Summer School Sydney, Australia
Minor Cosmopolitan Justice and Aesthetics
:: The Call for Applications is Officially Closed ::
Description
The summer school on Minor Cosmopolitan Justice and Aesthetics forms part of a larger research project on Minor Cosmopolitanisms that is concerned with establishing new ways of studying and understanding the cosmopolitan project against and beyond its Eurocentric legacies. Bringing together senior scholars and PD students in a Research Training Group located in Potsdam University in Germany, project members undertake research in conversation with scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds, located in universities and institutions around the globe.
Together with our partners at Macquarie University, the RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms will host a summer school in Sydney, Australia from February 12-18, 2018 that will bring together artists, academics and activists to explore conceptions of justice and aesthetics crucial to a critical inquiry of the cosmopolitan.
While claims to universal human rights and justice have been a linchpin of Eurocentric Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, critics have pointed out the vexed relationship of universal human rights and cultural specificity to the end of articulating a multitude of alternative notions of justice. The production and dissemination of art across national boundaries has been crucial in establishing cosmopolitan trajectories of exchange and inquiry. At the same time, aesthetic practices have been complicit in neo-liberal capitalist logics of the market, which privileges a monodirectional proliferation of products, ideas, and knowledge from the Euro-American centre. Therefore, there is a tangible but also productive tension between justice and aesthetics in various post-/de-/anti-colonial discourses.
The Australian settler colonial state is a particularly apt space to investigate these questions. Artists and performers have greatly contributed to shaping a counter-discourse that addresses colonial and neocolonial strategies of displacement, marginalisation and oppression. These responses are part of a structural re-empowerment of Aboriginal artists among others, and contribute to essential debates on issues of sovereignty and restorative justice.
Tying in with these discussions, the Summer School will address the following questions:
- How do aesthetic practices inhabit and inhibit various concepts of justice?
- How do such aesthetic practices address issues of citizenship, class, education, gender, race, age, and ability?
- In which ways do artistic traditions and canon formation relate to minor cosmopolitan justice? What do appropriation and integration into “major” power-sustaining structures do to those artistic practices?
- How do Indigenous communities and groups relate to concepts of nationhood, sovereignty, newcomer, and land? In this context, what is the currency of non-statist sovereignty?
- How can an aesthetics of nature be relevant to issues of justice? How is environmental justice negotiated, especially vis-à-vis Indigenous communities, and problems like dwindling biodiversity and ecosystem degradation?
- How can different experiences of oppression and persecution be productively addressed in relation to each other? Where can those connections be rendered visible to support acknowledgment and restorative justice?
Summer School Program
Call for Applications
We invite PhD candidates from Australia and the wider region whose projects touch upon the abovementioned issues to apply for participation in the summer school. To apply, please submit a short motivation letter, a short abstract of your research project, and a full CV before December 1st, 2017 to: sydneyschooluuni-potsdampde.
Limited funding for participation in the Summer School is available for PhD students. Please indicate specifically if you are applying for a travel bursary.
For more information on the program please go to www.uni-potsdam.de/sydneyschool.
*Note: The call for applications has closed
Official Flyer
- Download Summer School CfP (PDF 742KB)
Summer School Faculty
Alia Amir Ali (Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad)
Alia Amir Ali is a left-wing political worker who has worked closely with various working-class movements, students, women, katchi abadi dwellers, and the landless tenants' movement in Punjab. She has been actively involved in the rebuilding of the progressive National Students Federation (NSF) of which she served as former General Secretary (Punjab), and now works closely with the Awami Workers Party (AWP) in Pakistan. She is also a researcher on the Baloch National Movement, and is currently a lecturer at the Center of Excellence in Gender Studies at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad.
Tess Allas (UNSW Sydney)
Tess Allas has worked in the field of Aboriginal art since the early 1990's. She has coordinated, curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions including 181 Regent Street: Addressing Black Theatre in 2012 for the 2012 Festival of Sydney at Carriageworks; Shimmer, 2015/16 at Wollongong Art Gallery and With Secrecy and Despatch, 2016 at Campbelltown Arts Centre. She has curated a number of international print exhibitions in Montreal, Canada for the Montreal First Nations Festival; for the Gorman Museum at the University of California, Davis and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in the United States as well as many smaller exhibitions on the South Coast of NSW. In 2012 Tess was the recipient of an Arts Fellowship from Arts NSW for further study and investigation into the history and contemporary practice of shellworking in NSW Aboriginal communities.
She has written hundreds of biographies on Aboriginal artists for the 'Storylines Project' (www.storylines.org.au) which were published on the Design & Art Australia Online website (www.daao.org.au). Her print publications include essays for the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (University of Virginia) as well as articles in Art Monthly, Art & Australia, Artist Profile and Artlink. With Daniel Browning she co-edited the Blak on Blak edition of Artlink (Vol 30 No 1). Tess was the commissioning editor of the 2014 Artspace monograph on artist Frances Belle Parker. With fellow artistic collaborator, Charlie Schneider, Tess showed her video work Andy Warhol on Aboriginal Art at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Adelaide as part of the 2014 Adelaide Festival's visual art program. This video work was also shown at the Kallio Kunsthalle in Helsinki, Finland in 2016 with an accompanying print exhibition. The video was the result of a two-month residency in the Rocky Mountains, Canada in 2012, hosted by the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.
Daniel Browning
Daniel Browning is an Aboriginal journalist and radio broadcaster. A descendant of the Bundjalung and Kullilli peoples of far northern New South Wales and south-western Queensland, Daniel presents and produces Awaye!, the Indigenous art and culture program on ABC RN which surveys contemporary cultural practice across the arts spectrum. A visual arts graduate, Daniel is also a widely-published arts writer.
Roxley Foley
Kaurna Hills, born Roxley Foley of the Gumbaynggirr Nations, is a young Aboriginal political and historical commentator from what is now known as the federated colonies of Australia Incorporated. Born to activist families active in the indigenous arts, land rights and anti-nuclear movements, he has a unique insight into the worlds of institutions, governance, law, activism, land rights and repatriations. Since being sent to the Australian capital from a series of grass-roots community circles around the country, he now sits as a sacred firekeeper and facilitator of dialog, operating from the first people’s front line: the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra.
Alana Lentin (Western Sydney University)
Dr Alana Lentin is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at the University of Western Sydney and the current President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association. Formerly she was at the Department of Sociology at Sussex University and the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. In 2017, she was the Hans Speier Visiting Professor of Sociology at the New School, New York.
Alana works on the critical theorization of race, racism and antiracism. She is co-editor of the Rowman and Littlefield International book series, Challenging Migration Studies. Her latest books are Racism and Sociology (with Wulf D. Hund 2014) and The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age (with Gavan Titley, 2011). Her articles have appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, European Journal of Social Theory, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Patterns of Prejudice and Information, Communication and Society. She writes for outlets such as The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, Base Publication, The Conversation and The Religion and Ethics Report. She has also been interviewed for ABC Radio National Australia, the NHK Japanese Television, and The Islam Channel.
Ina Kerner (University Koblenz-Landau)
Ina Kerner is a professor of politics in the Institute of Cultural Studies at University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. Prior to this, she held faculty positions at the three Berlin universities as well as research fellowships or visiting professorships at the New School for Social Research in New York, the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths in London, among others. In the fall term of 2015/16 she was a guest professor at the Centre of Excellence in Gender Studies at Quaide-Azam University in Islamabad. Her teaching and research interests bridge political theory and gender studies; currently, she mostly works in the fields of feminist theories, intersectionality, and postcolonial theory. Her most recent publications in English include: "Relations of Difference: Power and Inequality in Intersectional and Postcolonial Feminist Theories", in the journal Current Sociology, 65 (2017) and "Solidarity across Difference Lines", forthcoming in Social Politics.
Stephen Muecke (UNSW Sydney)
Stephen Muecke is Professor Emeritus of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where he is part of the Environmental Humanities programme, and Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide. He has written extensively on Indigenous Australia, especially from the Kimberley, and on the Indian Ocean. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Faculty member, Global Center for Advanced Studies, Switzerland. He is the author, editor or translator of 19 books and 31 refereed articles since 2000. He has supervised 56 research theses, Honours to PhD, and is a creative writer (fictocritical writing, poetry) with several shortlistings and prizes.
Suvendrini (Suvendi) Perera (Curtin University)
Suvendrini (Suvendi) Perera is John Curtin Distinguished Professor and Research Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts. She completed her BA at the University of Sri Lanka and her PhD at Columbia University, New York. Since coming to Australia she has published widely on issues of social justice, including decolonization, race, ethnicity and multiculturalism, refugee topics, critical whiteness studies and Asian-Australian studies.Suvendi began teaching career at the City University of New York. She has combined her academic career with participation in policymaking, public life and activism. Suvendi is the author/editor of seven books, including Reachs of Empire; Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats and Bodies and Survival Media: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the War in Sri Lanka. She is coeditor, with Sherene Razack, of the anthology, At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror. She is currently the lead investigator on two ARC funded projects "Old Atrocities, New Media" and "Deathscapes." She is a founding member of Researchers Against Pacific Black Sites.
Joseph Pugliese (Macquarie University)
Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies. Joseph's research and teaching are principally oriented by issues of social justice. He deploys critical and cultural theories in order to examine and address the relationship between knowledge and power, issues concerned with discrimination and injustice, state violence, institutional racism, and regimes of colonialism and empire. He examines these issues in the context of everyday cultural practices, the state, institutions of power such as law, and the interface of bodies and technologies.
His most recent publications include two monographs: State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013). The book was nominated for the following international book prizes: the UK's Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize 2014 and the US Law and Society Herbert Jacob Book Prize 2014.
Paul Sheehan (Macquarie University)
Paul Sheehan is Associate Professor in English at MacQuarie University. He publishes and teaches in various areas of literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, particularly the changing cultures of modernism and postmodernism. His research and teaching interests also include literary and cultural theory, modern drama, and film studies. Paul Sheehan has completed two volumes on the subject of Violence and Aesthetics, mapping the paths taken from 19th-century decadence through to late 20th-century art cinema. His current project is a study of poetic form through a genealogy of mainly French theorists, entitled 'Continental Theory and the Rapture of Poetry'.
Adrian Stimson
Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation. He has a MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He considers himself as an interdisciplinary artist, exhibiting nationally and internationally. His paintings are primarily monochromatic. They are melancholic, memorializing, and sometimes whimsical, evoking ideas of cultural fragility, resilience and nostalgia. The British Museum recently acquired two paintings for their North American Indigenous collection. His performance art looks at identity construction, specifically the hybridization of the Indian, the cowboy, the shaman and Two Spirit being. He is also known for putting his body under stress, in White Shame Re-worked, he pierced his chest 7 times, recreating a performance originally done by Ahasiw-Muskegon Iskew, crawled across the desert in 110 degree heat for What about the Red Man? for Burning Man’s The Green Man and recently dug a TRENCH in a five-day durational performance sunrise to sunset. As he attended three residential schools in his life, his installation work examines the residential school experience. He has used the material culture from Old Sun Residential School on his Nation to create works that speak to genocide, loss and resilience. His video work includes “As Above So Below”, presented in 2016 for With Secrecy and Despatch, Campbelltown Arts Centre, using drone cameras to create a 2 channel video played cinematically on the gallery wall, which spoke to colonial genocide through massacres on our traditional lands. He was a participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, which sent him to Afghanistan. He was awarded the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award – Hnatyshyn Foundation.
Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sydney)
Dr Dinesh Wadiwel is a Senior Lecturer in Human Rights and Socio-Legal Studies in the the School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Sydney. Dinesh’s research interests include theories of violence, critical animal studies and disability rights. He is author of the monograph The War Against Animals (Brill, 2015) and co-editor (with Matthew Chrulew) of the collection Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016). Dinesh is convenor of the Human Animal Research Network (HARN) at the University of Sydney.
Acknowledgement of Land
Macquarie University and the research training group ‘Minor Cosmopolitanisms’ acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the Macquarie University land, the Wattamattagal clan of the Darug nation, whose cultures and customs have nurtured, and continue to nurture, this land since the Dreamtime. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and future; to the Ancestors; and to the Land and Water, its knowledges, Dreaming and culture – embodied within and throughout this Country. We mark this acknowledgement in the context of the ongoing impact of colonisation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their ongoing assertion of unceded sovereignty over Country.
Keynotes
Conversation on the exhibition "With Secrecy and Despatch"
Tess Allas, Daniel Browning, and Adrian Stimson
Wednesday, Feburary 14th, 2018
April 17th, 2016 marked the 200th Anniversary of the Appin Massacre. This massacre saw the government sanctioned murder, capture and displacement of Aboriginal communities within the Appin Region. Whilst horrific, and often forgotten, events similar to this have tarnished the histories of Western Colonisation the world over, recently there has been an increased engagement in a dialogue that not only discusses the impact of this colonisation on contemporary Indigenous identity, but also emphasises the need for the public acknowledgment and commemoration of these lost histories.
In collaboration with the local Dharawal community and co-curators, Tess Allas and Canadian, David Garneau; Campbelltown Arts Centre produced an exhibition entitled With Secrecy and Despatch. Allas and Garneau, commissioned new works by Indigenous Australian artists Vernon Ah Kee, Tony Albert, Frances Belle Parker, Julie Gough, Genevieve Grieves and Dale Harding along with First Nations Canadian artists Jordan Bennett, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Marianne Nicholson and Adrian Stimson. Whilst the catalyst for this exhibition remained the Appin Massacre, these artists explored other histories of brutality, conflict, identity, culture and memory from a variety of Indigenous perspectives. However, some of the artists drew directly upon the Appin Massacre to create their body of work.
Tess Allas and Adrian Stimson, in conversation with ABC broadcaster and journalist Daniel Browning (who was also amember of the With Secrecy and Despatch curatorium), will discuss the delicate process of bringing to life an exhibition that the community would be proud of and which employed ancient art making techniques sitting comfortably alongside contemporary art techniques including drone video, google earth use and digital image projections and time lapse image capture that together created a cutting edge contemporary art aesthetic which responded to a horrific event in our nations’ history and how that event affects us today. Daniel, Tess and Adrian will be hosting a Q & A session the following day, in which participants will be able to investigate further the approaches outlined in the previous days’ conversation
The Invention of ‘Cultural Racism’ and the Apparent Resurgence of White Supremacy
Alana Lentin
Wednesday, February 14th, 2018
The first anniversary of Donald Trump’s presidency allows us to reflect on the resurgence of white supremacy which seems to have accompanied it. Other events such as the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the election of far-right parties in several European countries have given rise to a spate of commentaries about the ‘left behind’ white working class. Race, from these perspectives, it is said, has been allowed for too long to trump class, and we are now reaping what we sow. The rise of the ‘identitarianism’ of the so-called Alt-Right has been interpreted as the overly permissive attitude towards the ‘identity politics’ of politically ascendant ‘minorities’ to the detriment of a liberal or a class based universalism that has gone out of fashion. In this talk, I argue that these accusations are not new. The claim that the struggle of racialized people for justice subtracts from both the liberal and the Marxist project was a recurring theme of the late twentieth century. It is borne of a purposeful misinterpretation of race that forecloses the continuous nature of coloniality and confines it in the 19th and 20th century European racist project.
Borne of this failure of accurate historicization, it has been tacitly accepted that racist ideas emerge in discrete stages. As such, since the late 1980s, a ‘new’ cultural racism has been identified which, it is argued, replaces older biological ideas of racial hierarchy observable in particular historical events that I have called ‘frozen racism’. However, the acceptance of ‘cultural racism’ refutes the relationality of race itself, always already constructed on the basis of myriad and complex components, appealing since its inception to both nature and culture. The proposition that cultural racism has reached its peak in then present political moment is accompanied by the suggestion that exposing the racist nature of these culturalist ideas will pose a significant challenge to them. However, I wish to argue that the very terms upon which this is set up – the division of racism into stages or types – thwarts this aim. The very identification of ‘cultural racism’ as apart from ‘old racism’ lends itself de facto to the minimization of ‘identitarianism’ or ‘white nationalism’ and its distancing from ‘real racism’. Indeed, every call out of an event or a statement as racist is retorted to by denial and defence against what has widely come to be seen as an extreme and undeserved accusation. Instead, I suggest that we see the naming of cultural racism as a novel phenomenon as contributing to the growing acceptability of ‘not racism’ as the first defence of white supremacists. Movements for racial justice, rather than being dismissed as divisive ‘identity politics’, should be seen as spaces for thinking against and out of our destructive political times.
Justice, where the bloody hell are you?
Roxley Foley
Thursday, February 15th, 2018
... is a mockery of an old very whitewashed Australian tourist campaign that celebrated Australian cosmopolitanism but erased Aboriginal people out of the picture. The talk will be a look at the illusion of justice, progressiveness, multiculturalism and at the historical revisionism in Australia which has put us in a place where Aboriginal people are still blamed for their own dispossesion and poverty.
Seminar Sessions
Session 1
Monday, February 12th, 2018
The Legal and the Aesthetic as 'Modes of Existence' in Indigenous Struggles against Extraction Colonialism
Stephen Muecke
I would approach the problem of the relationship between justice and aesthetics by not starting with Kant’s foundational Christian modernism. I would rather describe the legal and the aesthetic as contemporary ‘modes of existence’ (Latour) that work in parallel and overlap in institutional configurations. This means working descriptively and pragmatically (Stengers’ 'ecology of practices') on what people actually do in order to ‘create’ and/or ‘make just’, and what other kinds of agencies are activated and get involved in movements such as an Indigenous Australian struggle against extraction colonisation in Broome.
Solidarity Across Difference
Alia Amirali and Ina Kerner
In this session, the speakers will address the complexities and possibilities associated with “solidarity across difference”. Kerner, drawing on her experience as a visiting scholar in Pakistan, addresses the uneasy relation of solidarity and charity in contexts of extreme social inequality and problematises the “hands-off approach” to global feminism that arose as a reaction to the critique of the notion of global sisterhood. Amirali extends the discussion through an exploration of how class, ethnicity, and gender operate as “difference lines” within leftwing organising in Pakistan, and argues that a de-facto privileging of the particular over the general, and of difference over unity (and even sameness) leads to a recreation of the problem rather than its transcendence.
History, Injustice and the Politics of Vision in Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden)
Paul Sheehan
Session 2
Tuesday, February 13th 2018
Q & A session on ‘With Secrecy and Despatch’
Tess Allas, Daniel Browning and Adrian Stimson
The Revolutionary Political Party: A Vehicle for Justice or an Obstacle to Justice? Reflection on Party-Building in Contemporary Pakistan
Alia Amirali
Over the last few decades, “the Revolution” and “the Party” have become caricatured terms and ceased to be taken seriously (though recent events indicate that the tide is turning). Indeed, “the Party” has come to be seen as more of a hegemon to be resisted rather than a particular (and flawed) response to oppression. Can “the Party” be imagined, and built, differently? Are we even willing to imagine it differently? Could currently popular ideas of justice and resistance - horizontal, non-hierarchal, leaderless - be (unwittingly or otherwise) replicating the dominance that they seek to displace? Does the Party necessarily subsume individuality, creativity and difference into its ‘cold, concrete structure’ or can it be a vehicle for engendering and strengthening “minor cosmopolitanisms” and counter-hegemonic impulses? Does “enabling difference” alone encompass our ideals of justice? How come we so rarely focus on the process of party-building, its limitations and possibilities? Alia Amirali reflects on these questions through an examination and analysis of recent efforts to build a new left-wing political party in Pakistan.
Session 3
Tuesday, February 13th 2018
In an Impaired State
Suvendrini Perera
This seminar examines the four visual works that comprised the exhibition, My Horizon, presented at the Venice Biennale 2017 by Australia’s official artist, Tracey Moffatt. I argue that these four works, (Body Remembers, Passages, Vigil and The White Ghosts Sailed In) constitute a counterfield to the horizon of Australian whiteness, underscoring how the politics of Indigenous recognition and policies of ‘border protection’ are deeply interconnected. In that latter part of the seminar I turn to recent events that, I argue, are fully intelligible only in the context of this horizon of sovereign whiteness.
Kulata Tjuta and the Concept of ‘Instauration’
Stephen Muecke
At the Tarnanthi show at the Art gallery of South Australia, the Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears) Project derives from work begun in 2010 at Tjala Arts in the community of Amata, central Australia, under the direction of Willy Kaika Burton. Today it continues as a network of up to 100 artists from APY country, each producing a spear or piti (coolamon) that were later gathered and composed into an artwork that is a response to the British atomic tests of the 1950s at Maralinga. It is a kind of artistic ‘payback’. In circling around the atomic events, it becomes its own event with past and future ramifications. It is not just a work of art, but a just work of art.
Session 4
Tuesday, February 13th 2018
Spaces of Appearance? Australia’s Refugee Black Sites
Suvendrini Perera & Joseph Pugliese
This workshop discusses the powers of life activated among inmates designated as disposable and bare lives on Manus Island – powers that, we argue, amount to a fully mobilised and embodied resistive force, one that is deeply conscientized and confident in its analytical and creative potentiality. Seemingly disappeared on a prison island, held incommunicado and out of sight, the men of Manus prison camp yet manage to effect what might be described, as ‘a space of appearance’ (Mirzoeff 2017, 19-20) in which they make themselves visible as political subjects, both in Australia and across a global landscape.
Reading:
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Appearance of Black Lives Matter namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-ofblack- lives-matter/
Session 5
Wednesday, February 14th 2018
The Deathscapes Project
Suvendrini Perera & Joseph Pugliese
‘Deathscapes: Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States’ is a transnational research project on deaths in custody across settler states. It aims to produce new knowledge about the practices and technologies, both global and domestic, that enable state violence against two key racialized groups, Indigenous people and racialized migrants and refugees at the border. The project adopts a transnational and cross-disciplinary approach to racialized state violence to map the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres. The Deathscapes website will be a distinctive and innovative feature of the project, as a free-to-access resource that documents racialized deaths transnationally via a single digital site that consolidates statistics, analysis, graphics and artworks; it is a resource that is creative, archival and analytical, and for use by multiple publics.
The transnational research team for Deathscapes includes Prof. Suvendrini Perera (Curtin University), Prof. Joseph Pugliese (Macquarie University), Prof. Jonathan Inda (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Prof. Marianne Franklin (Goldsmiths, University of London).
Animals and Justice: Exploring Contemporary Approaches to Animals as Political Subjects
Dinesh Wadiwel
Approaches to social justice have typically restricted their claims to the "human." However, growing public concern in relation to the treatment of animals in the context of food systems and research suggests that "justice" is a useful frame for thinking about human relationships with the non human. In this presentation, I will review the recent "political turn" in animal studies, which has opened up new directions in thinking about animals, relationships of power, and societies. Building on the foundations provided by animals ethics and animals rights theory, these new approaches have focused on political questions relating to justice and injustice, non human political statuses, the design of political institutions, laws and communities, and the problems involved in developing strategies that will lead to meaningful change for animals. As I shall also discuss, a focus on animals as subjects of justice is also instructive for understanding injustice towards humans; particularly in making sense of the dehumanisation that accompanies structural violence.
Session 6
Thursday, February 15th 2018
Dealing with the 3 Ds: Deflection, distancing and denial in racism and migration studies
Alana Lentin
This seminar addresses what I identify as a central weakness of much contemporary ‘migration ethnicity and minorities’ (MEM) studies – the failure to engage deeply with race critical thought. I draw on several papers I have written on European migration studies and Australian ‘racism studies’ (Lentin 2014 & 2017), to think together with participants how the deflection, distancing and denial of the significance of race affects our understanding of borders, immigration and asylum, multiculturalism, settlement and ‘integration’, diaspora, transnationalism and diversity, etc.
My argument is that the failure to read these processes as racially inflected – borne of the particular histories of racial coloniality – permits political and social problems such as border security or social cohesion to be read as purely pragmatic and delinked from wider questions about the persistence of what Quijano calls the ‘coloniality of power’. It allows a reaching for what are touted as more realistic solutions, as seen in recent suggestions from Australian academics, such as more investment in positive multiculturalism or the encouragement of ‘bystander antiracism’, all of which, though assuredly welcome, are challenged by the lack of dialogue around the more insidious questions of white supremacy and continuous colonial rule. Drawing on the experience of the Challenging Migration Studies book series I co-edit with Gavan Titley I want to examine what locating race in migration studies looks like, what questions doing so opens up for the field, and what existing work we can draw on to advance our thinking.
Julie Gough’s Forensic Archaeology of National Forgetting
Joseph Pugliese
Julie Gough’s Hunting Ground (Pastoral) – Van Diemen’s Land is a video installation that brings into focus a number of Tasmania’s contemporary settler estates. These settler estates were founded in the wake of Tasmania’s Black War. By juxtaposing pastoral visions of these settler estates with the documentary evidence of the massacres of Aboriginal people that enabled their foundation, Gough visually compels the viewer to bear witness to Australia’s otherwise buried history of attempted genocide. Through her literal deposition of soil gathered from Aboriginal massacre sites across the bucolic visions of Tasmania’s settler estates, she visually materialises an unsettling torque of remembrance and forgetting.
Identity, Oppression, Survival: J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K
Paul Sheehan
Final Panel
Thursday, February 15th 2018
Minor Cosmopolitan Justice and Aesthetics: Potentials and Pitfalls
with Roxley Foley, Joseph Pugliese, Anja Schwarz
PhD Exchange
Discuss and Strategize!
Thursday, February 15th 2018
This session is reserved for an exchange of ideas between all postgraduate participants in the Summer School. It is conceived to serve as a space for dialogue and debate where we fellows will discuss a series of concerns related to our work, share thoughts and experience about these concerns, and debate potential strategies on how to deal with them.
Our exchange will be organized along the following topics:
A) methodology
B) theory
C) material
D) academia
Film Screening
Call to Account
This 20 minute film was produced by Researchers Against Pacific Black Sites on Human Rights Day 2015.
Presented by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, the screening will be followed by a discussion.
For more Information: rapbs.org
Excursions
Balls Head reserve
On Wednesday 14th February, a tour in the Yerroulbine/BallsHead reserve will be conducted by a guide from the Aboriginal Heritage Office. The tour will last around an hour an a half. As the sun heats up very quickly in summer, we were advised to start at 9:30 am on site. Travelling to Balls Head involves a journey of about 40-45 minutes (train to Waverton + shortwalk).
Informal walk in Redfern
As this early tour will leave us time until the next session at 2 pm, we invite all participants to travel to Redfern, a historical quarter for Aboriginal history, activism and arts, as well as the home of several cultural initiatives.
You can spend your lunchtime visiting the Gadigal Information Service Centre (27 Cope Street) and buy CDs of young artists, admiring Daniel Boyd's mural artwork What Remains at the corner of Vine and Everleigh Street, and learning about the powerful movement of the Tent Embassy at "The Block" between Lewis and Everleigh Street.
For more information on sites of protest and cultural empowerment, scan the QR Code to download the Barani Barrabugu Walk Tour booklet, or visit: www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/109777/BaramiBarabuguWalkTour_v3.pdf
Contact information
Organizing team:
Yann Le Gall, Anouk Madörin, Moses März, Mariya Nikolova, Julia von Sigsfeld, Jens Temmen, Heinrich Wilke
Sydney Summer School Organizing Team
University of Potsdam
Campus Neues Palais, Bld. 2
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam
Germany
sydneyschool@uni-potsdam.de
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