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The Border Politics of Whiteness

December 11-13, Carlton Crest Hotel, Sydney

Presented by The Department of Critical and Cultural Studies and the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association. Keynote speakers include Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Professor David Theo Goldberg, Director, Professor Cheryl Harris, and Associate Professor Joseph Pugliese.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

In recent years, celebrative rhetoric about the 'the global village' and the erosion of national borders appears to have shifted. Borderpolitics has become an organisational principle not only at the level of governmental concerns or media debates, but in the practices of everyday life. This is because the securing of borders is not simply about national sovereignty, but about the reconfiguring of zones of inclusion, exclusion, and the in-between in relation to social, political, economic, and cultural practices.

The practices and implications of borderpolitics open up a space for critical investigation especially in the area of Race, Ethnicity and Whiteness Studies. This field is concerned not merely with the politics of racial identities (although this is one of its concerns) but with the complex formation of colonial and racialised systems of knowledge. These knowledges permeate a range of disciplinary areas such as education, international relations, law, culture, geography, media, religion, management, tourism, terrorism, anthropology, sociology, politics, gender, sexuality, bodies, linguistics, philosophy, history, medicine, statistics, economics, biology and visual arts among others.

We invite speakers from a broad range of disciplines who are interested in examining borderpolitics with particular reference to the way in which whiteness is implicated in the construction of borders in their multiple configurations, and the manner in which Race, Ethnicity, and Whiteness Studies can intervene in and engage with border practices.

http://www.ccs.mq.edu.au/borderpolitics/index.html

Consumption, Commodification, Pleasure

December 4-5, ANU, Canberra

The School of Humanities at the ANU is hosting the international colloquium Dangerous Consumptions 4 on the theme of Consumption, Commodification, Pleasure.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The Colloquium has traditionally focused on issues of consumption in relation to alcohol, tobacco, illegal drug use, gambling and other areas where consumption produces harm or is seen as excessive. While retaining this focus we also hope to extend the range of topics this year with a broader perspective on consumption and its pleasures and dangers.

A key theme we wish to explore is that of commodfication: What is the relationship between consumption and commodification? How are pleasures and desires commodified in contemporary regimes of consumption and are the consequences of commodification always negative? How is commodification to be resisted or challenged? What kinds of subjectivities are produced through commodified consumption? Another key theme is the issue of consumption and difference: How are differences of gender, race, class and sexuality reproduced and/or disrupted through practices of consumption and the way they are represented and understood?

The colloquium encourages paper submissions which apply contemporary social and cultural theory and reflexive social science approaches to these themes but is open to all papers relevant to the theme of Dangerous Consumption.

http://arts.anu.edu.au/humanities/gend_conf/

The UNAUSTRALIA conference committee gratefully acknowledges the support of: