[csaa-forum] Call for Papers: 'Minor Culture' CSAA Conference 2015

[Jon Stratton]

Dear List members,


       This is
really a musing about the reaction to my email expressing concern about the
geographical focus of the speakers listed for the upcoming conference.  I have had a number of responses to my email,
all supportive; but none publicly on the List. These responses have come from
people I know in academic capacities, people who trust that I would not pass on
their emails or publicly reveal their names.  There have been no public responses at all. 



I wondered about this and so started asking why it might
be the case that people were not prepared to publicly endorse the comments in
my email.   The replies were always the
same: that academics down the food chain were worried about offending senior
academics who had power over their jobs, or potential employment.  The neoliberal turn in higher ed, which has
seen tenure all but disappear, which has seen many universities revising their
staff lists through ‘spill and fills’, and which has generally made academic
work increasingly insecure not least with the spread of contracts over
continuing positions, seems to have had an unedifying effect on disciplines.  


In Australian cs, at least, it seems that hierarchy has
become entrenched, certainly in the understanding of postgrads and ECRs.  People fear upsetting senior academics and
worry that other ECRs will be given preference if they speak out of turn.  I don’t know if this is the fear of the
powerless or if there is actual practice that feeds this fear.  Either way, it is a troubling phenomenon. 


Not least because
of the history of cs, because of what cs always prided itself as being.  For me, anyway, Stuart Hall and the work of
the BCCCS, was central to my understanding of what cs is.  For Hall and his colleagues, cs was a
situated practice, an ongoing work which critically engaged with daily
life.  CS addressed the issues and
silences of minorities, espoused values of egalitarianism and democracy in the
face of those who attempt to minoritise and exclude.  CS has a tradition of a generation or more
now of critiquing class and race, and the subordination of women, and more
recently those minoritised for other reasons such as disability.  


But I’m sure that I am telling you things you all already
know.  What I have watched happening to
Australian cs over the last ten and more years has been a loss of a political
edge.  Now, it seems, this is coming home
to roost in unfortunate ways.  


I have always thought of cs academics as trouble makers—or
seen as trouble makers by those who hold power. 
We trouble their sense of rightful power and their easy assumptions of
what in their eyes the world should look like. 
It worries me that, at least in the perceptions of postgrads and ECRs,
the traditional hierarchical structure is being replicated in Australian
cs.  It would seem that neoliberal
practices have dealt a crucial blow to people’s confidence to speak out and
that, perhaps, senior cs academics have not realised this.  Perhaps this is a situation we should strive to rectify? 


Personally, if their work was of an appropriate standard
I would prefer to employ a trouble maker because they are the people that get
things done.  They are the people who
kick back against the impositions of the powerful.  


Anyway, just a few thoughts.  


Thanking you all for your time, 


Jon.          


 
From: jon_stratton22 at outlook.com.au
To: timothy.laurie at unimelb.edu.au; csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2015 16:45:52 +0800
Subject: Re: [csaa-forum] Call for Papers: 'Minor Culture' CSAA Conference 2015




Dear Rimi and Timothy,
     Thank you for organising this conference and for the splendid list of speakers. My apologies for not having attended the annual conferences recently. If I had I may already know the answer to my concern. It is that all the speakers, with one exception, come from universities in Sydney and Melbourne--unless there are some changes in affiliation of which I am not aware. To put it differently, there are, I think, no speakers listed from Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, or, with the very honourable exception of Graeme Turner, from Brisbane. Nor are any speakers listed from Aotearoa/New Zealand. This makes the conference appear terribly Sydney/Melbourne-centric. I am sure that the two of you, with degrees from a Perth uni and an Adelaide uni, can aapreciate how this feels to those of us who live and work outside of the traditional core nexus. This seems to me an issue of particular relevance given the exciting topic of the conference. Minor Culture, related to matters of place, identity and marginality, are of great importance to those of us in places still identified as peripheral to the old Australian core. Is there a reason that I don't know about why the conference has been configured in such a traditional and exclusive a way?

To remind list members of a small portion of a complex and diverse history; Perth figured large in the early development of Cultural Studies in Australia not least because the city's historically marginal status in Australia replicated the early concerns of Cultural Studies with marginality. The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies was founded in Perth. The journal's home subsequently shifted to the United States and it became the journal we know of as Cultural Studies. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, which I believe still has a link with CSAA, was founded in Perth and its senior editor still works in Perth.

With best wishes,
Jon

From: timothy.laurie at unimelb.edu.au
To: csaa-forum at lists.cdu.edu.au
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 02:06:39 +0000
Subject: [csaa-forum] Call for Papers: 'Minor Culture' CSAA Conference 2015









Call
 for Papers:

 

MINOR CULTURE

Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, Dec 1-Dec 3, 2015 


 

Minor Culture
creates a space for inter-disciplinary dialogues around the study of
 place, identity and marginality, and addresses research on everyday cultural productions and media texts, cultural policy and discourses of sustainability, digital life and creative industries, and public cultures in the Asia-Pacific region. The conference
 also invites responses to the following questions:

 

·               
How are minor cultures inhabited? When do minor cultures become
 uninhabitable? 

·               
Is the concept of minority still useful in explaining contemporary
 forms of cultural marginality? 

·               
How do categories such as indigeneity and Aboriginality, gender
 and sexuality, class, disability, race and citizenship produce minoritising effects? How might these categories change when mobilised through governmental discourses, newsmedia, and everyday usage?

·               
Who narrates experiences of minoritisation? For whom are these
 narratives produced? How is minoritarianism articulated through film, music, television, literature, performance, and digital cultures?


·               
In what ways do practices of government and cultural policy
 shape relationships between local, national and transnational cultures? To what extent are legal regulations implicated in the formation of minoritarian practices?

·               
How do new minor or major cultural formations emerge? Through
 which means do political practices resist or intervene in these formations?

·               
Do minor cultures require novel theoretical tools or research
 methodologies? What do experimental approaches to cultural research look like? What alternative kinds of knowledge could such approaches make available?


·               
Is minority a humanist concept? What place could majority and
 minority have within post-anthropocentric thinking?

·               
And when do minor cultures cease to be minor?

 

 

Time & Location

University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

Nov. 30: Prefix Postgraduate Day (incl. workshops on theory and methodology from senior cultural studies researchers)

Dec 1-3
Minor Culture conference

 

Keynote Speakers

 
Distinguished Professor Ien Ang (Professor of Cultural Studies,
 Institute for Culture and Society)
 
Professor Jose Neil C. Garcia (Professor
 of English, Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City)

 

Professor Meaghan Morris (Professor
 of Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney)

 

Invited speakers also include
Dennis Altman, Tony Bennett, Catherine Driscoll, Ghassan Hage, Koichi Iwabuchi, Peter Jackson, Stephen Muecke, Greg Noble, Elspeth Probyn, Katrina Schlunke,
 and Graeme Turner.

 

 

Abstracts

Please send an abstract (250 words max), a title for the presentation (15 min max), and a short bio (30 words max) including your name, email address, degree level
 and institutional affiliation to: csaa2015 at lists.unimelb.edu.au
(both in the body of the email and as an attachment) by June 1, 2015.


Presenters will be notified of their acceptance no later than July 1.

 

Conference Co-convenors

Dr. Rimi Khan & Dr. Timothy Laurie (Screen & Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne)

 

Conference Organising Committee at the University of Melbourne

Assoc. Prof. Chris Healy (Screen & Cultural Studies)

Assoc. Prof. Fran Martin (Screen & Cultural Studies)

Assoc. Prof. Scott McQuire (Media and Communications)

Professor Angela Ndalianis (Screen & Cultural Studies)

Professor Nikos Papastergiadis (Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures)

Assoc. Prof. Audrey Yue (Screen & Cultural Studies)

 

 

Feel free to email any questions about the conference to
csaa2015 at lists.unimelb.edu.au

 

Website URL tbc, but for general information about CSAA, see www.csaa.asn.au

 









Dr. Timothy Laurie |
Lecturer in Cultural Studies

Room 237
John Medley Building

The School of Culture and Communication

THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE















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