The Menzies Centre Events in London

The Menzies Centre's program of events continues this Wednesday when we are delighted to present a Monash-Menzies Public Policy Seminar:

Australia: Cultural work and dis/enchantment in the public realm

EMILY POTTER (University of Melbourne) ‘Making Water Public’

LISA SLATER (RMIT University Melbourne) ‘Beyond Celebration’

(Further details below)

Time: 5.15pm

Date: Wednesday 25 March 2009

Venue: Menzies Centre, Australia Centre, Corner Strand and Melbourne Place, London WC2B 4LG

Cost: Free
Please rsvp to menzies.centre@kcl.ac.uk

Further details:

These papers will explore the emergence of public life in local situations of cultural – or perhaps naturecultural – work in Australia, with attendant ethics, responsibilities and engagements. In the post-industrial West, instrumentalist approaches to public life dominate, with cultural work commonly positioned as supplementary to the frameworks – both material and value-based – that give rise to the public realm. These papers will attempt to reorient this understanding. It will propose that, rather than following on from material reality and the ethical positions that inform this, cultural work has the capacity to produce public life. The two papers find their ground in what is excluded from the instrumentalism of Australian bureaucracy and quantitative approaches to knowledge – an instrumentalism of disenchanted reality. This is the terrain of cultural work: ephemera, bodily affects, sensations, emotions, and the entanglements of human and non-human lives. The local situations discussed mobilise a dialectic that instrumentalism alone cannot accommodate – one in which enchantment and disenchantment operate together to generate new ecologies of artful politics.

Emily Potter

‘Making Water Public’

Australia faces a dire water future: drought is chronic in many areas of the country, while climate change threatens to intensify the problem. In South-Eastern regions reliant on agriculture, especially, communities are faced with significant social, economic and psychic stress. In response, governments suggest water audits and buy-back schemes; techno-scientific discourse offers a continuation of disenchanted logic from the colonisation of Australia to today. Is this the only approach to Australian water futures? This paper suggests that the question of making water public is central to the remediation of drought effected environments and communities. It will discuss two case studies in which water is assembled in various arrangements of nature and culture – a creative research project titled Mallee, and the multiple lives of a water bottle – to argue that with the re-collection of water in the terrain of cultural work, water becomes productive of public life itself.
Bio:
Emily Potter is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. Her current research focuses on public poetics, sustainable place-making and more-than-human modes of inquiry. In 2007 she co-edited a collection of writings on water cultures and communities, Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia (Melbourne University Publishing).


Lisa Slater:

‘Beyond Celebration’

In contemporary Australia public discourse about Indigeneity in general and remote Indigenous communities in particular has been circumscribed by a climate of crisis. This has awakened mainstream Australia to vast inequalities, but the discursive frame continues to disable, or severely limit, an engagement with Indigenous lived experience and values. This paper is a part of a larger research project that examines the immediate and longer-term impacts of selected Australian Indigenous cultural festivals on community wellbeing. The paper will argue that wellbeing, health or healthy body, is not a neutral concept, but as much as it is highly ethical project so it is political. It asks what role do these socio-cultural spaces play in supporting or enabling Indigenous wellbeing and what might festivals tell us about what makes for a 'good life'?

Bio:
Lisa Slater joined the Globalism Research Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, in 2007 where she is the primary researcher on an Australian Research Council Linkage project (with the Telstra Foundation), which examines the relationship between Indigenous Australian Festivals and the health and wellbeing of youth and community.

Recent research: Indigenous festivals; Indigenous-settler relations in Australia; postcolonial cultural production; theories and senses of belonging and home in contemporary Australia. She has been published in, Cultural Studies Review, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Meanjin, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Borderlands e-journal.