Daily Archives: 15 September 2016

Petition – Save Humanities at the University of Otago

Spread the word and help save Humanities at the University of Otago:

“Some of you may have heard about the restructure of Humanities at the University of Otago. Owing to a decline in student numbers, the University is claiming the Division of Humanities has a budget shortage that must be balanced by cutting staff. A number of Departments within the Division are being targeted for staff redundancies by the end of the year. See here: https://www.odt.co.nz/…/humanities-division-cuts-focus-reve…

The Tertiary Education Union is running a Heart Humanities campaign to support affected staff and to challenge the time frame and scope of the cuts. Some context to this situation is the National Government’s funding of Maths and Science students at a higher rate than Humanities enrolments and the University’s budget priorities, which include spending millions on campus beautification projects and sponsoring rugby teams!

While we have strong support from within the University from staff and students, we also need public support, and in particular, support from external Universities and scholars. We have set up a petition to collate external support. Please sign & share: http://teu.ac.nz/2016/08/humanities-petition.”

Experimental Histories: Conference and Postgraduate Workshop

Experimental Histories: Performance, Colonialism and Affect
University of Tasmania
3-4 October, 2016

RSVP is ESSENTIAL due to limited places

Convenors: A/Prof Penny Edmonds (UTAS) and A/Prof Katrina Schlunke (USYD) (penny.edmonds@utas.edu.au and katrina.schlunke@sydney.edu.au)

In her perceptive examination of the encounter between history, performance and colonialism, American theorist Diana Taylor argues that performance transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a group’s sense of identity? Crucially, Taylor reminds us of the critical political and interventionist work of performance, especially those of Indigenous peoples, and associated artefacts and creative expressions which challenge us to look beyond traditional text-based sources, to ask: If we were to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity?have traditionally been studied what would we know that we do not know now? Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible? (Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke U.P., 2003).

This two day symposium is concerned with looking again at how we have come to know the colonial past. To attempt to know the past ‘experimentally’ is to make way for the emerging archive of previously overlooked embodied and affective actions, objects, everyday experiences and performative challenges to the colonial that were ignored or already accounted for. This means making a space for the stories of the bodies, objects, animals, constructed heritage sites and environments that became entangled within colonialism. Such an approach requires a reconsideration of the ways in which the past is presented. This symposium will critically interrogate the ways that the past is re-imagined, interpreted, commemorated and/or subverted through affective performances of heritage and history. We seek to explore new forms of creative expression and writing that are reflective of the affective force of the emotional past, as well as new ways of performing and ‘playing’ the past that produce different pedagogical effects.

Experimental Histories: Postgraduate Workshop

Date: 5 October, 2016
Time: 1:30-4:30pm
Venue: Sandy Bay Campus, University of Tasmania
RSVP: Essential as places are limited. HDR Students only please.
Cost: Free
Convenors: A/Prof Penny Edmonds (UTAS) and A/Prof Katrina Schlunke (USYD) (penny.edmonds@utas.edu.au and katrina.schlunke@sydney.edu.au)

In this workshop we will explore what is meant by an experimental history and how the concept and surrounding ideas might be useful in the organisation of your thesis projects at both a conceptual and writerly level. HDR students will be asked to consider the ways in which a range of diverse approaches to the past including histories of the present, genealogies, new historicism, history from below, popular and public histories, new museology, new materialism, re-enactment, artful histories, fictocriticism, and memory work have thrown up challenges to how we do research but have also provided an exciting new set of research tools. We will consider the particularities of the Australian context and offer a set of discussion points and writing exercises to explore this fascinating terrain.