School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

What makes sustainable and "happy" communities? In this paper I present some ways of thinking about this question from the perspective of 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. I will compare his ethical and political views to recent research in the social sciences that links income inequality to numerous negative social outcomes. On one reading, Spinoza appears very much in line with the view that inequalities in income necessarily have negative outcomes, but on a more Nietzschean reading, he can be seen to advocate such inequalities as the best and most rational way to live. Beth Lord is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland. She is author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), and Spinoza's Ethics: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (EUP, 2010).

As contemporary cities become increasingly media dense environments, the mode of inhabiting urban space is changing. The growing use of geo-spatial devices and the availability of real-time location specific information favours new forms of micro co-ordination of social activity, but also the extension of surveillance via data-mining and aggregation. As networked interactions become an everyday dimension of negotiating contemporary public space, there is a pressing need to think about how this trajectory transforms the older power-geometries of the city. Drawing on a range of contemporary projects, this talk will examine the contemporary politics of ‘participation’ and will investigate how networked media might be utilised to facilitate ‘participatory public space’.

There has been growing interest in recent years in looking at the intersection of media and religion, with particular focus on how religious entrepreneurs, subversives and new religious movements are building new followings by adapting in highly effective ways to the possibilities being offered by technologies and cultures of new media. While these adaptations of religion to new media, and concerns about the shaping effects that media are having on religion, are widely seen as relatively recent phenomena, a historical study reveals that all religions are, and always have been, mediated phenomena, with the form any religion takes at any time a significant function of contests and negotiation in the processes of its mediated constructions. This presentation explores this historical perspective on current religious activity with a study of the role played by literacy and literate figures in the third and fourth century transformation of Christianity from a pluralistic early movement to a structured political organisation governed by male bishops.

In 2004, Frank Warren began an art project known as “PostSecret”, which invited people to write a secret which “is true and you have never shared” on a postcard and mail it to him. Participants were encouraged to “let the postcard be your canvas”, and were invited to “see a secret” by visiting the project website. Beginning with a batch of 3,000 custom made cards, five years later, Warren continues to receive handmade postcards to the mailing address. He has amassed a collection of over 150,000 cards and has produced five hardcover books showcasing secrets he has received. The project also continues to have a strong online presence, with Warren regularly updating the project blog with scans of recently received cards, developing a Facebook presence for the project, and launching the “PostSecret Community” website where people can share secrets by uploading videos. In this paper I will situate the “PostSecret” project as an example of an intimate public existing across multiple media and sites. While handmade objects and the postal system form the affective and material core of “PostSecret”, Warren has created and maintained a participatory intimate public centred on life narrative through the use of a range of traditional and new media forms. The scale and success of “PostSecret” evidences the continuing appeal of the handmade as a signifier of authenticity in life narrative production and consumption, yet “PostSecret” is also an example of how online sites can be used to constitute and expand an intimate public. Presenting a textual analysis of the postcard as a personal memento reproduced online and in book form, I argue that the success of PostSecret results from its ingenious use of form to construct a community of feeling structured by the affects associated with confession.

On the basis of an analysis of Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846), a claim is made about the foundational connection between the themes of sexuality and un-reason as constituents of reason and the poetics of Realism in the European canon of the 19th century (Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Dickens). Reason/un-reason is framed by Kant’s aesthetics and the conceptualization of the supersensible self.

The creation of a book does not end with a draft manuscript. Rather, writers seek out publication and communication with an audience as the culmination of their work. During this phase, individual actors and institutions other than the writer make decisions that can affect the content, style, design and reception of the work as well as the publication of future works and the writer’s career. As such, publication and communication represent a network of relationships an individual writer must negotiate before they may be considered creative. This complies with Csikszentmihalyi’s (1988, 1997, 1999) systems model, which posits that, in order to understand creativity in any area, it is necessary to investigate not only the individual and the domain of knowledge they draw on but also how the social system operates, making judgements on and shaping that knowledge. It also correlates with Bourdieu’s (1977, 1993, 1996) concept of the field as the contexts for social and cultural contestation. This paper investigates two specific points of engagement with the field, namely the publisher and the editor, and how these members of the social system of Australian fiction writing influence both the writer and their work.

In 1981, Michel Foucault delivered the statement “Confronting Governments: Human Rights” at the UN in Geneva. Addressing “all members of the community of the governed”, he argued that the “suffering of men”, too often ignored by Governments, “grounds an absolute right to intervene”. In this period, he worked closely with Bernard Kouchner (then head of Médecins san Frontieres/Médecins du Monde, and, until recently, France’s Foreign Minister) who is credited with playing a central role in the development of the norm of humanitarian intervention. This paper will trace the mutual influences between what Foucault termed “the right of the governed”, and the new generation of activist humanitarian NGO’s that originated in the wake of the 1968 Biafra conflict with the founding of Médecins san Frontieres.

This paper draws upon contemporary feminist philosophy in order to consider the changing meaning of privacy and its relationship to identity, both online and offline. For example, privacy is now viewed by European Court of Human Rights as a right, which when breached can harm us by undermining our ability to maintain social relations. I briefly outline the meaning of privacy in common law and under the European Convention in order to show the relevance of contemporary feminist thought, in particular the image of selfhood that stresses its relationality. I argue that the meaning of privacy is in the process of altering as a result of a number of contingent factors including both changes in technology, particularly computer mediated communication (CMC), and extensive feminist criticism of the liberal public/private divide. This latter point can be illustrated by the feminist critique of the traditional reluctance of the liberal state to interfere with violence and injustice within the “privacy” of the home. In asking the question: “how is the meaning of “privacy” changing?” I consider not only contemporary legal case law but also the influential philosophical analysis of Thomas Nagel on privacy.

The northern regions of the Nordic states and Russia are technically part of the “Old World”, but recent history, thorny ethnic relations, politics, and not least its contemporary cinema, can be seen as closely related to those of postcolonial settler situations in the “New World”. Depending on context and ethnic and political allegiance, this relentlessly exoticized, remote, sparsely populated, ethnically and linguistically diverse region is itself imagined according to different, overlapping and conflicting geographies; as the northern peripheries of nation states, or as Sápmi, the transnational land of the Sámi people. This paper examines how contemporary documentary cinema in North Scandinavian Sápmi discovers, recomposes and deconstructs Northern identities in the space between the possibilities and imperatives presented by contemporary politics and, in the words of anthropologist Kjell Olsen, the “complexity of the quotidian, individual selves which often contest the clear-cut categories of collectivity endorsed by institutional discourses”. In doing so, filmmakers make auto-ethnographic use of images that have long been central to a “common sense” of Northern iconography, such as natural landscape, costume, reindeer, wildlife, maps and sacred sites. However, Northern films from different subject positions implicitly rely on divergent or even mutually exclusive historical and political narratives. In documentary biography and autobiography, this intensifies the dramatic significance and the political, ethical and ethnic volatility of the most ambiguous of Northern visual signifiers, the face.

Urban policy-makers in Australia are increasingly interested in fostering a more polycentric vision of metropolitan regions, bringing increasing attention to ‘place-making’ in the suburbs. Yet cultural and educational policy for the suburbs has often lacked the imagination that this would seem to require. On the conservative side of politics, the suburbs have been cast as a site of resolute utilitarianism. The animating impulse has been a largely negative one of defending the suburbs from the clutches of cosmopolitan urban ‘elites’. On the progressive side, the dominant policy rhetoric has been one of addressing suburban ‘disadvantage’. This perspective has been shadowed by the risk of condescension and cultural elitism, resulting in a somewhat anaemic ‘equity’ agenda with little interest beyond external indicators of redistribution. The paper suggests that one route out of this impasse might be to revisit some ideas from classical liberal theory about the relation between culture, education and place. Drawing from interviews with creative practitioners for the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project, it argues that there is some truth to the idea that the suburbs are defined by an autonomy from urban taste, but that this should not be equated with an absence of creative aspiration. Rather than setting these terms against each other, we might do better to look again at ideas of ‘self-formation’ or bildung, in the tradition from Wilhelm von Humboldt, in which role of government is conceived as one of supporting and enabling.

At the end of the nineteenth century, translation was a problem in search of a legal solution. Given the multiple conundrums translations posed, it is unsurprising that it was labeled “la question internationale par excellence”. Did authors possess an exclusive right of translation? Did authors enjoy a right to authorize translations of their work? Additionally, what rights did the translator possess in their own translation? Translation made new works out of old. A prerequisite for the continued circulation of texts, it was the primary vehicle by which authors multiplied their works but, even more significantly, acquired new readers. Yet, translation was a double-edged sword. On one hand, there was the promise of new markets and readers. But on the other there was the possibility that unless somehow regulated, the transformation into a new language could result in substandard or even corrupt texts that in effect alienated an author from their work. While the relationship between authors and readers has been and continues to be of significant interest to book historians, translation – an equally contentious site of both authorship and ownership — has not received the same attention. In her talk, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén considers translation as a recurring problem within the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886). As a catalyst for conflicts over the perceived stability of the literary work, the relationship between authors and readers and the geopolitical tensions between producer- and user nations, Professor Wirtén suggests that translation offers a complementary, productive, and still largely unexplored approach into the authorship/copyright conundrum relevant for copyright historians as well as for scholars of print culture. Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is Professor in Library and Information Science and Associate Professor (Docent) in Comparative Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on international copyright and the history of the public domain. She is the author of No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization (2004) and Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (2008) (both University of Toronto Press). Forthcoming in 2011 is a book chapter tentatively titled “Of Plants and Patents: Circulating Knowledge” for the book Intellectual Property and Emerging Biotechnologies (edited by Matthew Rimmer and Alison McLennan) and the essay “A Diplomatic Salto Mortale: Translation Trouble in Berne, 1884-1886” for Book History. Her new book project will be on The Intellectual Properties of Marie Curie and is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), between 2010-13. http://www.abm.uu.se/evahw

Computer games have been considered a dangerous pass time because of their consequences either in encouraging players to harm others, or in terms of harm to the moral character of the player. In response, defenders of gaming argue that its fictional nature, and the capacity of gamers to distinguish between fiction and reality, mean that gaming should be considered a harmless pass-time, and that the activities that occur within the fictional world of the game, such as ‘cop killing’, cannot be morally condemned. Online gaming concerning fantasy worlds has been treated as an extension of such games, on account of its fictional nature. This paper explores the nature of fiction and ethics, and argues that the defense of games as ‘fiction’ is not as obvious as it seems.

16 years after the Rwandan genocide, in which over one million civilians (mostly Tutsi) were slaughtered in 100 days, this paper will explore how screen media (film drama, documentary) has presented these events internationally and indigenously. Drawing from the insights of trauma theory (via La Capra, Kaplan, Walker), I will discuss Rwanda’s evolving screen culture and practice, alongside earlier attempts to mediate the ‘unrepresentable’ in other national/historical contexts of mass human suffering (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Shoah). Mick Broderick is Associate Professor and Research Coordinator in the School of Media, Communication & Culture at Murdoch University, where he is Deputy Director of the National Academy of Screen & Sound (NASS). His major publications include editions of the reference work Nuclear Movies (1988, 1991) and, as editor, Hibakusha Cinema (1996, 1999). Recent co-edited collections with Antonio Traverso include Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering (Routledge, 2010) and Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Press 2010). As writer, co-editor and co-producer, his short documentary Hope for the Future was simulcast on National TV while screening before 20,000+ genocide survivors at the Rwanda National Stadium during the 16th anniversary commemorations in April 2010.

My recent book Five Wounds (Allen & Unwin, 2010) is subtitled ‘An Illuminated Novel’ and is jointly credited to myself (as writer and art director) and Dan Hallett (as illustrator). Why ‘an illuminated novel’ rather than simply ‘an illustrated novel’? Because in Five Wounds the text, the illustrations and the design are not separate elements, created by isolated individuals who never communicate with one another. Every layout has been conceived of as an integrated whole and executed collaboratively. The phrase, ‘an illuminated novel’ alludes to the ‘illuminated books’ of William Blake, as well as to the medieval tradition of manuscript illumination. I’ll talk about how Five Wounds draws upon the history of the book, and about some of the difficulties involved in such an elaborate production. See http://www.fivewoundsthenovel.com for more information, including videos that showcase the book’s unique format. Jonathan Walker was educated at the Universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. His interests include card games, photography, comic books, cinema and contemporary music, along with the history of Venice, which he has studied, researched, lectured and written on for more than ten years. In the process, he has published many articles in academic journals on topics such as gambling and espionage. From 2000-2002, he held a prestigious British Academy Post-doctoral Fellowship at Cambridge. In 2003, he moved to Australia to take up a fellowship at the University of Sydney, where he was promoted to a position as Senior International Research Fellow in 2006.

Writers and their world | Lynette Russell Over the past few years I have, on and off, tried to learn a few sentences in the language of my Aboriginal ancestors. My guides through this have been linguists and language experts who have spent literally decades trying to recreate and reinvigorate a language that was virtually extinct. Their guides have been the word books, notes, journals and musings of early travelers, missionaries and ethnographers. Learning an Aboriginal language is a difficult, very difficult, task. My tongue seems to not understand where it should rest in my mouth; behind my lower teeth, in my palate or along the edge of my bite? As I have struggled with words that seem a strange yet wonderful collection of vowel sounds linked to unexpected consonants (clicking Gs and soft Ds) I marvel at the complexity and beauty of this language I desire to know. And I lament my own inability to do justice to a lexicon that sounds so lyrical that I feel I should attempt to sing it rather than merely struggle to speak it. Kate Grenville in her novel The Lieutenant, subsequent to if not sequel to the Secret River, has also consulted the word books and journals as her main character Lt. Rooke struggles to learn the language of the Gadigal mediated through his friendship with a young girl called Tagaran. Rooke is based on William Dawes, naval officer, astronomer and scientist who set up camp just on the fringe of the embryonic settlement where he was to observe the southern skies and map the constellations. Here Dawes met and befriended Patyegarang a young girl he compared to his beloved sister Anne. Patyegarang and Dawes taught each other their respective languages. I have a strong sense of identification with the characters in this book, I delight in its detail, the use of Gadigal language. I enjoy the sense of experimentation as Lt Rooke tries to pronounce words that his tongue (like mine) finds foreign. Rooke’s methodical and scientific mind is familiar, I recognise his need to find logic with in the chaos of the cosmos. I understand how he then applies this to mapping the language. I marvel at Tagaran’s playfulness, her confidence and her intellect, her certainty as someone who is firmly ‘at home’ in her ‘country’. In this seminar I want to explore the role of language in mediating the friendship between Rooke and Tagaran and how this might stand as an allegory for the relationships between Black and White Australia more generally. For the most part settler Australians have not endeavoured to learn or use Aboriginal languages apart from lyrical sounding place names, the meaning of which are often forgotten. Rooke’s desire to know the Other’s language suggests to me an engagement that is not easily categorised as simply colonialist. Importantly within this relationship there is (however momentarily or fleeting) equality. These are stories that belong to both Indigenous and settler Australians and the telling and retelling ought be seen as an exercise in reconciliation. Stories we all have a stake in.