Asian Cities and Cultural Change Conference
Venue: Old Canberra House
Date: Friday 1 July 2005
This colloquium explores critical issues related to contemporary urban
public culture in Asian cities arising from a joint research project
entitled “Urban Imaginaries” between HRC, ANU and Lingnan
University, Hong Kong.
Speakers will include:
Meaghan MORRIS, Lingnan University,
Hong Kong, China
Stephen CHAN, Lingnan University,
Hong Kong, China
Oscar HO, Director, Museum of Contemporary
Art Shanghai, former Exhibition Director, Hong Kong Arts Centre
WANG Xiaoming, Shanghai University,
China
Aneerudha PAUL, Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi
Institute for Architecture, Mumbai, India
Shekhar KRISHNAN, Collective
Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT), Mumbai, India
Geremie R. BARMÉ,
ANU
Graeme TURNER, University
of Queensland
Chairs will include:
Ian DONALDSON, ANU
Iain McCALMAN, ANU
Adam SHOEMAKER, ANU
David WILLIAMS, ANU
Caroline TURNER, ANU
Jonathan MANE-WHEOKI, National Museum of New Zealand
Conveners:
Professor Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University
Professor Stephen Chan, Lingnan University
Dr Caroline Turner, HRC, Email: caroline.turner@anu.edu.au
and Associate Professor Jen Webb,
University of Canberra
Enquiries:
Leena Messina
Programs Manager, Humanities Research Centre, ANU
Leena.Messina@anu.edu.au
Abstracts & Biographies
Session 1:
Title of Paper: VACANT POSSESSION/KORYU: WOMEN
AND CULTURE IN TRANSITION
PROFESSOR MEAGHAN MORRIS
Department of Cultural Studies
Lingnan University
vacant possession: (English) the right
of immediate possession of a house or property, the prior occupant having
departed.
from The Macquarie Dictionary
koryu: (Korean) temporary abode; migration; the cycle
of life and death.
from KIM Soyoung, Koryu: Southern Women, South Korea
If it is true that “at the beginning of the 21st century more
than half the world’s population lives in cities, and most major
and minor metropolitan regions are undergoing dramatic transformation”
(as the conference outline states), then the diversity and speed of
these changes can have a distinctive impact in the lives of women. If
it is true that the cutting edge of change is now to be found in public
cultures in dynamic urban settings, and brought into contact by global
media industries, communication technologies and cultural economies,
how are women participating in those cultures?
These questions are large, and rendered all the more complex as these
forces intensify the way in which “women’s lives are interwoven,
and also separated, by the increasing economic disparity between North
and South, and by the contesting values of East and West”(CHANG
Pilwha). Living in disparity and contestation, we are also living through
a transition in the value of culture, the significance of gender, and
the political force of both. However this is not necessarily a “new”
experience either in the history of feminisms, or for women, whose lives
and traditions in many cultural contexts are founded on the work of
dealing with change and displacement.
In this paper I will draw for my discussion of these questions on two
works of cinema that explore the problem of narrating historically drastic
transition, as it links and divides women’s lives and shapes urban
experience in Sydney and Seoul: Vacant Possession (1995, Australia),
directed by Margot Nash, and Women’s History Trilogy (2000-2004,
Korea), directed by Kim Soyoung.
Biography:
Meaghan MORRIS is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies, and Co-ordinator
of the Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Program, at Lingnan
University, Hong Kong. She has written widely on the role of cinema,
the media, and popular cultural history in forming national and transnational
cultures and her books include The Pirate's Fiancée: feminism,
reading, postmodernism (London, 1988), Australian Cultural Studies:
A Reader, co-ed. with John Frow (Sydney and Chicago, 1993), Too Soon,
Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington, 1998), and ‘Race’
Panic and the Memory of Migration, co-ed. with Brett de Bary (Hong Kong
University Press, 2001) as volume 2 of Traces: A Multilingual Journal
of Cultural Theory and Translation. Since January 2004, she has been
Senior Editor of Traces, a series published in English (HKUP), Chinese
(Nanjing: Jiangsu Education Press), Japanese (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten)
and Korean (Seoul: Moonwha Kwahaksa). Her forthcoming books are Hong
Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (co-ed.
with Stephen C.-K. Chan and Siu-leung Li, HKUP), and New Keywords: A
Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (co-ed. with Tony Bennett
and Lawrence Grossberg, Blackwells).
Session 2:
Title of Paper: GEOGRAPHIES OF RESISTANCE
ANEERUDHA PAUL
Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture
and SHEKHAR KRISHNAN
Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT), Mumbai
The past twenty years have witnessed the decisive end of attempts at
state-centred urban planning in Mumbai. The post-Independence Development
Plan, which has guided land, housing, and economic growth since the
sixties, has been displaced in favour of piecemeal investments in infrastructure
and transport, and housing and slum rehabilitation by the state, with
increased participation from private builders and agencies. With the
retreat of the state from its ambitious agendas of rational land-use,
equitable distribution of services and resources, and protection of
the environment, the instrumentalities of abstract spatial planning
used by the state have withered and mutated into new urban forms marked
by severe exclusions and enclosures. Classical urban planning practice
was historically premised on the segregation of the functions of modern
urban life into residential, commercial/industrial, and public spheres,
and their centralised location governed by state directives. However,
Asian cities have constantly demonstrate the falsity of this separation
of functions — with their vast districts of dense, mixed-use settlements
governed by porous legalities, popular politics, and tactical negotiations
over space and survival. This vast and complex economy has been inadequately
imagined as the Third World 'slum' or theorised as the 'informal economy'.
With the retreat of the state, centralised planning practice and its
technocratic spatial imagination has been appropriated into a new discourse
on urban space in which a predatory class of private builders dominates
the production of formal housing for a minority of the rich, amidst
rising inequality in access to housing and basic services for the majority
of the urban poor in Mumbai.
Modern, western approaches to architecture, urban design and planning
still treat urban housing as a place of residence, domesticity, and
leisure — as a privileged site of social relations, and a prized
object of consumption. However, a greater understanding of the cultural
history of Asian cities must situate urban housing as a key unit of
production in the urban economy, the material grid and medium through
which everyday politics and culture are experienced. In mega-cities
like Mumbai, the dissolution of large manufacturing industries in the
eighties, and growth of new elite-oriented service economies in the
nineties, has elevated the construction industry and land speculation
into the primary circuits of cash and capital accumulation in the city.
While a functional and economic separation of home and workplace is
a central tenet of modern urban spatial practice, in Asian cities like
Mumbai this functional separation poses severe obstacles to situating
the production of housing as part of the larger 'informal' economy of
small scale manufacturing, casual labour, and flexible employment which
defines the urban landscape for the majority of the urban poor. Such
a classical understanding of the role of the housing economy lends support
to the predatory urbanism and its regime of speculative accumulation,
legal exclusion, and the violence of mass demolitions of the homes and
workshops of the urban poor. The valorisation of the middle-class home
and over-consumption in the urban media has its parallel in the marginalisation
of the majority of the urban poor from land and housing — some
60% of the urban population of around 14 million citizens. Secure housing
is now the most desired object of consumption by all classes, from land-less
squatters and working slum-dwellers to established tenants and the middle
classes. The new social and spatial relations of global Mumbai have
given rise to various movements for housing and tenancy rights, and
are now becoming the main arena for public politics.
Our presentation will focus on two practical interventions by the Collective
Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in these new urban landscapes in Mumbai,
on understanding urban housing as social practice in the contemporary
city. The first interventions include an online platform, called the
Mumbai Free Map [1], in which a digital base map Greater Mumbai is being
made available in an accessible and interactive web-based interface.
Through this platform — built completely on open source software,
copyleft urban maps, and public geo-data — communities can access
and enter free information on their neighbourhoods, buildings, public
spaces and environment and assess the existing opportunities for self-development.
This information, while ostensibly 'public', has previously only available
to a closed circuit of builders, municipal officials, and their agents,
and our hope is to create a new medium for communities to realise their
spatial rights in Mumbai. The second intervention by CRIT which we shall
discuss is a programme for Community Housing Support [2] providing financial
models, policy advice, and architectural, design and information services
to urban poor communities seeking to redevelop their housing through
an open and decentralised design and financial model, with communities
replacing builders as the agents of self-development. In this programme,
CRIT is working with local housing associations in the Mumbai Tenants
Federation and Slum Rehabilitation Society. Through an open design and
production process, communities are actively involved in the design
and construcion of integrated home and work units, spatial types which
allow for inclusion and flexibility. The model of developing a community
corpus to finance the housing project also allows use of the often lucrative
profits from commercial land values to be reinvested in the maintenance
of the housing by the community as a secure asset.
The presentation will focus on the new geographies of community resistance
to the predatory forces of the new metropolitan environment, through
our work with local housing rights movements and associations of the
urban poor. While the Asian city is famous for its rich local geographies
and exotic cultural mixes, we need more detailed studies and analyses
of the cultural history of housing in Asian cities — both as a
material technology and as a social practice. The tactics and negotiations
of urban poor communities in the context of Mumbai's contemporary housing
crisis indicate a new form of urban politics. The future directions
will be articulated by a historical understanding of the production
of urban housing as material culture in the Asia Pacific.
[1] http://www.crit.org.in/projects/gis
[2] http://www.crit.org.in/projects/betwala
Biography:
Aneerudha PAUL, an architect and urban designer, is Executive Member
and Founding Trustee of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust),
Mumbai, and has been Director of the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute
of Architecture (KRVIA), Mumbai, since January 2005. He was the Deputy
Director of KRVIA from 2000, and from 1995-2000 the Coordinator of the
KRVIA Design Cell. He completed his BArch form Bengal Engineering College,
Calcutta, in 1990, and his March from the School of Planning and Architecture,
New Delhi, in 1993.
Shekhar KRISHNAN is a social scientist and independent researcher based
in Mumbai. He is an Executive Member of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives
Trust), Mumbai (http://www.crit.org.in), consultant with the Srishti
School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore (http://www.srishtiblr.org),
and partner-consultant with Mahiti Infotech, Bangalore (http://www.mahiti.org).
He is also Visiting Faculty at the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute
of Architecture (KRVIA), Mumbai (http://www.krvia.ac.in). For more information,
and to read and download his work online, go to http://crit.org.in/members/shekhar
He has been based in Mumbai for the past six years. He was the founding
Coordinator then Associate Director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge
Action & Research) (20012003), and was the Founder and Joint Convenor
of the Mumbai Study Group at the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai (20002002).
For more information, see his full curriculum vitae (http://crit.org.in/members/shekhar/cv)
and full list of papers and publications (http://crit.org.in/members/shekhar/papers).
Session 3:
Title of Paper: THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY AND ITS
OTHER: THE ETHNICISING OF THE AUSTRALIAN SUBURB
PROFESSOR GRAEME TURNER
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
University of Queensland
The suburb has been a foundational component of the Australian
urban imaginary for several generations, and one of the means through
which a version of national identity that mythologized the rural environment
dealt with the fact that most of its citizens actually lived in the
city. As multiculturalism has to some extent weakened the exclusivity
of earlier versions of national identity, and as contemporary versions
of national identity have taken up the lifestyle decorations multiculturalism
has supplied, the Australian suburb has begun to lose some of its mythic
centrality-- giving way to the cosmopolitan city. Among the consequences
of this has been a radical revision of the place the suburb occupies
in the national imaginary. While the cosmopolitan inner urban spaces
explicitly welcome globalizing influences as a sign of their inclusiveness,
the outer suburbs have begun to fragment into communities defined in
various ways by minority ethnicities, economic disadvantage, and criminality.
Most vividly apparent in locations such as Bankstown and Cabramatta
for their connection with, respectively, the Lebanese and the Vietnamese
community, and most dramatic in its recent effect on Muslim-Australian
communities, this shift constitutes a major change in the meanings associated
with Australian urban and suburban imaginaries.
Biography:
Graeme TURNER is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre
for Critical and Cultural Studies since 1999. He is one of the key figures
in the development of cultural and media studies in Australia and has
an outstanding international reputation in the field. His work is used
in many disciplines—cultural and media studies, communications,
history, literary studies, and film and television studies—and
it has been translated into seven languages. Graeme's research interests
are largely in Australian media and popular culture, and his current
research project is an ARC-funded study of talkback radio. His most
recent publication is a study of the production and consumption of celebrity,
Understanding Celebrity, published by Sage (UK) in May 2004. Other recent
publications include The Film Cultures Reader (Routledge, 2002), and
(with Stuart Cunningham) The Media and Communications in Australia (Allen
and Unwin, 2002), (with Frances Bonner and P.David Marshall) Fame Games:
The production of celebrity in Australia (Cambridge University Press,
2001).Graeme Turner was elected President of the Australian Academy
of the Humanities in November 2004, is a member of the Expert Advisory
Committee for the Humanities and Creative Arts in the Australian Research
Council, and the Director of Research for the Faculty of Arts at the
University of Queensland. While he no longer takes undergraduate classes,
he continues to provide research supervision to postgraduate students
enrolled at the University.
Session 4:
Title of Paper: BEIJING, A GARDEN OF VIOLENCE
PROFESSOR GEREMIE BARMÉ
Division of Pacific and Asian History
Australian National University
This paper examines the history of Beijing in relation to gardens‹imperial,
princely, public and private and the impetus of the ‘gardener’,
in particular in the in 20th-century. Engaging with the theme of ‘violence
in the garden’ as articulated by such scholars as Zygmunt Bauman
and Martin Jay, I reflect on Beijing as a ‘garden of violence’,
both before the rise of the socialist state in 1949, and during the
years leading up to the 2008 Olympics.
Biography:
Geremie R. BARMÉ is Deputy Convener and Professor, Division of
Pacific and Asian History. His research work in Chinese culture and
intellectual history has been interspersed with film, web site and writing
projects in the United States, China and Hong Kong. His research interests
include the history of Beijing and gardens, 20th century Chinese intellectual
and cultural history; contemporary Chinese cultural and intellectual
debates; modern historiography; Ming-Qing literature and aesthetics;
and Cultural Revolution history (1950s-70s). His latest film Morning
Sun(Boston, 2003) (www.morningsun.org), a study of the culture that
created the Cultural Revolution which he co-wrote and co-directed with
Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, won the John OConnor Award for best
film from the American Historical Association. His book An Artistic
Exile: a life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975) (University of California Press,
2002) was awarded the 2004 Joseph Levenson Prize for Modern China. His
latest book, edited with Miriam Lang, is a collection of oral histories
by Sang Ye entitled China Candid: the People on the Peoples Republic
and it will appear through University of California Press later this
year. He is also co-editor with Dr Bruce Doar of the online quarterly
China Heritage Newsletter (www.chinaheritagenewsletter.org) and editor
of East Asian History.
Session 5:
Title of Paper: CREATION OF MYTHOLOGY AS A
SOCIAL CRITIQUE
OSCAR HO
Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai
Shanghai, China
The talk focuses on how Hong Kong people consciously or subconsciously
invented or rearranged traditional myths, ghost stories, fung-shiu stories
to create new meaning as critical metaphor, and the talk will be concluded
with some exhibition and art projects that I have been involved with,
to show a very creative and inventive use of urban mythology to voice
the people's opinions, and most important of all, to create a sense
of identity.
Biography:
Oscar HO Hing-kay got his B.F.A. degree at the University of Saskatchewan,
and M.F.A. at the University of California, Davis. From 1988 to 2001,
he was the Exhibition Director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, curating
and co-curating numerous local and international exhibitions, including
China’s New Art, Post 1989, Hong Kong Sixties: Designing Identity
and Contemporary Photography from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China,
Very Fun Park: Contemporary Art from Taiwan. In addition to his curatorial
work in Hong Kong, he curated actively in various parts of the world,
including New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, United States and United
Kingdom. He was invited as guest curator for the 2nd and 3rd Asia Pacific
Triennials at Queensland, Australia; curator for the Asia region for
the ‘Container 96’ in Copenhagen in 1996, and was chief
curator for the HX Art Festival at Halifax, Canada in 2000.He was senior
research officer on cultural policy at the Home Affairs Bureau of the
Hong Kong Government from 2001 to 2003. From 2003 to 2004, he was teaching
curatorship and art criticism at the Chinese University and Lingnam
University. Since the mid 1980s, he has been writing for local and international
newspapers and art journals, and is the founder and currently president
of the Hong Kong chapter of the International Art Critics Association,
and a member of the Founding Editorial Board of the AFTERALL art journal.
He is currently the director of a newly established museum of contemporary
art in Shanghai.
Session 5:
Title of Paper: REAL ESTATE MARKET: THE NEW
STATE IDEOLOGICAL APPARATUS IN TODAY’S SHANGHAI
WANG XIAOMING
Center for Contemporary Culture Studies
Shanghai University
China’s “reform,” started in late 1970s, was motivated
by two major popular aspirations: 1) the development of economy and
raising living standards, and 2) cultural deregulation and political
democracy.
Because of what happened in, and out of, the mainland China during the
1980s, especially in 1989-1991, the two popular aspirations were forced
into one contorted desire: yearning to experience freedom, liberation,
and other values of life through personal economic prosperity. The social
consensus on “the supremacy of individuals’ material interests”
was thus formed. It set off a “reform” very different from
that of the 1980s, which has been ongoing since mid and late 1990s till
today.
The new “reform” has changed the structure of Chinese society
fundamentally, China today is entirely different from it was 20 years
ago. Although it almost abandoned the socialist model of 1950s-1060s
completely, it has not come much closer to the social model of the capitalist
West. It is slipping in a direction that existing human knowledge cannot
tell whither it leads.
New conditions create new needs. The effective construction of a new
mainstream ideology has been crucial since 1990s for the reproduction
of not just the culture but the whole society.
The new ideology, however, cannot be produced the way Maoist official
ideology was. The Chinese today try to experience more and more the
meaning/values of the intangible in the prosperity of personal life.
The new ideology, therefore, must establish its foundation in the individual’s
everyday mode of life. Since the focus of contemporary attention is
on an individual’s material interests and only such interests
could continuously attract the participation of the powerful, the new
ideology must lean on economic activities, or even perform some economic
functions directly, i.e. create some major economic benefits, to ensure
the sustained involvement of the powerful.
Last but not least, China today is still a country of centralized power;
negative images have been created of its government among the populace
for various reasons. The new ideology must, therefore, acquire a double
function: meeting the public’s need to vent their dissatisfaction
and guiding them eventually back to the beaten track of compromising
with the reality and accepting the government’s control. This
is to say what the society of 1990s needed is more of a social mechanism
that produces the new ideology than a new mainstream ideology itself.
This new social mechanism is, to borrow and develop an Althusserian
concept, a new State-market Ideological Apparatus.
At the experimental stage in mid 1980s and quickly taken shape in 1990s,
the real estate market, with its advertising industry, is such a new
ideological apparatus. Taking the market in Shanghai as an example,
my presentation will give some basic analysis of this new kind of IA.
Biography:
WANG Xiaoming, a world-renowned scholar of Lu Xun, has been Professor
of Chinese Literature at the East China Normal University in Shanghai
since 1992. In 2001, he established the Center for Contemporary Culture
Studies at Shanghai University, and has since served concurrently as
its director. In 2004, he set up for Shanghai University the first graduate
program in the field of cultural studies on the Chinese mainland. Author
of over 10 books and editor of more, Wang is currently leading a team
of researchers working on the emergence of a new ideology through various
forms of urban culture in contemporary Shanghai. For the international
cultural studies community, Wang serves on the Editorial Board of Traces.
He is also a Research Associate of the “Cultural Education and
Policy” research cluster of the Kwan Fong Cultural Research and
Development Programme at Lingnan University.
Biography:
Stephen CHAN is Program Director of Master of Cultural Studies at Lingnan
University, Hong Kong, where he served as Department Head of Cultural
Studies from 2000 to 2003, and the first Director of its BA Cultural
Studies in 1999. Prior to that, he taught English/Cultural Studies at
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he edited the bilingual Hong
Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin and directed the Hong Kong Cultural Studies
Program (1994-1998). Chan received his education in Hong Kong (U Hong
Kong, BA 1978, MPhil 1981) and USA (U California at San Diego, PhD 1986).
Published on modern Hong Kong and Chinese culture, he was the founding
editor of the book series Hong Kong Cultural Studies (in Chinese) released
by the Oxford University Press (China) since 1997. He is the editor
of Identity and Public Culture, Practice of Affect: Hong Kong Popular
Song Lyrics, and Cultural Imaginary and Ideology. Co-author of Hong
Kong Un-Imagined: History, Culture and the Future (Taipei 1997), Chan's
scholarly interests range from literary, filmic to a broad range of
other forms in cultural imagination. His current scholarly interests
are popular representation and narrative identity, the transnational
re-shaping of Hong Kong action cinema, urban public culture, and critical
education through popular genres. His latest works include Building
zCultural Studies for Postcolonial Hong Kong (Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity
and Translation, Rodopi 2002), From Literary to Cultural Studies: A
Hong Kong Perspective, (Methodologies in Literary Research, Taiwan UP
2002), and a co-edited volume (with M. Morris and Li, S.) entitled Hong
Kong Connections Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Hong Kong
University Press 2005).
Biography:
Jen WEBB is the director of the creative writing
program, and teaches in the writing and cultural theory areas. Her academic
interests range from neomarxist theorising of social practice to aesthetic
forms and content, with snippets of semiotics, narrative theory, communication
theory and social research, along the way. Jen's books are mainly in
the academic area. She is the editor of a collection of essays, Re-Siting
Theatre (1997, CQU Press) and co-author of several introductory texts:
Understanding Foucault (1999, Allen & Unwin, SAGE), Understanding
Bourdieu (2000, Allen & Unwin, SAGE), and Understanding Globalisation
(2002, SAGE). Her most recent academic book is the co-authored work
Reading the Visual (2004, Allen & Unwin). She is also a contributing
editor, with Tony Schirato, of the SAGE book series, Understanding Culture.
Her academic essays and articles, and her poems and short stories, have
been widely published in Australia and overseas. Jen has recently published
her poetry collection, Proverbs from Sierre Leone (2004, Five Islands
Press) and is currently writing a novel with the working title Angela
Nova, and completing a collection of short stories, Ways of Getting
By. Her current research is split between the relationship between creative
practice and human rights, and the relationship between creative thinking
and embodied subjectivity.
Chairs Biographies:
Ian DONALDSON FAHA, FBA, FRSE, was Professor of English at the ANU from
1969 to 1991, and served as the first Director of the Humanities Research
Centre from 1974 to 1990. In February 2004 he returned to the ANU and
to his former position as Director of the HRC. In the intervening years
he has been Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the
University of Edinburgh (1991-5), Grace 1 Professor of English Literature
(1995-2002), Fellow of King's College (1995-), and foundation Director
of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities
(2001-3) at the University of Cambridge. His books include studies of
Jonson and Shakespeare, Renaissance comedy, modern European drama, the
practice of biography, the rape of Lucretia, and early views of the
Australian Aborigines. With David Bevington and Martin Butler, he is
a General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson,
due for publication by Cambridge University Press in 25 volumes early
in 2006. He is a Consultant Editor (literature 1500-1779) for The Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, to be published later this year, and
is completing a life of Ben Jonson, scheduled for publication by Oxford
University Press in 2006.
Iain McCALMAN FRHS, FASSA, FAHA was born in Nyasaland, Africa and was
educated in Zimbabwe. He arrived in Australia in 1965 and studied for
his BA (Hons) and his MA at the Australian National University, followed
by a PhD at Monash University. He is currently a Federation Fellow jointly
at the Humanities Research Centre and the Centre for Cross-Cultural
Research at the Australian National University. Director of the Humanities
Research Centre from 1995 until July 2003, he was also President of
the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2001 to November 2004.
He has recently been appointed to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering
and Innovation Council (PMSEIC. He has held many Visiting Research Fellowships
in Britain and the United States, most recently as Mellon Visiting Professor
at the California Institute of Technology in early 2005. His last book
was The Last Alchemist: The Seven Extraordinary Lives of Count Cagliostro,
Eighteenth-Century Enchanter, New York: HarperCollins 2003
Adam SHOEMAKER is Professor and Dean of Arts at the
Australian National University in Canberra and Convenor of the National
Institute of the Humanities. He came to Australia from Canada in the
1980s and has had a succession of public, international and academic
positions since that time, including three years spent with the Delegation
of the Commission of the European Communities. He has worked in the
Privy Council Office in Ottawa, in Nice, Toulouse, Antwerp and Brussels,
as well as in Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. He has written or edited
seven books dealing in whole or part with Indigenous cultures and race
relations, including Paperbark (1990), Black Words, White Page (1992),
Mudrooroo: A Critical Study (1993), A Sea Change: Australian Writing
and Photography (1998), David Unaipons Legendary Tales of the Australian
Aborigines (2001) and - most recently - the French-language work Les
Aborigènes dAustralie, published by Gallimard in November 2002.
David WILLIAMS is Professor and Director, ANU School of Art since 1985
and currently Associate Dean (International) in the ANU Faculty of Arts.
Key positions held include Director, Crafts Board of the Australia Council,
Chair, Australian Capital Territory Arts Development Board and Cultural
Council, and membership of the VACB International Committee, Asialink
Visual Arts Committee, Queensland Art Gallery Asia Pacific Triennial
of Contemporary Art Curatorial Committee, the Parliament House Art Collection
Art Advisory Committee and various University review panels. He is currently
Chair, Art Monthly Australia, an Executive member & Deputy Chair
of the Australian Council of University Art & Design Schools and
a member of the ANU Campus Planning & Development Committee and
Public Art Committee.
Professor Williams is a widely respected for his experience in the ACT,
nationally and overseas. He has travelled extensively in SE and North
Asia, and Europe and is a regular contributor to conferences, seminars,
publications and committees on art education, cultural development and
visual arts activities. In 2004, he was awarded the Chevalier in the
Order of Arts & Letters from the French Ministry of Culture and
Communication.
Dr Caroline TURNER is Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre.
Prior to taking up this appointment in January 2000 she spent 20 years
as a senior art museum professional. As Deputy Director of the Queensland
Art Gallery she organised and curated over 60 international exhibitions,
including Matisse with works from 50 collections worldwide, which toured
Australia in 1995 and had audiences of over 300,000. In the mid-1980s
Turner also began working in the area of contemporary Asian and Pacific
art, organising the first exhibition of contemporary Japanese art for
an Australian museum in 1989. Dr Turner was co-founder and Project Director
for nearly ten years for the Asia-Pacific Triennial Project which, over
three exhibitions in 1993, 1996 and 1999, attracted audiences of 60,000,
120,000, and 155,000, Turner was also the scholarly editor of the three
major catalogues and the book Tradition and Change: Contemporary Art
of Asia and the Pacific, University of Queensland Press, 1993 and has
written extensively on contemporary Asian art as well as lecturing on
this subject internationally. Her latest book of essays Art and Social
Change: Contemporary Art of Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Press 2005
is the most up to date survey of the dramatic developments in Asian
and Pacific contemporary art in the last decade. She is currently heading
a research project on an ARC Discovery grant entitled “The Limits
of Tolerance” which explores the links between art and human rights
and is also working on several projects related to museums and museology.
The Australian Government appointed Dr Turner to the Australia-China
Council in the 1980s and the Australia-Indonesia Institute in the 1990's.
At the HRC she has organised numerous conferences and research projects
and she has also been editor of the HRC/CCR Journal Humanities Research
since 2000. She is the convener of the graduate course Art Museums in
Development in the Sustainable Heritage Development Program, Research
School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU. She has been recently appointed
to the Board of Cultural Facilities Corporation at the ACT Government.
Jonathan MANE-WHEOKI is Director Art and Visual Culture at Te Papa Tongarewa
Museum of New Zealand. He was formerly Dean of Music and Fine Arts and
Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Canterbury. He has
published and lectured extensively in the fields of European and New
Zealand art and architectural history, and cultural heritage and museum
issues. Of Ngapuhi (New Zealand Maori) descent, he has long been active
in advancing the cause of Maori education and as a curator of contemporary
Maori art. He has served on the Arts Council and Te Waka Toi (the Maori
Arts Board) of Creative New Zealand, and the Marsden Council, and is
currently a governor of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, President
of the Humanities Society of New Zealand Te Whainga Aronui, and a member
of the Interim Council for the Humanities in New Zealand.