Past special events

2018 · Cultural and Communication Studies Section’s Twentieth Anniversary Colloquium

Held on Wednesday 14 November 2018, the Colloquium celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Cultural and Communication Studies Section of the Academy. The establishment of the Section was the result of a campaign led by the late Professor Ken Ruthven, a key moment of which was the Academy’s 1991 Symposium ‘Beyond the Disciplines: The new humanities’.

The event revisited some of the key topics discussed in that symposium – the discipline of cultural studies, multiculturalism, cultural policy studies, feminist/gender studies, and postcolonial/subaltern studies – and discuss how our disciplines have moved on since then. Our focus will be on the theoretical, political, and institutional challenges they have confronted, the changing contexts in which they have evolved, and the directions in which we think they are headed.

Presenters included some of the founding Fellows of the Section, some newer Fellows, as well as early and mid-career researchers.

The event was convened by Professor Tony Bennett AcSS FAHA, Professor John Frow FAHA, Professor Elspeth Probyn FASSA FAHA and Associate Professor Chris Healy FAHA. The event was hosted by Professor Gerard Goggin FAHA in the Social Sciences Building at the University of Sydney.

We acknowledge and thank the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, the University of Sydney’s Department of Media and Communications, and Western Sydney University’ Institute for Culture and Society for their generous support of this event.

Program

Download the program, including abstracts.

Introduction

Welcome to Country by Uncle Allen Madden

Welcome by Professor Umberto Ansaldo (University of Sydney)

Opening remarks by Professor Tony Bennett AcSS FAHA (Western Sydney University) — Head of the Academy’s Cultural and Communication Studies Section

Session 1

Chair: Professor John Frow FAHA (University of Sydney)

Professor Meaghan Morris FAHA (University of Sydney) — Learned Academies: Why Bother?

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner FAHA (University of Queensland) — The Humanities as Heuristic: Coordinating the sector

Professor Brett Neilson (Western Sydney University) — The academy as Logistical Institution

Respondent: Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham AM FAHA FAcSS (Queensland University of Technology)

Session 2

Chair: Professor Gerard Goggin FAHA (University of Sydney)

Dr Crystal Abidin (Deakin University & Jönköping University) — Somewhere between here and there: Interdisciplinary in cultural studies as a young scholar

Professor Jill Bennett (UNSW Sydney) — Embodied subjective experience and the limits (and possibilities) of empathy

Dr Shawna Tang (University of Sydney) — Sexuality in Cultural Studies: Doing queer research in Asia

Respondent:Professor Elspeth Probyn FASSA FAHA (University of Sydney)

Session 3

Chair: Associate Professor Chris Healy FAHA (University of Melbourne)

Professor Julian Thomas FAHA (RMIT University) — Contemporary Histories of Media Automation: Connecting policy, politics, and communications.

Associate Professor Fran Martin (University of Melbourne) — Australian Cultural Studies in the Asian century

Respondent: Professor Wanning Sun FAHA (UTS)

Session 4

Chair: Professor Tony Bennett FAcSS FAHA(Western Sydney University)

Matt Poll (Indigenous Heritage and Repatriation Project, Macleay Museum) — Reinventing Tradition: Repatriation in S.E. Australian Aboriginal Communities.

Emeritus Professor Tim Rowse FAHA (Western Sydney University) — Reconciliation as Public Culture: Taking Cultural Studies beyond Ghassan Hage’s ‘White nationalist’.

Respondent: Associate Professor Chris Healy FAHA (University of Melbourne)

Closing remarks

Professor Joy Damousi FASSA FAHA, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

2018 · Trust and its discontents

The Academy was delighted to sponsor through its Section Workshop Scheme the ‘Trust and its discontents’ workshop which was held on 26 September 2018 in Melbourne.

The event was hosted by the Academy’s Cultural and Communication Studies Section and convened by Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham AM FAHA FAcSS (Queensland University of Technology),Professor Julian Thomas FAHA (RMIT University) and Professor Jean Burgess (Queensland University of Technology).

Highlights from the event have been made on Twitter using #AAHTrust

Overview

The Banking Royal Commission and the crisis in governance of world-spanning digital platforms such as Facebook have focused public discussion in Australia and elsewhere about falling levels of public trust in business, media, social media and government. The Edelman Trust Barometer, a widely-cited, survey-based report on the topic, is one example of a host of recent studies reporting an ongoing decline in trust for all institutions. Edelman’s 2017 report notes a particularly sharp fall in trust in the media, reflecting growing concern over disinformation, or “fake news”. Some of the basic systems by which we entrust others — such as the commonplace agreements in which we give “informed consent” — are said to be broken by new digital technologies of control and surveillance. The question of trust is now centre stage in our hyper-sceptical, highly-mediated and globalised world, and the humanities and social sciences should play a central role in explicating the challenges for, and mitigating the risks to, the social, cultural and democratic fabric arising from the erosion of trust.

The workshop aimed to illuminate critical aspects of the current problem and future prospects of trust, drawing on recent work in the humanities and related disciplines. It fostered a deeper examination of what trust involves, engaging with the complexity of its cultural practices, and the forms of technological and institutional design it relies upon. The event considered the remedies for mistrust in public institutions and the media, and the emergence of specialised systems of exchange designed to reframe radically the issue of trust. The workshop contributed to an exciting, interdisciplinary field, involving contributions from anthropology, cultural and communication studies, ethics, philosophy, history, economics and finance, and law.

Program

Download the program for all abstracts and biographies.

Select presentations are available below.

Session 1

AUTOMATING TRUST?

Key note presentation by Professor Genevieve Bell (Autonomy, Agency & Assurance Innovation Institute and Florence Violet McKenzie Chair, Engineering & Computer Science, Australian National University)

Session 2

MEASURING TRUST AND ITS DEFICITS

Steven Spurr (Edelman Australia) — Edelman trust barometer

Professor Frank Bongiorno FASSA (School of History, Australian National University) — Australian political trust in historical perspective

Emeritus Professor Tim Rowse FAHA FASSA (Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University) — The reconciliation barometer as a measure of trust between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians

Professor Justin O’Brien (Australian Centre for Financial Studies, Monash Business School) — Trust and its discontents

Session 3

MEDIATING TRUST AND DISTRUST

Dr Karen Jones (Philosophy, University of Melbourne) — A field-guide to everyday (social) pathologies of distrust

Associate Professor Nic Suzor (Law School, Queensland University of Technology) — A constitutional moment for the ‘net: protecting human rights online

Professor Jean Burgess (Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology) — What fake Peppa Pig videos can teach us about trust

Professor Bronwyn Carlson (Department of Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University) — Indigenous Australians and informal networks of trust on social media

Session 4

TECHNOLOGIES OF TRUST

Dr Mikayla Novak (Blockchain Innovation Hub, RMIT University) — The cost of trust

Associate Professor Ellie Rennie (Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University) and Professor Julian Thomas FAHA (Social Change Research Platform, RMIT University) — Trust, AI and blockchains: Imagining automated decision making

Symposia

50th Anniversary, 2019

Special events

Public Lectures