The University of South Australia’s Creative People, Places and Products Research Centre (CP3), in collaboration with the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) , will host the 31st CSAA Conference from 6-8 December at UniSA City West Campus, Tarntanya/Adelaide.
5-8 December 2023
Pre-Fix: 5 December 2023
UniSA City West Campus, 50-55 North Terrace, Adelaide
05 December - 08 December 2023
Now more than ever ‘culture’ is a contested site of exclusion and possibility. The present realities of climate crisis, increasing inequality, multiplying communities of hate, in addition to growing geo-political insecurity demand cultural as well as political, social, and economic responses. This year's CSAA annual conference seeks to explore how we can create an open and inclusive cultural space for collaboration in a country like Australia where sovereignty of the First Nations peoples has never been ceded. How do we de-colonise culture? How do we re-create it?
Cultural studies aims for inclusivity. During this face-to-face gathering, we are keen to explore how cultural studies and allied disciplinary fields might examine the potential of culture in practice to shed new light on local and global problems. How can we create an open and inclusive cultural space when Indigenous scholars remain few in a white academy, where precarity and job insecurity remain endemic, where the lingua franca remains English and where discourses and practices continue to push to the margins cultural ideas, practices and ontologies that challenge various forms of normativity? We invite you to re-imagine with us how cultural studies concepts and activities can work pragmatically, that is, tailored to the contours of these issues.
Justin O’Connor is Professor of Cultural Economy, University of South Australia. Until 2020 he was visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Industries Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University. From 2012-2018 he was Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash University. Between 2012-18 he was part of the UNESCO ‘Expert Facility’, supporting the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Cultural Diversity.
Justin has produced Creative industry policy reports for the Australian Federal Government and the Tasmanian State Government, and for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DEFAT) on Creative Industries and Soft Power. Previously he helped set up Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS) and has advised cities in Europe, Russia, Korea and China. Under the UNESCO/EU Technical Assistance Programme he has worked with the Ministries of Culture in both Mauritius and Samoa.
Justin is the author of the 2016 Platform Paper After the Creative Industries: Why we need a Cultural Economy and co-editor (with Kate Oakley) of the 2015 Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries. He has co-edited Cultural Industries in Shanghai: Policy and Planning inside a Global City, (2018, Intellect), Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Asia (2020, Palgrave), and Different Histories, Shared Futures. Dialogues on China and Australia. (2023, Palgrave).
He has also published the CP3 Working Paper Reset: Art, Culture and the Foundational Economy (2020) and Reset: Een nieuwe start voor kunst en cultuur (Amsterdam: Starfish Books). In December 2023 he will publish Culture Is Not An Industry (2023, Manchester University Press).
Professor Sandy O’Sullivan is a transgender/non-binary Wiradjuri (Aboriginal) scholar leading the Intimacies node of the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures at Macquarie University in Sydney. They are a 2020-2025 Australian Research Council Senior Future Fellow, with a program titled Saving Lives: mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ creative artists. The program forms a series of provocations on the role of queer artists and art in modelling complex identities and contributing to the wellbeing of First Nations' peoples. This nationally funded program continues their work on an earlier multi-year ARC project that explored representation and engagement of Indigenous peoples and communities across ‘national’ museums, and that reviewed 470 museums. Since 1991 they have taught and researched across gender and sexuality, museums, the body, creativities and First Nations’ identity. In addition to academic work, Sandy has been a musician, performer and sound artist since 1982, holding national and international residencies.
Anja Schwarz is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She has worked on Australian and German memory cultures around Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and has contributed to the conceptual discussion of German-Australian colonial entanglements. Together with her colleague Eva Bischoff, she currently directs the collaborative and inter-institutional research project “Berlin’s Australian Archive”, which conducts extensive provenance research into the collections of prominent German naturalists who worked in the Australian colonies. Through a series of workshops with knowledge holders and experts from First Nations communities, the project aims to rearticulate these collections with Aboriginal histories and lived cultural worlds.
Another area of her research, conducted together with Lars Eckstein, focuses on Polynesian navigational knowledge conveyed by the Tahitian tahu’a Tupaia in his 1769 map of Oceania. More recently, this work has led to the Te Ara Vaka Moana Conference in February 2023 which brought together Pacific ancestral navigators and boat builders to discuss the Polynesian vessels on display at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum.
Professor Schwarz’s keynote presentation is supported by the UniSA Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, which is cofounded by the Erasmus+ Program of the European Union.
Susan Stryker, Ph.D., will join the faculty in Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Southern California in 2024. She is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, co-editor of the multi-volume Transgender Studies readers, and was founding executive co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. A collection of her essays, When Monsters Speak, edited by McKenzie Wark, will be published next year by Duke University Press.
CSAA is offering some small bursaries to help support the travel costs of Postgraduate and sessional CSAA members to attend in 2023.
Susan Luckman
Prudence Black
Lia Bryant
Rupa Ghosh
Kasia Jaworski
Brydie Kosmina
Stephen Muecke
Jess Pacella
Stuart Richards
Rosie Roberts
Jon Stratton
Email: ctv-csaa2023@unisa.edu.au
Australian students
Phone: +61 8 8302 2376
Enquiry: unisa.edu.au/enquiry
International students
Phone: +61 8 9627 4854
Enquiry: unisa.edu.au/international/enquiry
