[csaa-forum] CCR Seminar Series 08: Kylie Brass & David Rowe and Reena Dobson - 17 April

[Reena Dobson]

Apologies for cross-postings

 Centre for Cultural Research

University of Western Sydney

 

invites all to attend

the CCR Seminar Series 2008

featuring

Dr Kylie Brass & Professor David Rowe (CCR)

and

Reena Dobson (CCR)

Date: Thursday, 17 April

Time: 2.00pm - 4.00pm

Venue: Gallery Floor, Female Orphan School (Building EZ), Parramatta
Campus

Afternoon tea and cakes provided 

RSVP: Ania Ajiri a.ajiri at uws.edu.au or 9685 9600

Apologies: Kay Anderson k.anderson at uws.edu.au   

 

 

Knowledge Limited: Public Communication, Risk and University Media
Policy

Kylie Brass and David Rowe

In an increasingly corporate and managerially-driven institutional
environment, academics are being strongly encouraged to engage with the
media in order to showcase their research and demonstrate their
university's knowledge assets and relevance for wider communities. Many
universities have recently introduced or updated policies and procedures
for managing this academic-media contact to maximise positive media
outcomes. A new wave of 'media policy' documents is supplanting earlier
policies governing 'public comment' as a means of managing risk when
academics engage in extra-mural commentary. These policies seek to
regulate academic public interventions in various ways, including by
establishing the institutional intellectual competency that licenses
academic public speech. This paper explores some of the key policy and
institutional contexts for managing academic-media relations, and
considers how the 'unscripted' autonomy of comment beyond the academy
may be compromised by contemporary university brand and risk management.

 

 

Everyday Mauritius and the Ethnic Imaginary

Reena Dobson

Mauritius is an Indian Ocean island whose contemporary population is
made up of long-established diasporas with historical and cultural links
stretching out to parts of Africa, China, France and India.  As a
result, Mauritius can be seen as a multi-ethnic society par excellence.
This paper argues that everyday life in Mauritius is heavily ethnicised,
with ethnic identities being constantly maintained, performed, reified
and made important.  Using an adaptation of Charles Taylor's notion of
the social imaginary, the ethnic imaginary foregrounds the importance of
these cultural differences and focuses particularly on the nuances and
ways in which people do and do not fit together and how they see
themselves in relation to their fellow citizens and islanders.  The
ethnic imaginary seeks to explain how Mauritians constantly and
ceaselessly reify their cultural differences, at the deliberate expense
of national unity, but only up to a point.

 

 

Dr Kylie Brass is a Research Officer at CCR currently working on a
project with Professor David Rowe examining strategies adopted by
universities to manage public academic interventions. She completed her
PhD, Going Public: Pedagogy Beyond the Academy, in the School of
English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney in
2006.  Her research interests include academic culture, public
intellectualism, pedagogy, media policy, and contemporary American
literary culture. 

 

Professor David Rowe is Director of CCR.  He has published extensively
in the areas of media and popular culture, especially sport, music and
journalism. His books have been translated into Chinese, Arabic and
Turkish, and include Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity
(2004, second edition) and Globalization and Sport: Playing the World
(2001, co-authored).

 

Reena Dobson is a Research Officer across CCR, providing Centre-wide
research support. She is in the final stages of her PhD, provisionally
entitled, 'The Most Cosmopolitan Island Under the Sun'? Ethnicity,
Tolerance and Cosmopolitanism in Mauritius. Her research interests
include issues of ethnicity and identity, cosmopolitanism, islands,
'home' and autoethnography.

 

 

Parramatta Campus Map and Directions 
http://www.uws.edu.au/about/locations/maps/parramattamap     

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