New Method Masterclass – Introduction to World-Literature
Workshop
Does it make sense to talk about Australian Literature, or English Literature, in the age of globalisation? As far back as 1848, Marx and Engels argued that international trade would mean national literatures would be superseded by a Weltliteratur. To what extent might the aesthetic features of the…
“Something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten”: Autofiction in the Amazon Fulfilment Centre
Lecture/seminar
In German novelist Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (translated into English in 2018), the author details her time working as a temporary labourer in an Amazon fulfilment centre. As a work of autofiction, Geissler’s novel offers an unconventional twist: the novel is written in the second person…
'Each book, in a word, carries a history': New Insights from First Fleet Association Copies
Lecture/seminar
The First Fleet sailed from England on 13 May 1787, carrying more than 1,500 people. What books they read, owned or carried with them remains a subject of great historical and research value for understanding Early European settlement in Australia. This paper examines surviving books of First Fleet…
Exploring Indigenous histories and cross-cultural collecting encounters in German art, archival and material culture collections: The Agnes S Schulz and Frobenius Expedition to Arnhem Land, Australia 1954-1995
Seminar
In June 1954, Agnes Susanne Schulz, a member of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, travelled to the Northern Territory, where, over a period of nearly two years, she recorded rock art, cultural knowledge and practices, and collected material culture of local Aboriginal peoples…
Credit as care and financial frontier. An ethnography of predatory inclusion under Brazil’s ‘fintech revolution’
Lecture/seminar
In Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a rise in poverty and accelerated the already ignited ‘fintech revolution,’ pushing a policy agenda of financial inclusion that has been transforming Brazilian society for more than a decade. In the aftermath of the pandemic, indebtedness was at a record…
Spiralling Visions: The Decolonial Oceanic Arts of Yuki Kihara and Taloi Havini
Lecture/seminar
Potawatomi philosopher and climate justice scholar Kyle Powys Whyte has eloquently decolonised the spectre of the Anthropocene as the shared fate of all humanity in dystopian portrayals of perilous futures. Indigenous peoples have already experienced the catastrophic effects of colonising…
Care Circuits: Yolŋu, kidney disease and the work of policy translation
Lecture/seminar
An epidemic of end-stage kidney disease in remote Australian First Nations communities calls attention to the care practices that enable patients’ blood to flow through dialysis machines in order for it to continue to flow through their bodies. The care practices of patients, their families, health…