and objectives that shaped our section in the early 1990s. I will then consider some issues that seem pressing to me today, when “why bother” is a question that I now ask myself. Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner FAHA (University of Queensland) The Humanities as Heuristic: Coordinating the sector An engagement between a critical discipline such as cultural studies, a discipline which in many ways defined itself in opposition to the traditional humanities, and a bastion of the traditional humanities such as the Academy, may have seemed peculiar at the time it was first suggested. In this talk, Graeme Turner will discuss the pragmatics of that engagement, and the ways it has worked towards constructing something of a voice for the humanities disciplines within higher education policy -- and where that project stands at the moment. Professor Brett Neilson (Western Sydney University) The Academy as Logistical Institution Shipping ports in India and Latin America, data centres in Hong Kong and Singapore – these facilities seem remote from the institutions of cultural and communication studies in Australia. In this talk, I reflect on what the study of such logistical facilities has taught me about the position and operations of these fields in the academy. The focus will be on questions of labour precarity, software and planning. I ask how the political technology of the FOR code has shaped activity in cultural and communication studies and explore the implications of a future in which privately-owned databases and automated systems play a greater role in governing, measuring and knowing work in the humanities. Respondent: Professor Stuart Cunningham AM FAcSS FAHA (QUT) 2 12:00pm SESSION 2 Chair: Professor Gerard Goggin FAHA (University of Sydney) Dr Crystal Abidin (Lecturer, SCCA, Deakin University; Postdoctoral Fellow, MMTC, Jönköping University; Researcher, Handelsrådet) Somewhere between here and there: Interdisciplinary in cultural studies as a young scholar For many early career scholars who are still finding their footing in academia and learning to brand their work, discovering cultural studies can feel like the catchall home for all inter-, anti-, or post-disciplinary struggles. Sitting between the social sciences and the humanities, cultural studies also seems to offer the prospect of decolonizing academic practice. In this talk, I reflect on my journey as a young scholar and how I came to locate myself in cultural studies after being trained in departments of sociology, anthropology, communication, and media studies. I suggest, from humble experience, some of the ways we can mentor young scholars to rethink our practices of academic learning, publishing, collaborating, teaching, and conferencing at the cusp of proliferating digital cultures and practices. Professor Jill Bennett (ARC Laureate Fellow, UNSW Sydney) Embodied subjective experience and the limits (and possibilities) of empathy With increasing pressure to give voice to “lived experience” in areas of mental health and social justice, Human Sciences with a focus on cognitive, neuropsychological, or even social factors, are in need of richer methods for addressing subjective experience – especially that which is stigmatised or compromised by its labelling. Arts and humanities provide richer techniques for describing the texture and transmission of experience, and for theorising the emotional complexities of ‘knowledge exchange’. But do we have a disciplinary configuration up to the practical tasks of stigma reduction and empathy cultivation? I will argue that this pressing social challenge is the natural responsibility of Cultural Studies as an engaged, adaptive, post- disciplinary space of creative thinking. Dr Shawna Tang (Department of Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney) Sexuality in Cultural Studies: Doing queer research in Asia In As Normal as Possible (2010), one of the inaugural titles in Hong Kong University Press’ Queer Asia series, the editor, Yau Ching, then Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies in Lingnan University, Hong Kong, observed that queer studies in the region “are still marked as territories for the impossible and the unthinkable, inhabited by stigma, silence, risk and frustration.” I take Yau’s observation as a point of departure and continuity to reflect on my experience doing queer research in the Cultural Studies cluster of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2013-2014), from the perspective of my current location at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. I use my transnational intellectual endeavours to offer insights into what it means to do sexuality research in Asian institutional contexts. Respondent: Professor Elspeth Probyn FASSA FAHA (University of Sydney) 1:30pm LUNCH 3 2:30pm SESSION 3 Chair: Associate Professor Chris Healy FAHA (University of Melbourne) Professor Julian Thomas FAHA (RMIT University) Contemporary histories of media automation — connecting policy, politics, and communications. In the 1990s cultural and media policy emerged as an important new field for the humanities in Australia, marked out in major publications and ambitious research programmes. We are now dealing with a daunting and much expanded range of theoretical, political and institutional problems across cultural, media and communications policy studies. In this talk, I discuss some of these arising from current work on the contemporary histories of media automation, a highly generative and challenging new field for cultural researchers, practitioners and policy makers. Associate Professor Fran Martin (University of Melbourne) Australian Cultural Studies in the Asian century. This discussion will revisit the mid-1990s debates in Australian cultural studies around critical transnationalism and what Ien Ang and Jon Stratton referred to as a project of “Asianing Australia” (1996; see also KH Chen 1996, “Not yet the postcolonial era”). Eighteen years into the “Asian century,” has Ang and Stratton’s hope of undoing the conceptual binary separating “Asia” from “Australia” been realized? What challenges does Australian cultural studies face in understanding its own geo-political situatedness in the world of 2018? Respondent: Professor Wanning Sun FAHA (UTS) 4 3:30pm SESSION 4 Chair: Professor Tony Bennett FAcSS FAHA (Western Sydney University) Matt Poll (Indigenous Heritage and Repatriation Project, Macleay Museum) Reinventing tradition: Repatriation in S.E. Australian Aboriginal Communities. In 1993, precedents established at forums initiated through the United Nations International Year of the World's Indigenous People, sparked conversations in Australian museums that eventually took the form of Museums Australia policies; ‘Previous Possessions, New Obligations’ (2000) and ‘Continuing Cultures Ongoing Responsibilities’ (2005). These policies proactively assert the Indigenous ownership of tangible cultural heritage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island