ECPS News and Events

In line with colloquy’s mandate to make postgraduate publishing openly available, other unsolicited academic articles and review articles of a general nature, along with book reviews, translations, opinion essays and creative writing, will also be considered. We encourage postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and research fellows to submit scholarly articles in line with the style guide available at the Colloquy website.

Articles of an unrelated nature will be considered alongside the themed section (both refereed in a double-blind process), and creative writing or opinion pieces are also welcome for the unrefereed section of the electronic journal.

Book Launch: Travels in Atomic Sunshine

13 November 2008

Robin Gerster’s Travels in Atomic Sunshine will be launched in Melbourne at the Shrine of Remembrance by Professor Bruce Scates.

In February 1946, the Australians of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) moved into western Japan to ‘demilitarise and democratise’ the atom-bombed backwater of Hiroshima Prefecture. For over six years, up to 20,000 Australian servicemen, including their wives and children, participated in an historic experiment in nation-rebuilding dominated by the United States and the occupation’s supreme commander, General MacArthur.

It was to be a watershed in Australian military history and international relations. BCOF was the last collective armed gesture of a moribund empire. The Chifley government wanted to make Australia’s independent presence felt in post-war Asia-Pacific affairs, yet the venture heralded the nation’s enmeshment in American geopolitics. This was the forerunner of the today’s peacekeeping missions and engagements in contentious US-led military occupations.

Yet the occupation of Japan was also a compelling human experience. It was a cultural reconnaissance — the first time a large number of Australians were able to explore in depth an Asian society and country. It was an unprecedented domestic encounter between peoples with apparently incompatible traditions and temperaments. Many relished exercising power over a despised former enemy, and basked in the ‘atomic sunshine’ of American Japan. Yet numerous Australians developed an intimacy with the old enemy, which put them at odds with the ‘Jap’ haters back home, and became the trailblazers of a new era of bilateral friendship.

Travels in Atomic Sunshine is a salutary study of the neocolonialism of foreign occupation, and of Australia’s characteristic ambivalence about the Asian region.

• Details of the book launch here

Military Media Relations and the War in Afghanistan: The Australian Experience

Saturday 22 November

This one day symposium, bringing together journalists who have reported from the front lines in Afghanistan, ADF PR personnel, academics and media commentators, will explore how, by whom, and with what effects the Australian military's current deployment has been reported. Specific issues to be examined will include:

• the management of media access to the Australian troops
• the ADF’s media management practices in Afghanistan
• the media’s role in reporting events in Afghanistan
• the role of independent media coverage of Australian forces in Afghanistan
• public relations and reporting
• military-media relations: how did we get here and where to now?
• are the public well-served by the current reporting arrangements?

The symposium will provide a unique opportunity to examine and debate the ADF's use of its own public affairs and imagery specialists, the media's present and future role in the representation of conflict, and what this will mean for Australian media-military relations.

• Further details and registration here

• B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value
  Call for Papers: Second Round. Due to high levels of interest in B for Bad Cinema, the Conference conveners have extended the call for papers to a second round, with a new closing date of January 30, 2009.

• Distinguished American Musicologist Philip Bohlman Visits Monash
  December 2008 - …he will present the keynote address at the National Conference of the Musicological Society…

• Symposium on Traditional Cultural Expression and International Law
  15 December 2008 - The aim of this symposium is to investigate the ambiguities in the WIPO draft protocols for the protection of traditional cultural expression. Speakers will be asked to address one of three issues in order to open up dialogue between the different disciplinary perspectives…

• Art and the Political
  Throughout 2008 - This is a series of six graduate seminars and two public lectures…

• Call for Papers: B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value
  The Inaugural Centre for Film and Television Studies Conference, April 15–17, 2009…