Dear All,
Please find below the Political Science Department's Postgraduate Bulletin for 22 September 2004, listing news of interest to postgrads in the Department, and upcoming seminars.
Regards, Ben.
1. Website usability review
2. Chinese Studies Research Group
3. Social Policy Forum 6 October: Putting the 'Policy' Back into Politics
4. 2004 Ashworth Lecture 13 October: A New Work and Care Settlement
5. Law School public forum 28 September: Temporary Protection: Permanent Torment?
6. English Seminar 29 September: The Haunted Library
7. History panel discussion 5 October: Palestinian and Jewish Voices in Dialogue
8. Staff/postgraduate 6-a-side soccer: Match report
Issues of this bulletin are archived on the web at:
http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/courses/postgraduate/bulletin.html
Department news and upcoming seminar info is posted at:
http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/new/
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1.
Website usability review
The Web Centre is conducting a website usability review of the university site.
This includes a web user survey to gather user feedback and gauge satisfaction with the site. The survey is short and anonymous. Input is sought from anyone who uses the current site.
To access the survey, please visit: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/webcentre/survey/survey.html
For more information, please contact Claire Spencer, Web Producer in the Web Centre (spencerc@unimelb.edu.au / 8344 0476).
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2.
Chinese Studies Research Group
The Chinese Studies Research Group (CSRG) meets the first Friday of every month to discuss and share ideas and experiences relating to researching China. We also hold regular Research Days to provide Chinese Studies researchers with the opportunity to share their knowledge.
The research areas of our participants are very broad and include, for example: Ming Dynasty history, contemporary politics, Buddhist writings, environmental management, traditional music, anthropology, Christian missionaries, applied linguistics, urban property, education, popular culture and media, etc...
The Group encourages all postgraduate students and academics, regardless of their disciplinary area, who are working on or researching on or about China to join as a member.
To become a member of the Group, please contact Bick-har Yeung (bhy@unimelb.edu.au) via email.
The Chinese Studies Research Group is affiliated to the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association (UMPA).
More information is on the web at:
http://buffy.lib.unimelb.edu.au/collections/asian/CSRG/CSRG.html
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3.
Social Policy Forum 6 October: Putting the 'Policy' Back into Politics
The Centre for Public Policy and the University of Melbourne Sociology Program are holding a half-day symposium focused on social policy and the 2004 federal election, on Wednesday 6th October, 1pm - 5.30pm. Titled Putting the Policy Back into Politics: Critical Commentaries on the Federal Election Campaign 2004, this symposium provides a much-needed opportunity for critical debate on the lack of real social policy discussions in current federal election campaign. This event hopes to generate a forum for academics and others at Melbourne to review some of the key issues affecting and shaping Australian society today and beyond.
For more information about this event - including the speakers - and to download a registration form, please visit:
http://www.public-policy.unimelb.edu.au/events/election_symposium.html
$55 (inc GST)
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4.
2004 Ashworth Lecture 13 October: A New Work and Care Settlement
The 3rd Annual Ashworth Lecture in Sociology:
"A New Work and Care Settlement: Can Australia's Institutions Catch Up With Australians?"
Assoc. Prof. Barbara Pocock (The University of Adelaide)
Wednesday 13 October
6.00pm-7.30pm
Refreshments will be provided before the lecture, starting from 5.30pm
Public Policy Lecture Theatre
2nd Floor, 234 Queensberry Street, Carlton
The University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Barbara Pocock is a Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide in the School of Social Sciences. Her research and teaching has focussed on gender and work, work and family, unionism, social science research and labour studies. Barbara has been involved in unions since her working life began twenty-five years ago, and has worked in the shearing sheds of New Zealand and Australia, the NSW public sector, the banking and the textiles clothing and footwear industries and at the United Trades and Labor Council of South Australia. Through a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship, Barbara is currently researching the issues of work, community, households. Barbara contributes to research and public debate on work questions and has advised both federal and state governments on aspects of employment, work, industrial relations and vocational education.
All University staff and students and any members of the public interested in Contemporary Sociology issues are invited to attend the lecture.
For more information, please contact Joanne Pagounis: joannep@unimelb.edu.au or 8344 7213
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5.
Law School public forum 28 September: Temporary Protection: Permanent Torment?
The Institute of Comparative and International Law and Amnesty International Australia are holding a public forum aimed at drawing attention to the plight of refugee temporary protection visa (TPV) holders and the legal and social issues surrounding Australia's TPV regime.
Titled 'Temporary Protection: Permanent Torment?' the forum is scheduled for 6pm on 28 September in Lecture Theatre 102, Melbourne Law School.
Professor William Maley, Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the ANU and author of The Afghanistan Wars will be joined by Dr Graham Thom, Amnesty International Australia Refugee Coordinator, and Najaf, a Melbourne-based refugee, to discuss what Australia's temporary protection regime means for refugees, what it means for Australia and above all, why we should care.
For more information contact Leanne McKay (l.mckay@unimelb.edu.au).
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6.
English Seminar 29 September: The Haunted Library
Date: Wednesday 29 September
Time: 4.15
Venue: Large Seminar Room, John Medley Building, West Tower, 216B
Presenter: JOHN GANIM (Department of English, University of California, Riverside)
Modern critics have always had difficulty with libraries. I begin with a famous and familiar critic, Lewis Mumford, on a famous and familiar building, Carriere and Hastings New York Public Library of 1901-11:
"New York Public Library. Actual working facilities as a storage place for books and manuscripts and as a workplace for scholars and writers and readers seriously marred by the sacrifice of space, convenience and efficiency to solidity and monumentality. Overcrowded within a decade of its opening. Light, air, space, and silence--the Benedictine luxuries, according to Dom Butler--were all forfeited in this inept design." [Culture of Cities, Plate 26, p. 359]
In fact, the New York Public Library more or less repeated the design solutions of the great turn of the century public libraries in the US, and in so doing dramatized the division between populist access and progressivist civility. But these conflicts are not only expressions of political ideals, they are also conflicts among, and within, libraries themselves. Let me state my argument at the outset: The program for library buildings are among the most detailed for any building type, rivalled only by hospital and military institutions, a kinship that has implications for the buildings I will be examining. Access and protection, security and hospitality, specialized and general collections, storage and reading areas, comfort and surveillance, discovery and retrospection, technology and preservation, all these demands sometimes conflict, as do, more formally, the rationalized and technical demands of librarianship and the public use of the library building as a built form of collective unconscious, esoteric secrets, a Memory Palace. For the problem is not one of design, but of the almost impossible demands of the library program, which cannot be met in the single, unified structure extolled by modernist agendas or the formal symmetries extolled by neo-classical architecture. The buildings do not always, in fact, rarely work to the satisfaction of librarians, because of that conflict. Librarians have always had difficulty with libraries. But they are libraries because of that conflict, because libraries function in the public consciousness and unconscious as peculiarly liminal spaces. Like the books stored within them, libraries can say more about the societies that build them than those societies would sometimes like to know. This lecture will discuss a number of famous library buildings, from the Bibliotheque St Genevieve through the Bibliotheque de France and the new British Library, as well as surveying a series of movie scenes set in libraries, including Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, Pagemaster, Ghostbusters, Hitchcock's Blackmail, Philadelphia, Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. The lecture will be illustrated with slides, and with a video.
Professor John Ganim (Department of English, University of California, Riverside), is a Faculty of Arts Visiting Scholar to the Department of English. He has published widely on medieval literature and medievalism studies, and has a new book, Medievalism and Orientalism, about to appear with Palgrave Macmillan. In addition to his interests in medieval literature and culture, he also publishes studies on the intersection of literary and architectural theory, with a special interest in urbanism. Professor Ganim is the keynote speaker for the Once and Future Medievalism conference; his address to the conference will be given as a public lecture, 'The Middle Ages at the World's Fairs: Medievalism, Orientalism and Imperialism,' (6.00 pm, Monday, 27th September, Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre).
ALL WELCOME
For more information, contact Liz Kertesz, 8344 5497, ekertesz@unimelb.edu.au
Full details of programme available at: http://www.english.unimelb.edu.au/research/seminars.html
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7.
History panel discussion 5 October: Palestinian and Jewish Voices in Dialogue
The History Department at The University of Melbourne presents "Histories in Conflict: Palestinian and Jewish Voices in Dialogue"
Session Four: Tuesday 5 October 2004
Is there a way forward?
What can the Diaspora communities contribute?
A panel discussion on the future of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship.
Panelists will include Danny Ben-Moshe, Maher Mughrabi, Mark Baker and Ihab Shalbak.
Location: Charles Pearson Lecture Theatre, ERC Building, University of Melbourne
6.30pm
Please visit the Dialogue website: http://www.history.unimelb.edu.au/HIC-PJ/
Enquiries: Madeleine Hamilton +61 3 8344 4461, m.hamilton@unimelb.edu.au
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8.
Staff/postgraduate 6-a-side soccer: Match report
A full report on the 5th/6th place play-off report is on the Department website at:
http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/new/match_report.html
Next season commences on October 18.
Ben.Harper
Research and Graduate Studies Administrator
School of Political Science, Criminology & Sociology
The University of Melbourne
VIC 3010
AUSTRALIA
61 3 8344 6571
http://www.politics.unimelb.edu.au/courses/postgraduate/