Events » Current Events
Semester 1, 2008
DISCIPLINING INNOVATION: new learning & teaching in media & cultural studies. Friday November 21, 2008
Keynote speaker: Prof. Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, University of Western Sydney.
As disciplines heavily invested in making sense of the contemporary world, media and cultural studies are constantly engaging with new examples, new technologies, new political contexts and even new theoretical paradigms. The progressive political ethos of many working in this field makes many of us sympathetic to pedagogical innovations that promise to shake up existing practices, hierarchies and conventions.
However, the new offers threats as well as opportunities to our disciplines. This colloquium will consider how we should teach media & cultural studies in a changing world of environmental crisis, globalization, continuing demands for social justice and rapidly shifting communications technologies and practices. At the same time it will address the politics of "new pedagogies" in institutions preoccupied by audit cultures and "instrumental progressivism".
Is there a space in contemporary universities for innovative teaching beyond the horizon of what Robins and Webster in Times of the Technoculture call "instrumental progressivism"?
How do we avoid being drawn into the hyperbolic claims of newness we use in our own learning grant applications - and continue to acknowledge the role of collaboration in developing innovative curricula?
Can the "soft" money of learning and teaching initiatives and pilots be used to compensate for the long-term under-funding of Australian higher education?
How do we recognise and reward excellence in teaching practices that are not new?
How do we connect our educational innovations to our interest in social justice?
To register, contact Nicole Matthews (Nicole.matthews@scmp.mq.edu.au)
by Tuesday, November 18
____________________________________________________________
Programme
Acknowledgment of country 9.30 am
Keynote: Prof. Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University 9.45 am
Tea and coffee
Performances of knowing 11.00 am
Nick Mansfield, Macquarie University
Ruth Barcan, University of Sydney
Dugald Williamson, University of New England
Lunch 12.30 pm
Pedagogy and economic subjectivity 1.15 pm
Sue Saltmarsh, Charles Sturt University
Kylie Brass and Kieryn McKay, University of Western Sydney
Looking out for teaching 2.15 pm
Catherine Simpson, Macquarie University
Nicole Matthews, Macquarie University
Tea and coffee
Roundtable: What's "new" in pedagogy? 3.15 pm
Megan Watkins, University of Western Sydney
Karen Vered, Flinders University
Elaine Kelly, Macquarie University
Venue: Macquarie University, Room C5C 498
All welcome! The colloquium is free of charge
RELATIONAL DIS/LOCATIONS: MEDITERRANEAN CULTURES IN TRANSLOCAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS
Contact: Joseph Pugliese
Location: Whitley Room U@MQ
Union Centre and the Centre of Middle East and North African Studies present a one-day symposium concerned with work that conceptualises the Mediterranean not as a fixed geographical locus mapped and regulated by a series of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates but, rather, in terms of a dispersed spatio-temporal and geopolitical phenomenon that is not identical to itself. This is not the Mediterranean of the imperial mare nostrum; rather, it is a transmediterranean marked by lines of contestation, dissemination and reconfiguration. This symposium brings together scholars working on Mediterranean cultures, their multiple dispersions and embodiments. The symposium examines how Mediterranean cultures are engaged in flows of transnational cultural exchange that are reconstituting local cultures and identities and translocating these things in the context of national/ist cultures. The symposium will also focus on the phenomenon of diaspora, both transmediterranean and transnational (with a particular focus on Australian diasporic cultures and their Middle Eastern, North African and European affiliations and connections), refugees and the undocumented, the "war on terror," media representations, colonial and imperial histories, tourism, and aesthetic visions.
Marx Reading Group
Contact: Nicole Matthews
Location: W6A 820
A group of HDR students and CCS staff are currently running a reading group of Marx' Das Kapital (vol 1). The group meets fortnightly to discuss roughly two chapters per meeting. All welcome!
Contact Nicole Matthews 9850 8755, or Jon Seltin 9850 8778 for details.