Bios and Abstracts

A - L :: M - Z

"Symbolic defiance: contemporary Palestinian isues of culture, identity and nationalism"
In her recent essay Poetry as Homeland American Palestinian Nathalie Handal addresses a problem faced by many Palestinian women: "what is it to be Palestinian? Is it being born there? We weren't. Is it having lived there? We haven't. Is it having a Palestinian passport? Such a thing doesn't exist. Is it speaking Arabic? We can't really. Then why are we Palestinian?"

This paper documents some of the extraordinary challenges facing Palestinian women, both in the scattered communities of the international Palestinian diaspora and those remaining in the historical Palestinian region. What remains of traditional Palestinian society and culture half a century after the creation of the State of Israel, and what legacies of this culture can be found in diaspora communities? What part has cultural heritage played in Palestinian nationalism, and how have Palestinian women utilised pre 1948 cultural forms to construct cultural and political identity?

Through adaptation and re-invention of cultural symbols, Palestinian women have invested elements of their traditional culture with a new meaning specific to contemporary national discourse. In the current revival of Palestinian cultural heritage - in the texts of Palestinian diaspora poets and the textiles of Palestinian refugees - a lost cultural identity has been re-imagined, and what it means to be "Palestinian" redefined.

Maureen Bettle
I have taught literature at New England University (1964-1970)
The Australian National University (1970-1982)
The Canberra College of Advanced Education(later University of Canberra) 1983---to present
I am currently the convenor of Literary Studies at UC.
I was Dean of Students at UC 1995-1996
From 1998-1999, I was the programme director of the Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing
From 2000-2002 I was the director of the Bachelor of Arts
During all of its period of production (1988-2001 ) I was on the editorial board of Redoubt magazine, first as fiction editor and later as literary editor.
I have a BA Hons degree in English from Cambridge and an MA from the same university.

Dawn Casey
Prior to her appointment as Director of the National Museum of Australia in 1999 Ms Dawn Casey was Chief General Manager of the Acton Peninsula Project Task Force, the body responsible for the construction of the new facilities for the National Museum of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, on Acton Peninsula in Canberra.

Ms Casey has wide-ranging experience in the management of indigenous and cultural heritage policy issues. As a member of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, she was responsible for the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.  She has provided policy advice on issues associated with Australia's national cultural institutions and served as Chair of the Heritage Collections Committee, the body with responsibility for implementing specific programs to address issues of collection management, preservation and conservation, research and documentation, and access.

Art and Politics at the National Museum of Australia
Museums have an important role to play in cultural survival. In recent years the museums in a number of settler societies have been obliged to radically reconsider their relationship with indigenous people. The result has been a growth in consultation and partnership, and of exhibitions which feature the indigenous voice

Australian Indigenous art as an expression of identity, human rights or social justice has a major role to play in present day museum exhibitions. Examples at the National Museum include Fiona Foley's work 'Annihilation of the blacks', Brook Andrew's ceiling banners 'totem' and 'visitation' and Elaine Russell's series of works detailing her childhood memories of life on an Aboriginal Mission. Exhibitions outside the Museum's walls have included 'Stories of Australia' in Guangzhou, China, and 'Reconciliation - the melting pot of culture' at the Reconciliation Australia Office in Canberra.

Inevitably, public responses to contemporary Indigenous art in a museum context have been mixed. In the current cultural climate, some critics feel free to accuse the National Museum of being 'political', or placing too much emphasis on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander subject matter. The majority of visitors however respond to the art works and other Indigenous displays with enthusiasm. We see evidence that non-Indigenous Australians are keen to learn more about Indigenous culture, including the confronting and difficult issues embodied in contemporary art practice.

Professor Hilary Charlesworth
Hilary Charlesworth is Professor and Director of the Centre for International and Public Law at the Australian National University.

Her research and teaching interests are in international law and human rights law. In 1997 she wrote, with Burns Weston and Richard Falk, International Law and World Order. The Boundaries of International Law, written with Christine Chinkin, was published by Manchester University Press in 2000 and awarded the American Society of International Law's 2001 Certificate of Merit as a "preeminent contribution to creative scholarship". Her most recent publication is Writing in Rights (UNSW Press 2002).

Professor Charlesworth graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1979 with an LLB(Hons) and BA(Hons). After completing her Articles she worked as an Associate to Justice Ninian Stephen of the High Court of Australia. She graduated from Harvard Law School with an SJD in 1986.

In 1987, she was appointed as a Lecturer at the University of Melbourne Law School. From 1993-97 she was John Bray Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide. She was a part time Commissioner with the Australian Law Reform Commission on its reference into Equality before the Law in 1993-94. From 1994-99 she was a Hearing Commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. She was President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law from 1997-2001. She is Co-Editor of the Australian Yearbook of International Law and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law. She is also a Professor in the Global Law Faculty of New York University. From September to December 2001, she was the Manley O Hudson Visiting Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School.

She was recently appointed as the chair of the ACT government's committee to investigate whether the ACT should adopt a bill of rights.

The uses and abuses of culture in human rights law
International human rights offers support for the cultural life of groups and individuals. It recognises a right to participate in cultural activities and rights to freedom of association and freedom of speech. Human rights law also accepts the realm of culture as a restraint on human rights. This paper will consider the tensions in the various ideas of culture in human rights law. It will investigate arguments about cultural relativism and whether or not a universal approach to human rights is possible or desirable.

Christine Chinkin
Christine Chinkin is Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an Affiliated Overseas Faculty Member, University of Michigan. She was previously Dean and Head of the Department of Law at the University of Southampton (1993-1997). She has also taught at the University of Sydney Law School (1984-1992), the National University of Singapore (1981-1984), the New York Law School (1978-80) and Queen Mary College, University of London (1975-1978). She graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London with an LLB (1st class hons) and has an LLM from both the University of London and Yale University and a PhD from the University of Sydney.

Christine Chinkin's major teaching and research interests are in international law, human rights, especially the human rights of women, international and domestic alternative dispute resolution and feminist theory. She is the author of Third Parties in International Law (Oxford University Press 1993); Dispute Resolution in Australia (Butterworths 1992) (with H. Astor) and The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (forthcoming Manchester University Press, 2000) (with H. Charlesworth) and many articles in legal and other journals. She is an editor of the American Journal of International Law. While at the Humanities Research Centre Professor Chinkin will be researching issues arising out of the international negotiation of peace agreements and the role of women.

The paper will introduce the international legal framework for the protection of human rights, in particular those provisions that have special relevance for artists. It then explores further linkages between art and human rights through discussion of the International Women's War Crimes Tribunal. This was a Tribunal conceived of and run by Asian women's non-governmental organisations which considered the legal responsibility of the Japanese state and individual military and governmental leaders - including the Emperor Hirohito - for crimes against humanity committed against the comfort Women.

Christine Clark
Christine Clark studied art history at the University of Queensland and undertook a Master of Business Administration with dissertations in cultural policy and Australian/Asian relations at Griffith University, Brisbane. Whilst working at the Queensland Art Gallery, she was extensively involved in the first three Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibitions in 1993, 1996 and 1999, including co-curating the Philippine component with Julie Ewington and Imedla Cajipe-Endaya for the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial.  Through an Asialink Arts Management Residency she has conducted art management workshops throughout Indonesia and is currently working with Indonesian curators on numerous projects for 2003 and 2004. Christine Clark is Special Projects Manager at the Humanities Research Centre, where she is working on an Art and Human Rights and Asia-Pacific museum project.

Dr Miriam Estrada-Castillo
Dr Miriam Estrada-Castillo, born in Ecuador, South America, is an International Expert on Human Rights issues, currently working as a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, as part of the Centre's Latin America theme for 2002. Amongst her many engagements and her research work: Australian & Latin American Human Rights Action Plans: Critical and Comparative Analysis Dr Estrada will be a keynote speaker and panelist in September at the HRC Conference, The Diaspora of the Latin American Imagination. Until March 2002, Dr Estrada was the Technical Director of the Project to Support the Ecuadorian National Human Rights Plan, for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Geneva, Switzerland). Due to her long experience, extending over 30 years, and to her qualifications, Dr Estrada has accomplished an important work on the dissemination and diffusion of the Human Rights and Culture of Peace Principles all over the Latin American Region.

As the Special Adviser on Human Rights to the Andean Parliament she prepared and edited the Work Plan for the Region adopted by the Fifth Commission of the Andean Parliament regarding Human Rights, Rights of the Andean and Afro-Andean peoples, women, adolescent, and children rights. She also accomplished the approval of resolutions 001 to 007 of 1999 from the Andean Parliament, Fifth Commission; in regards to commitment of legal reforms, emission of laws and resolutions, dissemination, promotion and training of international human rights conventions; the commitment to adapt and diffuse the Optional Protocol of CEDAW and those referring to the work of minors, traffic and sexual exploitation of children and adolescents.

Dr Estrada has been a Member and the Vice-President (1996-1999) of the Monitoring Committee of the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of All Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). As such Dr Estrada was a member of the editing group for the text of the Optional Protocol to the CEDAW and participated as member of the task force of the Committee in the preparations for the Fourth World Conference for Women, 1995. A lawyer, journalist, educator and human rights activist, Dr Estrada has held, amongst others, the following positions: Vice Minister of Social Welfare of Ecuador, Member and the Vice-president (1996-1999) of the Monitoring Committee of the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of All Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Special Adviser on Human Rights to the Andean Parliament, to the Presidency of the Supreme Court and to the Presidency of the National Congress of Ecuador, President of the Ecuadorian Juvenile Court of Ecuador, author of the Ecuadorian Legislation of Minor and Regional Adviser on Human Rights and Culture of Peace for UNESCO.

She has written and published 14 books related to Human Rights, Family Law, Women's and Children's Human Rights and Political and Social Issues.

John Gage
Visual Culture and Human Rights
The legal extension of human rights in the 1960s to include 'culture' opened the door to a vast range of ambiguities, especially in the area of visual media. Anthropologists have tended until recently to steer clear of interpreting material culture, and with good reason. This paper looks at some of the difficulties facing those who seek to identify specific attributes in the visual cultures of the post-modern world, and in particular at the developing notion of 'traditional' in recent Australian Aboriginal art.

Amar Galla

Diana Glazebrook
Teaching (performance) art is like sharpening the blade of a knife
The title of this paper is an aphorism told to me by a West Papuan artist living in a UNHCR camp in Papua New Guinea. The development of people's cultural sensibilities is analogous to the sharpening of a weapon: it can be used in people's defence or resistance, and may be perceived as threatening. This was the case in the detention without trial of West Papuan performance artist and museum curator Arnold Ap. His detention and subsequent death led to the flight into Papua New Guinea in February 1984 of some two hundred and fifty people, including Ap's students, colleagues and fellow musicians. This paper explores an emergent discourse of 'West Papuan culture' in the 1980s that represented a bounded cultural repertoire oriented to 'Melanesia' in the east undermined by the intrusion of 'Indonesian' cultural forms. It considers how this emergent discourse of West Papuan culture articulated with the Indonesian state's discourse of national culture, for example in the tropes 'unity in diversity' and the 'unified archipelago'. It looks at the role of a cultural performance movement led by Arnold Ap and Sam Kapissa in the political milieu leading up to 1984. Throughout the paper, resonance of this cultural performance movement is related back to the UNHCR camp in Papua New Guinea where many West Papuan refugees accorded to Ap's life and work, the status of prophet and national martyr.

Ihab Hassan
For more information about the speaker, visit www.ihabhassan.com and the Humanities Research Centre's Visiting Fellows pages.

Painting a continent - or Nothing. A Kenotic View of Human Rights
The paper, personal in tone, focuses on the concept of the Void, or Nothingness, as a spiritual force in Antipodean art, and explores the relation between human rights and kenotic spirituality. The artists considered include Fairweather, McCahon, Hunter, Gittoes, Valamanesh, among others. Selective slides will be shown from these artists.

Subhash Jaireth
Poetry, Resistance and City-Space: Reclaiming the City through Poetry
There are public spaces where, to cite Vito Acconci, Œthe public gathers because it has a right to the place,¹ However there are also spaces which are Œmade public¹, Œwhere the public gathers precisely because it doesn¹t have the right to.¹ These are made public by force. In my brief essay I want to explore the relation between poetry, resistance and city-space. The city provides space and modes of circulation for poetry, the means to be meaningful and hence the means to survive, but in this process the city is itself re-constituted and re-claimed. In the essay I shall first describe the way we, my Russian friend and I, in August 1993, retraced the streets of Osip Mandelshtam¹s Moscow, recounting the uncanny story of survival of his poetry in Russia. The focus then will shift to modern day Canberra where Pen Canberra, a chapter of the Pen International has created a walkway of trees to commemorate writers and journalists who perished in the prisons in Nigeria, Australia, East Timor, Afghanistan, Turkey and Russia.

Linda Jaivin
'Writing Refugees'
A terrible tragedy is unfolding in our country. We are mistreating hundreds of genuine refugees, including children, locking them up behind razor wire for indefinite periods and demonising and vilifying them almost daily in the media. As a storyteller, I feel compelled to tell the human stories that make up this tragedy. As a writer with a naturally comic bent, I am challenged to find the right voice with which to relate these stories; luckily, the asylum seekers I know all have a good sense of humour and know that sometimes you have to tickle people before you punch them in the guts.

Dr Brian Kennedy
Brian P. Kennedy MA, PhD was born and educated in Dublin. Prior to becoming Assistant Director at the National Gallery of Ireland, he worked in the European Commission, Brussels, and in Ireland at the Chester Beatty Library, Government Publications Office, and Department of Finance. He has wide experience as an author, lecturer and public speaker at conferences and seminars, and as a contributor to arts programs on radio and television. He was Chair of the Irish Association of Art Historians, 1996-97.

Dr Kennedy is the third Director of the National Gallery of Australia. He took up the post in September 1997, and since then he has worked to make the Collection more accessible to the public in Canberra, throughout the country and abroad through the introduction of free admission, a broad range of exhibitions, an expansion of the loans and travelling exhibitions programs, and development of an extensive multi-media site. He has also initiated a staffing review, a more focussed acquisition policy, notable purchases, and major exhibitions. There has been a drive for greater public and private funds, and this has brought Government support for a major building enhancement project, and significant private donations for acquisitions, along with corporate sponsorship.

Dr Kennedy is Chair of the Council of Australian Art Museum Directors, and Chair of the National Capital Tourism Alliance. He is a member of the Boards of Art Exhibitions Australia and the ACT Tourism Industry Council. Dr Kennedy is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management, and an Honorary Ambassador for Canberra.

The Certainty of Uncertainty: Art and Human Rights
It was Flaubert who said that: ŒOf all lies, art is the least untrue¹. No work of art is worth a human life. But if people continue to believe that art objects and art experiences can help us to question our certainties, then they have a vital place in the defence of human rights. These rights include freedom of creative expression. Works of art should never be so seductive that we forget that people made them.

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