[csaa-forum] Public Seminar Greg Noble, UniSA

[Gilbert Caluya]

MnM Public Seminar - Professor Greg Noble
"Some of my best friends are anti-racists: from revealing racism to exploring conviviality"

This paper explores what the current interest in ‘conviviality’ might add to an analysis of life in culturally diverse societies. In contrast to the ‘panicked’ discourse that dominates public debate around multiculturalism, and the preoccupation in much academic work with the task of ‘revealing racism’, this paper grapples with the ways cultural differences are transacted in daily conduct. It argues that we need to focus on the habituated capacities which people develop for negotiating cultural differences, what we might call the ‘civic virtues’ of mundane, intercultural life. Although habit has been a central theme for understanding racism and the formation of national identities, it has rarely been used to think about the routine practices through which people acquire the embodied capacities for living with others. Conviviality is not to be understood as the erasure of conflict nor the simplistic celebration of ‘multicultural love’, but the ‘everyday diplomacy’ employed in negotiating a world of strangers. Drawing on ethnographic work on suburban cosmopolitanism, it argues that central to this are practices of cooperative labour found in urban life and their temporal and spatial dimensions. The paper suggests we need to reorientate research towards an analysis of the pedagogic dimensions of the habits of urban living.

Date:    10am-noon, 10 April 2014
Venue:  University of South Australia, City West campus, 
            Room GK2-15, Sir George Kingston Building
            50-55 North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia
Registration via email to MnM-Centre at unisa.edu.au

Gilbert
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Dr Gilbert Caluya
ARC DECRA Fellow and Research SA Fellow
The International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding
University of South Australia
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