Indian Ocean & South Asia Research Network

29 March 2012

Perceptions of 2009: Looking back at the Indian students’ crisis

About the workshop
2009 was a period of crisis for many Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney. This crisis and its representation in the media of both India and Australia led to such strong tensions in the bilateral relationship that formal delegations were sent to India to provide reassurance. Perceptions of both countries were affected and Indian student numbers in Australia dropped. This workshop will examine the 2009 crisis; reflecting on lessons learnt and future strategies to strengthen relations between communities inAustralia.

PROGRAM:

12 noon Lunch

1 pm – 1: 20 pm

Heather Goodall (UTS): Looking back, looking laterally; university responses.

1: 30  – 3:30 pm

• Matt Wade (Fairfax Correspondent in India): Reporting from India in 2009
• Rory Medcalfe (Lowy Institute): Implications of the 2009 student crisis on the bilateral relationship between India and Australia
• Devaki Monani (Research Scholar UTS): Human Rights missing in Action: state wide approaches in Victoria

Discussant: Professor Amitabh Mattoo (Australia-India Institute, University of Melbourne)

3:30 to 4 pm Afternoon tea

4 – 5:30 pm

• Amit Dasgupta (Consul General of India): Perception and reality: thinking about Harris Park
• Robert Redfern (NSW Police): Managing Harris Park: what worked and what didn’t
• Stepan Kerkyasharian (Community Relations Commission): Lessons learnt from the crisis

Christopher Kremmer: Reflections

10 February 2011

Post-colonialism, Religion, Gender and Ethics: Rethinking paradigms and boundaries

Abstract:
The papers presented in this seminar come from eminent scholars working across the boundaries of religion, gender and postcolonial frameworks. They will consider the ways in which women negotiate discourses of religion and politics via case studies of Islamic veiling, and Islamic law in Canada, Hinduism as a world religion, and marriage in Bangladesh. The case studies raise important questions about the ways in which post-colonialism produces a particular paradigm of ethical thinking, and how gender is situated within such paradigms by post-colonial theorists. Religion as a category of western knowledge is explored via post-colonial insights, demonstrating gaps and inconsistencies in how theorists write gender and religion in post-colonial theory.

About the speakers:

Morny Joy is University Research Professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. She works and has published in the area of philosophy and religion, postcolonialism and intercultural studies in South and Sout-East Asia, as well as the all important area of women and religion. During the last two years she has co-edited two posthumous volumes of the work of Grace Jantzen. In addition, she has recently published a volume on Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (Springer). Another edited volume is forthcoming in early 2011, entitled After Appropriation: Explorations in Intercultural Philosophy and Religion.

Naomi Goldenberg is professor of religious studies at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada.  She writes and teaches about topics pertaining to religion, gender, psychoanalysis and popular culture.  She is currently at work on interrogating the category of religion in reference to politics and the technology of statecraft.

Santi Rozario is a Reader in School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University and Associate Director of the Body, Health and Religion (BAHAR) Research Group. Her academic background is in sociology and social anthropology. Her PhD (University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1989) was on women and the relations between religious communities in a Bangladeshi village. Her doctoral thesis was subsequently published as Purity and Communal Boundaries: Women and Social Change in a Bangladeshi Village. She has continued to carry out research in Bangladesh, in areas including development studies, health (including childbirth and reproductive health), microfinance, and religion. A major recent project was on Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in the Asia Pacific Region. In recent years she has also carried out research with British Bangladeshis in the UK, including a project on genetics, religion and identity (2005-7). Her current ESRC-funded project (2008 onwards) is on Islam, young Bangladeshis, marriage and the family in the UK and Bangladesh.

About the Chair:

Kathleen McPhillips is lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle, NSW. She has written extensively on religion and gender and particularly questions of sainthood and the life of Mary MacKillop. Her most recent publication was in Eremos.

18 August 2010

Postgraduate Workshop with Professor Sugata Bose
Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs (Modern South Asian History; Indian Ocean History)

‘A Hundred Horizons: Colonialism, Globalization and Oceans’

Please click here to download the call for participation with information on how to apply [PDF].

26 November 2009

Postgraduate Workshop with Prof. Gyanendra Pandey (Emory University, Atlanta, US)

Download the Call for EOI’s here.

28/29 October 2009

Joint workshop with the China Research Centre:
Health and Borders in China, India and the Indian Ocean Region

Please click here for more information on the workshop and for the two day programme.

Inquiries: Beatriz Carrillo, China Research Centre

27 October 2009

Island Connections:
Networks, labour & cultures across Oceans & Empires.
mauritius – reunion – australia – fiji – noumea

Click here for more information.

20 August 2009

Postgraduate Workshop with Dipesh Chakrabarty

14 May 2009

Research and Communities Workshop:

Strategies for research for trade, industry & social justice in Asia, Australasia and the Pacific
For more information, please click here.

With visiting researcher Kanchi Kohli, Kalpavriksh Environment Action Group, Delhi, India.