ECPS Podcast
This podcast contains audio and video (mostly audio) from events such as conferences and workshops held by ECPS. It is an overview/highlights of all the podcasts in the school, so sometimes you will see items that are duplicated in our other podcasts. Good if you want to keep informed about a variety of topics, but don’t have time to subscribe to all the school’s podcasts.
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Subscribe to this feedNegotiating the Sacred V: Chandran Kukathas
15 August 2008
Do children have interests?
It is widely held that children have interests that deserve protection, by the law, by the state, and by international conventions. But before we can consider the merits of different measures to protect children it is important to ask whether or not children do indeed have interests and, if they do, what these might be. In this paper I suggest that children do not have interests and therefore that, whatever protections they require must have some other basis than that of attending to their interests. I also suggest that they have many fewer claims to protection than is sometimes asserted.
Negotiating the Sacred V: Siobhan McHugh
15 August 2008
Marrying out: Catholic/Protestant unions in Australia 1920s-70s
For over 150 years, until post-war migration diluted the mix, Australia was polarised between the majority Anglo Protestant Establishment and a minority Irish Catholic underclass. Religious differences reflected social and political tensions derived from colonial days and exacerbated by organisations like Freemasons, the Orange Lodge and Catholic secret societies. A self-imposed religious apartheid often saw Catholics go to Catholic schools, socialise in Catholic groups and work in traditional Catholic areas like the public service. Protestants likewise mingled mostly with their own, as a 1930s brochure, The Protestant’s Guide to Shopping in Rockhampton, hilariously demonstrates. Following the 1908 Ne Temere papal decree, religious and family protocols strongly discouraged inter-faith marriages – yet a quarter of Australian Catholics continued to marry ‘out’ until the late 1960s (Mol 1970). Such ‘mixed marriages’ often caused deep family divisions, from disinheritance to social exclusion. Children brought up in such marriages sometimes suffered a confused identity, not fully accepted by either ‘side’. The sectarian attitudes of the period no longer apply to Catholics and Protestants in Australia, but parallels can be drawn with post 9/11 attitudes towards Muslims – the new ‘Other’.
This paper is based on 42 oral histories of participants in a mixed marriage, children reared in one, or Protestant and Catholic clerics. The research will be the basis for a Doctorate in Creative Arts.
Negotiating the Sacred V: Lori Beaman
14 August 2008
Religious diversity and family matters: Polygamy and the limits of the law
Polygamy has been the topic of much debate and controversy in Canada and the United States in the past year, often making the news with dramatic events involving alleged child and woman abuse, police raids, and the deliberate ‘flaunting’ of illegal activities. How can we make sense of this seeming sudden attention to a family form that has existed relatively quietly for at least a century in communities across Canada and the United States?
Lori G. Beaman holds a Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada at the University of Ottawa. Trained in sociology, law and philosophy, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her central research focus which is religious freedom and its regulation. Her books include Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law, _Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press (2008); _Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions and Innovations, Toronto: Scholar’s Press (2006) and Religion, Globalization and Culture, edited with Peter Beyer, Leiden: Brill Academic Press (2007). She presents her work regularly at international conferences, and has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including Nova Religio, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Church and State.
Negotiating the Sacred V: Gary Bouma
14 August 2008
Religion and governing the family
All religions have images and ideals of the human family. These images and ideals range widely and are in no small part informed by social and cultural factors. For example, polygamy is more likely to emerge in societies with a high mortality rate among young males. Once in place, these images and ideals are likely to be given religious sanction – ‘God wants(ed) it thus’. A religiously plural society like Australia is likely to experience contestation between different religious groups as they seek to use the state to enforce their religiously sanctioned images and ideals. This is evident in the current debates about gay marriage and polygamy, the earlier debate about re-marriage of divorced persons, and debates about other aspects of family life from contraception and abortion to the provision of facilities suitable to couples in their senescence. In all of this it is the temptation, or in the case of some – e.g. Calvinists, Catholics and Wahabbi Muslims – the perceived requirement to use the state to impose on others the views of some poses a threat to the smooth functioning of democracy in a religiously plural society. There may also be situations where secularists impose their images and ideals upon others using the state.
Public Lecture: Professor Agnes Heller
April 3rd 2008
The Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of Artworks?
Professor Agnes Heller
Both “autonomy ” and “dignity” are moral concepts. The moral category “autonomy” is traditionally applied to art, and understood sometimes dogmatically, like by Adorno. Yet it never becomes clear what is autonomous: Art as such? The sphere of Art? Or the single artwork? This paper suggests substituting the normative word “dignity” for the heavily evaluative term “ autonomy”. In the case of the ‘dignity of man’ the norm of dignity prohibits using man as mere means - so it is in the case of works of art. They can serve as means, yet they need always also be treated as ends in themselves. The concept “dignity” of art will be illuminated - not illustrated – by examples of contemporary works.
A Welcome to Dr Janine Burke
March 19th 2008
The School of ECPS is delighted to welcome Dr Janine Burke as a new Monash Fellow (co-located in the Centre for Women’s Studies in the School of Political and Social Inquiry). Janine is a renowned independent scholar, and author of many books of art criticism including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1995) and Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002). Janine recently convened the successful Inside the mind of Freud Exhibition. Her fellowship work will focus on artistic collaborations and will involve exhibitions locally and internationally.
The Dean of Arts, Professor Rae Frances, welcomed Janine on behalf of the Arts Faculty at an event at the MUMA Gallery. Dr Burke gave a short presentation on her fellowship plans titled “Geniuses Together: Exploring Creative Partnerships”.
Music, Culture and Society Conference: Michael Bull
6th March 2008
Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism: iPod Culture and Recognition
Michael Bull (Sussex)
In this lecture I argue that iPod culture represents the antithesis of the ideal of the cosmopolitan citizen inscribed in Western culture, that cosmopolitanism increasingly resides in the content of users iPods. That users increasingly turn away from the complexities and contingencies of urban everyday life. iPod culture signifies the development of a new listening self that calibrates the personal use of sound to the desire of the user – iPod culture represents a culture in which individuals increasingly micro-manage their experience. The lecture will discuss the social ramifications of what I refer to as a hyper-post-fordist appropriation of social space.
Michael Bull is Reader in Media and Film at the University of Sussex and has written widely on sound, music and technology. He is the author of Sounding Out the City. Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves:iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007) and is co-editor of The Auditory Culture Reader (Berg 2003). He is also the founding editor of The Senses and Society Journal published by Berg. He was until recently a consultant to Portalplayer, California and is a core member of New Trends Forum, a European Thinktank funded by Bankinter, Spain.
ECPS Conference: Professor Jeffrey Alexander
19th December 2007
Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action
Jeffrey Alexander (Yale)
Jeffrey Alexander presents an overview of his current work on the role of performance and cultural pragmatics in social action. He leads a discussion about the fruitful interaction of contemporary cultural sociology and performance studies—and the place of dramaturgy, narrative, audience and performance in social inquiry.
Jeffrey Alexander is the author of The Civil Sphere (2006), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004 co-author), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Neofunctionalism and After (1998), Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason (1995), Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology (1989), Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis (1988), Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two, Columbia University Press (1987), Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982-83).
Today, Alexander is leading a team of researchers at Yale University dedicated to developing a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’. A preliminary version of Alexander’s work on social performance can be found in the volume he recently edited with Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006).
The Greeks Conference: Louis Ruprecht
May 3rd 2007
Modern shrines to an ancient muse: a religious history of the modern public art museum
Associate Professor Louis Ruprecht Jr. (Georgia State)
Louis Ruprecht is author of Was Greek Thought Religious? On the Use and Abuse of Hellenism, From Rome to Romanticism (Palgrave, 2002), Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value (SUNY, 1999), Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence (SUNY, 1996), Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve (Continuum, 1994).