Scaling Australia

Seminar Series 

Menzies Centre for Australian Studies
Arts and Humanities Research Institute, King’s College London

CALL FOR PAPERS

In recent years, Australian Studies has been challenged and enriched by two different paradigms that place.

‘Australia’ as concept,  space and place into contact with questions of scale: in terms of both ‘deep time’ and planetary space. Drawing on the humanities, sciences and the social sciences, this seminar series seeks a broad range of responses to these questions from an array of cognate disciplines and practices (e.g. anthropology; area studies; archaeology; art history; Australian studies; climatology; communications; cultural studies; economics; film studies; geology; history; Indigenous studies; literature; media studies; palaeontology; philosophy; politics; postcolonial studies; sociology, and so on), deploying an array of different approaches, theories, methods and forms.

Suggested themes might include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Implications of scale for teaching Australian history, literature and film
  • Social production of spaces big and small
  • Indigenous histories, historiographies and epistemologies
  • Australian climatology, palaeontology, geology and/or archaeology
  • Australia’s geopolitical climate, including economic and cultural ties with Asia
  • Migrant perspectives within Australia and (perceptions of) Australian migrants abroad
  • Transnational perspectives on: Australian screen media, music and literature; Australian understandings of Indigeneity and ‘race’; Australian cultural studies, history and historiography; refugees and asylum seekers within/without Australia

 

KEY DATES

Precise seminar dates (usually Wednesdays about once a month) will be set for the Scaling Australia seminar series and will available on the Centre’s website by mid June 2017.

  • Submissions open: 22 May 2017
  • Submissions close: 30 Jul 2017
  • Submissions reviewed: 17 Aug 2017
  • Successful candidates notified: 18 Aug 2017
  • Programme confirmed: 22 Aug 2017

Please submit an abstract to be considered for the Scaling Australia seminar series by 30 July 2017.

Submissions should contain an abstract of 300 words accompanied by a short biographical statement, and be sent to menzies.centre@kcl.ac.uk for the attention of Ian Henderson. If you have a preferred  date range to present your paper, please  specify  in your submission.  Interdisciplinary and theoretically informed papers are particularly welcome. Proposals for panels are also welcome. Please note Menzies Centre seminars usually involve two or three speakers giving 15/20-minute papers followed by general discussion.

For more information: www.kcl.ac.uk/menzies

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