Events from the Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne Australia
Seminar Room 1 and 2
Monash University Law Chambers
472 Bourke Street
Melbourne Victoria
You are warmly invited to the following Criminal Justice Research Consortium (CJRC) Seminar
Presented by Emeritus Professor Richard Harding, Centre for Law and Public Policy, the University of Western Australia
Please see the attached PDF brochure for more details
RSVP cjrc@med.monash.edu.au by the 19 October 2009
Room H5.95, Building H
Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Monash University
Presented by John D’Arcy May, Associate Professor of Interfaith Dialogue, Irish School of Ecumenics, Dublin
It is often overlooked that ‘universal’ or ‘high’ traditions such as Buddhism and Christianity themselves began as ‘indigenous’ traditions in very particular cultures and societies, which they then transcended as they engaged with cultures very different from those of their contexts of origin. It has been suggested that there are more commonalities between the Buddhist story and the Dreaming stories of Aboriginal Australia than initially meet the eye, and there is much to be learnt – both negatively and positively – from Buddhism’s extraordinary adaptability to its host cultures through the centuries. Christianity, too, has developed its own techniques for adaptation to cultures that are foreign to it, though its missionary history shows that it has also transformed cultures in its own image. In addition, both Buddhist and Christian traditions are increasingly confronted by a secularity whose exclusive humanism seems to portray them both as optional life choices rather than compelling truths.
This poses a challenge to emerging Christology and Buddhology in Australian and Asia-Pacific contexts. Are they capable of recovering the intense relationship to earth and cosmos, land and place that marked their origins without losing their absolute transcendence of an impermanent phenomenal world? Can traditions such as Australian Aboriginal religion help to ‘earth’ them, thus enhancing their contribution to ecological ethics, environmental sustainability and socio-economic justice? Is a fundamental re-interpretation of central teachings such as creation and incarnation, emptiness and interconnectedness feasible? What effects would such a re-interpretation have on ethics in a ‘time of many worlds’, of religious pluralism in the multi-cultural public sphere of an emerging global civil society? These are some of the questions to be addressed.
Enquiries: UNESCOChair@arts.monash.edu.au
Produced by the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, the Monash Asia Institute and the UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relation, Monash University
Room H116, Building H
Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong
Monash University
Victoria
Cassie Meyer and Jenan Mohajir from Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) will present a public talk on the work of IFYC and how you can be the change in your comunity by building bridges between groups, organising social action projects and envisaging cooperation in your community.
The Interfaith Youth Core is a Chicago-based international non-profit organisation that is building a movement of interreligious and intercultural cooperation through youth leadership and community service. The IFYC trainers are widely recognised as leaders in the field of interfaith relations in and beyond the US.
To register or to find out more information about the presenters and this event, visit the School of Political and Social Inquiry: Interfaith Youth Core Public Talk.
Presented by Professor Alistair Thomson
We all have stories about leaving.
Leaving is a universal human experience, though its nature and meaning vary across time and culture. I realise now that over more than 25 years many of my oral history interviews have included very ordinary and yet quite extraordinary leaving stories. In this lecture we’ll listen to the leaving stories of men who went to war and women who migrated to the other side of the world. How have they told stories and made sense of leaving? Why are those stories so jagged and sharp, etched with the sounds of silence? How can historians make useful sense of poignant memories?
Following the lecture, please join us for drinks & nibbles on the 8th floor of Building H in the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.
Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.
RSVP: 13 November to susan.grist@arts.monash.edu.au for catering purposes
Produced by the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation
A Monash panel, sponsored by the Social Aesthetic Research Unit, is appearing at the Art.Media.Design | Writing Intersections Conference, Swinburne University of Technology, November 18-19.
The panel will present a roundtable session on the contribution of ’place-image-journey-locus’, ’things-artefacts-objects-design’ and ‘body-theatre-performance-space’ to the act of creation and its representation. The panelists will discuss:
Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished childhood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity. For the case studies I investigate – Georgia O’Keeffe, Claude Monet and Emily Kame Kngwarreye – re-creating Eden was a life-changing, art-making, healing rite that provides a map of their careers and an index of their subject matter.
We are what we hold, rather than what we say. The paper examines the central place of things and artefacts in human communication, and the role that objects—as externalizations of the self, consumption and identity—play in aesthetic experience.
Performances are a central means by which cultures bring themselves into being. Performances, in their liveness, their ephemerality, and their power to transform, are thus a key way in which cultures acknowledge, negotiate and embody their propensity for living and dying every moment. Conjectures about what performance is, often spill over into speculations about what performance is for and, therefore, how performances should be carried out. Ontological issues appear to have ethical and political corollaries when considering performance. If cultures continually live and die, along with their embodiments in performances, so artists who are mindful of this transience will work accordingly, knowing that their work is as strong as the moment it is created, and as fleeting as the moment it passes. Perhaps those who create social events do likewise, mindful that societies, while appearing relatively stable and lasting, are also ephemeral and transient. If it is the case that performance(s) bring culture(s) into being, maybe this is also true for society/ies. Perhaps what makes society possible is that performances, and performance, bring societies, and therefore society, into being.
‘Writing’ is often taken as a model of the creative process. It is widely assumed, not least by writers themselves, that creation in general has features that we readily associate with language, logic or discourse. ‘Text’, ‘textuality’, and ‘inter-textuality’ became very popular metaphors in the second half of the twentieth century to explain a large variety of cultural and artistic phenomenon. This echoed the influence of linguistic philosophy and linguistic models in twentieth-century cultural theory. The paper takes issue with the idea that the creative component of culture is structured on the model of language. It suggests rather that acts of imagination in fact look more like object creation and design, than speaking and writing. Ironically, this is true of speaking and writing as much as it is of painting or sculpture. The presentation explores the idea of the imagination as a form or process of object creation, and that imaginative writing, whether in the arts or the sciences, is closer in nature to an act of sculpture or work of design than it is to a speech act or a discursive text.
BMW Edge
Federation Square
Melbourne
Marking the 75th anniversary of the Shrine, Professor Bruce Scates will be joined by a panel of leading historians: Ken Inglis, Joan Beaumont and Katti Williams to debate the past, present and future of the Shrine of Remembrance.
Refreshments provided.
Limited places, book early via telephone 03 9661 8100 or email reception@shrine.org.au
Presented by Cameron Duff, Monash University
RSVP: mark.davis@arts.monash.edu.au
For further information 2009 Sociology Research Seminars
Produced by Sociology, School of Political and Social Inquiry
BMW Edge
Federation Square
Melbourne
Ensemble Liaison and Friends presents its final concert for the 2009 season. Featuring the internationally renowned Baritone, Peter Coleman-Wright.
Works by Mendelssohn, Strauss, Brahms and Schubert. Culminating with the heavenly Ruckert Lieder by Mahler is a very special arrangement for Baritone and Piano Quartet.
Hanging Rock Wines served from 6:30pm.
Book now through www.ticketmaster.com.au or 136 100.
Further information about Ensemble Liaison.
Discourse Analysis and Cultural Diversity: Conversations in the Melting Pot
Monash University Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street
Melbourne, Victoria
Keynote Speakers:
Registration now open.
The conference will focus on religious communication and religious aesthetic forms. The underlying impulse is to bring into dialogue scholarly work undertaken in religious studies and theology with debates and research in the fields of communications and cultural studies, including performance, literary, visual and aesthetic analyses. The premise of the conference is that communication and aesthetic forms play an active role in shaping a religious culture’s sensibility rather than merely reflecting that religious community’s ideology, logic or worldview. In short, religious communication makes religious experience meaningful, possible and effective.
The conference is particularly interested in exploring:
This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.
Further information and registration at the Religious Communication Conference site.
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