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Latin Bridge (previously known as Princip’s bridge) where Archduke Ferdinand was killed, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina |
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Yaso Nadarajah
yaso.nadarajah@rmit.edu.au
Bio
Yaso Nadarajah was born in Malaysia and educated at Madras University, India and Melbourne University,
Australia. Her work has been in conceptualizing and establishing educational programs in Malaysia and
Australia. In the last three years, this work has focused on establishing programs that engage different
communities with RMIT University in developing new teaching, learning and research activities/projects
with a particular focus on local global partnerships, cultural diversity and communities' engagement as
spaces of creative transformation. Yaso’s work is now located within the Globalism Institute; as a place
from which to understand more thoroughly the processes of community sustainability, especially in relation
to the global world through reciprocal connections with other communities regionally and globally. Her work
is now focusing particularly on the emerging community engaged research practice and the nature and
impetus of creative transformative spaces.
Paul James
paul.james@rmit.edu.au
Paul James is Director of the Globalism Institute (RMIT), an editor of
Arena Journal, and on the Council of the
Institute of Postcolonial Studies. He has received a number of awards including the Japan-Australia
Foundation Fellowship, an Australian Research Council Fellowship, and the Crisp Medal by the
Australasian Political Studies Association for the best book in the field of political studies.
Invitations have been received to deliver addresses in Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cuba, Finland,
France, Germany, Greece, Israel-Palestine, Japan, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Scotland,
Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. He is author or editor of nine books including,
Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (Sage, 1996). His book with Tom Nairn,
Global Matrix: Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terror, has just been published by Pluto Press, and
Globalism, Nationalism Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In will be published by Sage in early 2006.
Martin Mulligan
martin.mulligan@rmit.edu.au
Before joining the Globalism Institute in 2004, I worked for 10 years
in the innovative Social Ecology program at the University of Western
Sydney where I developed new courses in areas related to ecological
thinking and environmental education. During this time I conducted
the research for a book titled Ecological Pioneers: A Social History
of Australian Ecological Thought and Action co-authored with
Prof. Stuart Hill and published by Cambridge University Press (2001).
This book was nominated for both the NSW Premier’s Prize for history
writing and the Queensland Premier’s Prize for history writing. With
Professor William Adams of Cambridge University, I collected and edited
a volume of writings published under the title Decolonizing Nature:
Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era by Earthscan
(London, 2003). I am interested in ways of deepening discourses on
sustainability through the promotion of ‘ecological literacy’ and
in exploring how a deeper ‘sense of place’ can bring together concerns
for the environmental and social sustainability of local communities.
In particular, I am interested in how we Australians might rethink
our attitudes to water by ‘re-immersing’ ourselves in the hydrological
cycle.
Peter Phipps
peter.phipps@rmit.edu.au
Bio
Peter Phipps is a researcher with the Globalism Institute and is currently the Research Project Manager for Community Sustainability-International.
Research Field
Recent research: postcolonial perspectives on modernity and consumerism in Australia, South and South East Asia; cultural politics of postcolonial theory and the culture wars; Indigenous settler relations in Australia; Indigenous community sustainability; Indigenous visual arts policy, transnational cultural and intellectual flows; global tourism; history and theory of anthropology, and transnational religious movements.
Leanne Reinke
leanne.reinke@rmit.edu.au
Bio
Dr Leanne Reinke is a researcher with the Globalism Institute at RMIT University.
Leanne was awarded her PhD from the School of Political and Social
Inquiry at Monash University in 2001, for a thesis that
dealt with the impact
of communication and information technologies in education within
Indigenous communities. She has considerable experience
in project-based research,
having worked on a wide range of projects in several universities
throughout her academic career. Leanne’s research interests include changing communication technologies, theories of community formation, and their transformation under the conditions of globalisation. She also has an interest in the field of education, specifically the cultural dimensions of communication technologies in the delivery of education and the issues surrounding modern schooling in conjunction with tribal-traditional forms of knowledge.
Research Interests
Leanne's research interests include changing communication technologies, theories of community formation, and their transformation under the conditions of globalisation. She is currently undertaking research in the field of different knowledge systems, specifically in relation to communication in communities throughout Australia and Northern Canada. She also has an interest in the field of education, specifically the cultural dimensions of communication technologies in the delivery of education and the issues surrounding modern schooling in conjunction with tribal-traditional forms of knowledge. The experience she gained when working within the field of education policy has assisted her work in researching the issues surrounding transnational education, and vocational education and training in Indigenous communities.
Further information is available at www.rmit.edu.au/staff/leannereinke
Ceridwen Spark
ceridwen.spark@rmit.edu.au
Bio
Dr Ceridwen Spark completed her doctorate on native title and colonialism in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. She has been published in a range of journals, including the Journal of Australian Studies, Tourist Studies and Continuum. In addition, she regularly writes reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Canberra Times and the Australian Book Review.
Research Field
In her contribution to the Border Knowledges project, Dr Ceridwen Spark is exploring the cross-cultural interactions surrounding kuru, a disease which is an antecedent of Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease. These interactions occurred between the Fore people of PNG and medical and anthropological researchers in the 1950s and ’60s. Ceridwen will identify how the cultural assumptions and beliefs of individual Fore and ‘waitskins’ were challenged and changed as a consequence of kuru research. Taking a biographical approach, she aims to provide a valuable record of hitherto untold kuru stories, including those emerging from the previously marginalised perspectives of female researchers and Fore medical assistants and villagers.
Chris Shepherd
chris.shepherd@rmit.edu.au
Research field
Agricultural Development, Indigenous Knowledge and ‘Race’ Relations in Peru
and East Timor
Chris Shepherd’s research is concerned with the agriculture of indigenous farmers in the Peruvian Andes of Latin America. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with state and non-governmental rural development organisations in the Department of Cusco, Chris’ work is set at the interface of the indigenous Quechua-speaking communities and development agencies who engage them in a technical capacity to ‘modernise’ their agricultural modalities and output with a view to draw the ‘subsistence’ economy of Andean food production into wider, regional, and international markets.
Chris’ work explores how epistemic authority is vested with the developers and the concomitant delegitimisation of indigenous capabilities that result in the persistent depreciation of the Quechua people’s knowledge and productive practices.
Chris’ research into Andean agriculture, therefore, weighs in at that point where the discursive constructs of development as a technical operation begin to disintegrate and reconstitute themselves within a larger sociotechnical culture in which desire, race, and the surveillance and discipline of underdeveloped subjects are central features.
Chris’ published work connects the ‘on the ground’ processes of development in everyday life with broader analyses of development that situate the latter within national and international political frameworks. He shows, then, how local farmers’ experience of self and agriculture are shaped by global development networks whose power is concentrated in the so-called ‘developed world.’ By the same token, Chris details the myriad of ways in which development projects are received, appropriated, resisted, and hybridised in their local settings, thereby moderating the view of the ‘development-as-discourse’ critics who maintain that development is a monolithic and singularly powerful ‘First World’ machine that both creates and dominates its ‘underdeveloped’ subjects. A second focus of his work looks more specifically at how agents of development can better include indigenous culture and knowledge into their interventionary practices. In this respect, Chris examines the diverse practices of, and the potential within, non-governmental development organisations.
More recently, Chris has extended his interest in rural development to post-independence East Timor where the ‘development rush’ and its predilection for ‘problems and deficiencies’ has resulted in an undervaluing of local livelihoods and cultures.
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2004 |
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