Poster Presentations
STEREO PROPAGANDA: Re-imagining the South Through Stereographic
Photography and the History and Photographs from the African
American Community of Mound Bayou, Mississippi
Lynne Marshall-Linnemeier
Stereo Propaganda is an interdisciplinary endeavor, incorporating
research and investigations into narrative (oral history), documentary
photography (including family photographs), and photo based
mixed media (creativity and fine art). It attempts to effectively
bring together two bodies of collectibles, one personal and
one commercial, with the intent of shifting stereotypes as regards
race and Southern culture. In addition, the project endeavors
to shed new light on the ability of African Americas to overcome
commercial negative imagery through family photographs that
they chose to collect and save. It is, in effect, an investigation
into the dynamics of material culture through the utilization
of images, oral histories, and written documents.
Stereo Propaganda represents the initial effort to survey African
Americans depicted in stereography, an early photographic medium
as well as a field survey of images of African Americans from
the Milburn Crowe Collection located in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.
Mound Bayou, is the largest Negro town in the US and was founded
by the former slaves of Joseph Davis, brother to confederate
president Jefferson Davis. By utilizing stereo cards as a backdrop
for family snapshots from the Crowe Collection and others in
the area, a unique examination of material and visual culture
is presented and examined literally, visually and creatively.
Ties that Bind: Explorations of Economic Slavery in the Context
of [Female] Domestic and [Male] Construction Workers in Singapore
Anita Quigley, Murdoch University
As a small island-state, Singapore’s population currently
supports 100,000 female domestic foreign workers mainly from
the developing nations of Indonesia, Philippines and Sri Lanka.
These individuals perform the daily domestic, child rearing,
and/or elderly caring chores for family units comprising young
professionals, their children and sometimes, their ageing and/or
infirm parents. In the process, they support the economic function
performed by their married female employers by enabling their
participation in a burgeoning labour market. Another type of
migrant worker in the ‘low-skill’ category is that
of the construction worker. In its effort to attain continued
economic growth, Singapore has had to rely on the imported labour
provided by approximately 200,000 workers from Bangladesh, Sri
Lanka and India. Despite hosting such large numbers of foreign
workers, government policies do not necessarily afford them
protection in the substantive areas of their employment (e.g.
hours of work, wage levels, conditions of employment etc). Media
interest in the fallout produced by this lack of consideration
of the social and economic impact of working in a foreign environment
has largely been restricted to reporting instances of grotesque
abuses of authority that often culminate in physical injury
and sometimes in death for both types of workers. In view of
this misalignment of corporate expectation and responsibility,
this presentation seeks to do the following:
• Outline the role of domestic and construction workers
in Singapore and the mechanisms involved in their employment;
• Identify the local and/or regional systems established
to protect the interests of these workers, and the gaps in these
systems;
• Analyse the human costs of not addressing these gaps
(at both macro- and micro- levels), and the long-term implications
of this in the creation of a new ‘economic slavery’
market.
Sheltered Workshop', 'Job Ready Training', 'Assisted Employment'
- or Modern Slavery? for people living with Intellectual Disability
and/or Mental Illness?
Robbie Lloyd, UWS
This poster explores issues surrounding the current debate
on getting more people off the Disability Services Pension and
'into work', cuts to ATLAS respite funding for intellectually
disabled in NSW, and the plethora of Job Network type organisations
allegedly targeting people with intellectual and psychiatric
challenges for 'employment options' - but with no marked change
for the majority.
Sheltered workshops still operate widely. People
living with mental health challenges are doing a full week's
work and not being paid at all, in the name of getting them
'job ready'. And most are too scared to challenge their circumstance,
in case it cuts off their options even more.
In Sydney, a community of belonging involving
about 60 participants, are conducting Life Journalling with
Volunteer Buddies, among young adults living with mental illness
and/or intellectual disability.
This project involves Interpretive Ethnography and Participatory
Action Research being applied in community, as tools for participatory
rehabilitation reform and community empowerment.
Sharing perspectives among participants, who are each keeping
a fortnightly journal of their feelings and experiences for
one year, raises many of the hidden feelings and experiences
behind modern slave-like operations in 'rehabilitation'. The
project includes clustered peer support groups, an overseeing
'consumer' advisory group, documentary film and photographic
essay, and an 'in community', on-going conversation valuing
diversity in consciousness (onto-diversity), and 'working the
business of life', using a structure of feeling and experience
to stimulate awareness.
Landscapes of Slavery: Plantation Structures in Colonial Queensland
Trudy White
Slave holding plantations of the 19th century have left a physical
record of slavery practices in the landscape. Plantation studies
have revealed several major 'types', or preferential patterning
of plantation landscapes throughout slave plantations from the
antebellum American South and colonial Jamaica (Orser 1990;
Otto 1984; Ferguson 1992). It should then be possible to apply
these various typologies to remote contemporary plantations
that historically did not practice slavery, to determine what
factors of control are present in the landscape.
In colonial Queensland, sugar plantations from
the Central district to the Far North thrived for a brief forty
year period under intensive labour practices similar to the
colonial systems established in Jamaica and the West Indies
(Griggs 1997:46). However, by sourcing Melanesian labour under
an indentured labour system, plantation owners and managers
could, and did, refute accusations of slavery being practiced
on their lands (Gistitin 1995:3; Evans et al 1988:149-150).
However, the material witness of the physical landscape of
Queensland's plantations indicates that they bear many similar
characteristics to those landscapes of identified slavery plantations.
While these similarities may be coincidental to known slavery
plantations, they reinforce the use of landscape to order and
control the ethnic mix of white superiors and black labourers.
REFERENCES:
Evans, R., K. Saunders, K. Cronin (1988). Race Relations in
Colonial Queensland. A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and
Extermination. St Lucia, University of Queensland Press.
Ferguson, L. (1992). Uncommon Ground: Archaeology
and Early African America 1650-1800. Washington, Smithsonian
Instituion Press.
Griggs, P. D. (1997). "'The Origins and Early
Development of the Small Cane Farming System in Queensland,
1870-1915'." Journal of Historical Geography 23(1):46-61.
Gistitin, C. (1995). Quite A Colony: South Sea
Islanders in Central Queensland. Brisbane, AEBIS Publishing.
Moore, C. (1985). Kanaka: A History of Melanesian
Mackay. Port Moresby, University of Papua New Guinea.
Orser, C. E. Jr. (1990). 'Archaeological Approaches to New World
Plantation Slavery'. Archaeological Method and Theory. M. Schiffer.
Tucson, University of Arizona Press. Vol. 2: pp.111-154.
Otto, J. S. (1984). Cannon's Point Plantation
1794-1860. Living Conditions and Status Patterns in the Old
South. Orlando, Florida, Academic Press Inc.
