SCMP News: November 2008

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Warawara Seminar Series welcomes Dr. Irene Watson

Warawara Seminar Series welcomes Dr. Irene Watson : noted Indigenous academic Dr. Irene Watson, Associate Professor at the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, University of South Australia, will present an engaging piece, 'On Law', as part of the Warawara Seminar Series on the 19th of November, 2008, from 12.00pm - 2.00pm in The Blackshield Room, Room 501 W3A.

'On Law' By Irene Watson.
How might I speak about the law, and what law is it that I am speaking of? I am speaking of Aboriginal law, but I am also speaking of Australian law. Often when speaking on the sovereignty of Aboriginal law prohibitions arise from the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal side of the colonial frontier. Aboriginal prohibitions are about the authority to speak, for law. So how might I speak without transgressing the law itself? Non-Aboriginal prohibitions arise out of the idea of terra nullius and a colonial history that denied Aboriginal peoples capacity to ‘hold’ law. While the colonial history of Australia denied the existence of Aboriginal law, in this post-Mabo space that has rejected terra nullius, how is it that these two bodies of law might speak or continue to not speak to each other?

Irene Watson belongs to the Tanganekald and Meintangk peoples and in colonial times their languages, peoples and lands became known as Ngarrindjeri. Her mother’s country lies across the Coorong and the south east of South Australia. Irene has worked with her family and a number of other Aboriginal communities for many years in the struggle to protect country, she has also worked on a number of community projects recording the language, oral history, and language place names and story and song lines of her grandmother’s country. Irene has published articles on Aboriginal law and colonialism and also written about her traditional ruwi-country in a self-published book (2002) Looking at you, Looking at me. In 2000 Dr Watson received the Bonython Law School prize from Adelaide University for best PhD (unpublished) thesis, title: Raw Law: The Coming of the Muldarbi and the Path to its Demise. Irene has worked as a legal practitioner with the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement SA and been associated as member of the organization from 1973-2005. As an academic she has taught Aboriginal perspectives and knowledge of law in all three South Australian universities from 1989 until current. Irene has worked collaboratively in advocating space for Aboriginal law, in international fora, including the UN and also Aboriginal jurisdictions established by the Chiefs of Ontario, the First Nations International Court of Justice. Irene has recently completed a post doctoral research fellowship with the University of Sydney, and is currently working at the University of SA, David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research.

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Disciplining Innovation: new learning and teaching in media and cultural studies Nov.21st, Macquarie University, C5C 498

Keynote speaker: Prof. Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University & University of Western Sydney

All are welcome to attend this free colloquium

As disciplines heavily invested in making sense of the contemporary world, media and cultural studies are constantly engaging with new examples, new technologies, new political contexts and even new theoretical paradigms. The progressive political ethos of many working in this field makes many of us sympathetic to pedagogical innovations that promise to shake up existing practices, hierarchies and conventions.

However, the new offers threats as well as opportunities to our disciplines. This colloquium will consider how we should teach media & cultural studies in a changing world of environmental crisis, globalization, continuing demands for social justice and rapidly shifting communications technologies and practices. At the same time it will address the politics of "new pedagogies" in institutions preoccupied by audit cultures and "instrumental progressivism".

* How do we avoid being drawn into the hyperbolic claims of newness we use in our own learning grant applications - and continue to acknowledge the role of collaboration in developing innovative curricula?

* How can we use educational technologies without falling prey to utopianism or technological determinism?

* Can the "soft" money of learning and teaching initiatives and pilots be used to compensate for the long-term under-funding of Australian higher education?

* How do we recognise and reward excellence in teaching practices that are not new?

* How do we connect our educational innovations to our interest in social justice?

If you would like to come, please register your interest with Nicole Matthews by Tuesday, November 18.

The colloquium programme is available here.