CFP: Re-Imagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility.

7-9 December 2016

Maritime Museum of Western Australia, Fremantle

 

Addressing the urgent and compelling need to re-imagine Australia as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures. 

 

Re-imagined through story, critique, reflection, art, human rights and education. 

The conference will offer the opportunity of responding to the intensification of overlapping, interpenetrating and mixing of cultures and peoples in everyday life in Australia – and how its public culture has become increasingly re-imagined through intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue. 

 

Re-imagining different ways of knowing, belonging and doing.

The conference aims to showcase contemporary research and creativity in understanding Australia through interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches.

 

For the first time, the International Association of Australian Studies conference will take place in Western Australia (WA), following on the zeitgeist of Griffith Review’s ‘Looking West’ (2014), the end of the mining boom and vigorous national protests against the closure of remote Aboriginal communities based on a racial and cultural politics of ‘lifestyle’ that bear the hallmarks of European Enlightenment triumph. WA offers a rich context to explore the creative, cultural and critical dynamics of Australian society. Its proximity to the Indian Ocean, to Indonesia, Southeast Asia, India, China and Africa make WA an ideal place from which to look at Australia, as well as a place to understand how others see it.

 

The conference encourages postgraduates, early career and senior scholars to present new and innovative work cognate to our theme.