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GLOBAL2016

The IAFOR International Conference on the City 2016

“The Global and The Local: Crossing Sites of Cultural, Critical, & Political Intervention”

July 16–18, 2016 | NH Collection Barcelona Constanza, Barcelona, Spain

The IAFOR International Conference on Global Studies, held for the first time in 2016, brought together 88 delegates to consider some of the following questions: How have cities taken on their different shapes – residencies, commercial quarters, waves of settlement and expansion? Why have they taken on specific locations – riverside geographies, trade routes, fortification, population flows, religion, food, migration? How has their siting played into history, politics and culture?

Our conference theme for 2016, “The Global and The Local: Crossing Sites of Cultural, Critical, & Political Intervention”, generated an exciting interdisciplinary response from scholars and practitioners in the arts, humanities and (social) sciences, from artists and writers to urban planners, designers and futurists.

Keynote and Featured Speakers included renowned critic and theorist Professor Bill Ashcroft of the University of NSW, Australia, a founding exponent of post-colonial theory and co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to systematically examine the field of post-colonial studies, and Alonso Carnicer, an award–winning News Reporter for TV3 in Spain, who spoke about Barcelona’s shanty towns, among others.

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GLOBAL2016 Conference Photographs

[envira-album slug="global2016-conference-photographs"]

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Programme

  • Transnation – the Transnational Within
    Transnation – the Transnational Within
    Keynote Presentation: Professor Bill Ashcroft
  • Holding to Account: Visualising Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Betrayal
    Holding to Account: Visualising Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Betrayal
    The 4th Kathleen Firth Keynote Lecture: Professor Baden Offord
  • Crime Fiction – A Global Phenomenon
    Crime Fiction – A Global Phenomenon
    Keynote Presentation: Professor Bill Phillips
  • Filling in the Lonely, Empty Places
    Filling in the Lonely, Empty Places
    The 14th Doireann McDermott Lecture: Gloria Montero
  • Recovering the Memory of Barcelona’s Shanty Towns
    Recovering the Memory of Barcelona’s Shanty Towns
    The 17th Doireann MacDermott Keynote Lecture: Alonso Carnicer
  • Speculations on Posthuman Love – Nalo Hopkison’s Response to Neoliberal Necropolitics
    Speculations on Posthuman Love – Nalo Hopkison’s Response to Neoliberal Necropolitics
    Keynote Presentation: Professor Belén Martín-Lucas
  • Global Studies in Challenging Times – Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
    Global Studies in Challenging Times – Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
    Keynote Panel Presentation: Professor Baden Offord, Professor Donald E. Hall, Professor Sue Ballyn, Professor Bill Phillips
  • City Poems – Readings
    City Poems – Readings
    Featured Presentation: Professor A. Robert Lee
  • Walking the Global City – Journeys in World Literature
    Walking the Global City – Journeys in World Literature
    Keynote Presentation: Professor Myles Chilton

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Speakers

  • Professor Bill Ashcroft
    Professor Bill Ashcroft
    University of New South Wales, Australia
  • Professor Belén Martín-Lucas
    Professor Belén Martín-Lucas
    University of Vigo, Spain
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Dr Bill Phillips
    Dr Bill Phillips
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Alonso Carnicer
    Alonso Carnicer
    TV3, Spain
  • Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Professor Myles Chilton
    Professor Myles Chilton
    Nihon University, Japan
  • Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
    Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Dr A. Robert Lee
    Dr A. Robert Lee
    Nihon University, Japan (retd.)
  • Dr Maria Grau Perejoan
    Dr Maria Grau Perejoan
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Professor Donald E. Hall
    Professor Donald E. Hall
    Lehigh University, USA
  • Professor Baden Offord
    Professor Baden Offord
    Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
  • Dr Catalina Ribas Segura
    Dr Catalina Ribas Segura
    University of Barcelona, Spain

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Organising Committee

The Organising Committee of The IAFOR International Conference on Global Studies (GLOBAL) is composed of distinguished academics who are experts in their fields. Organising Committee members may also be members of IAFOR's International Academic Advisory Board. The Organising Committee is responsible for nominating and vetting Keynote and Featured Speakers; developing the conference programme, including special workshops, panels, targeted sessions, and so forth; event outreach and promotion; recommending and attracting future Organising Committee members; working with IAFOR to select PhD students and early career academics for IAFOR-funded grants and scholarships; and overseeing the reviewing of abstracts submitted to the conference.

  • Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Dr A. Robert Lee
    Dr A. Robert Lee
    Nihon University, Japan (retd.)
  • Professor Donald E. Hall
    Professor Donald E. Hall
    Lehigh University, USA
  • Professor Baden Offord
    Professor Baden Offord
    Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

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Reviewers

IAFOR depends on the assistance of a large number of international academics and practitioners who contribute in a variety of ways to our shared mission of promoting international exchange, facilitating intercultural awareness, encouraging interdisciplinary discussion and generating and sharing new knowledge. Our academic events would not be what they are without a commitment to ensuring that international norms of peer review are observed for our presentation abstracts. With thousands of abstracts submitted each year for presentation at our conferences, IAFOR relies on academics around the world to ensure a fair and timely peer review process in keeping with established international norms of double-blind peer review. We are grateful for the time, effort and expertise donated by all our contributors.

Senior Reviewers (2016)
  • Adelina Vrancianu, University of Bucharest, Romania
  • Aimite Jorge, University of Namibia, Namibia
  • Andrea Bellot, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain
  • Angela Wilson, Curtin University, Australia
  • Anne Rutherford, Western Sydney University, Australia
  • Bayez Enayati, Urmia University, Iran
  • Darren Man-Wai Cheung, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
  • Diana Rios, University of Connecticut, United States
  • Dora Renna, University of Verona, Italy
  • Elena Raevskikh, Centre Norbert Elias – Marseille, France
  • Febrian, Sriwijaya University, Indonesia
  • Fernanda Mendes, European University/Laureate International Universities, Portugal
  • Gala Maria Follaco, University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy
  • Hassan Afrakhteh, Kharazmi University, Iran
  • Jobelle Abaya, University of the Philippines – Diliman, The Philippines
  • Kereshmeh M.N Roodbari, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
  • Kwok Kuen Tsang, Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong
  • Mohamad Razaghi, EPFL, Switzerland
  • Prem Ramburuth, University of New South Wales, Australia
  • Reynante Autida, Western Mindanao State University, The Philippines
  • Ruth Tindaan, Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
  • Safrina Noorman, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Indonesia
  • Tomoko Kitagawa, University of California, Berkeley, Japan
Reviewers (2016)
  • Barbara Fernandes Leite, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
  • Biljana Djoric Francuski, University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Diana Rios, University of Connecticut, United States
  • Fatemeh Zeinali Zadeh Ranjbar, Islamic Azad University, Iran
  • Giorel Curran, Griffith University, Australia
  • Imam Bakir Kanli, Marmara University, Turkey
  • James Tanoos, Purdue University, United States
  • Krista Johnston, University of Winnipeg, Canada
  • Lauren Walden, Coventry University, United Kingdom
  • Linda Lapina, Roskilde University, Denmark
  • Maileenita Penalba, University of the Philippines Baguio, The Philippines
  • Rania Shafik, National Research Center of Egypt, Egypt
  • Reshma Sucheran, Durban University of Technology, South Africa
  • Rita Vieira, Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto, Portugal
  • Sabahat Gizem Özmen, Yasar University, Turkey
  • Seungkoo Jo, Tongmyong University, Republic of Korea
  • Sofia José Santos, Autonomous University of Lisbon, Portugal
  • Zhou Fang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

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CITY2016 Virtual Presentations

The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) is a research organisation, conference organiser and publisher dedicated to encouraging interdisciplinary discussion, facilitating intercultural awareness and promoting international exchange, principally through educational exchange and academic research.

Virtual presentations afford authors the opportunity to present their research to IAFOR’s far-reaching and international online audience, without time restrictions, distractions or the need to travel. Presenters are invited to create a video of their presentation, which is then uploaded to the official IAFOR Vimeo channel and remains online indefinitely. This is a valuable and impactful way of presenting in its own right, but also an alternative means for those delegates who may be unable to travel to the conference due to financial or political restrictions. The same publishing opportunities apply to virtual presenters, with final papers being included in the GLOBAL Conference Proceedings.

 This video archive is best viewed on a desktop computer with a strong Internet connection. 

The Global and Local Urban Identity

Author Information
Rania Shafik, National Research Center, Egypt
Hussam Salama, National Research Center, Egypt

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Investing on Preventive Diplomacy: How ASEAN can Generate Soft Power through Its Peacemaking Mechanism

Author Information
Jodelyn E. Bisco, De La Salle University, The Philippines

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Transnation – the Transnational Within
Keynote Presentation: Professor Bill Ashcroft

The rise in Global mobility at the same time as state borders have become ever more hysterically protected, has interested postcolonial cultural critics for some time. The wreckage of colonialism has exposed a tension between the state and the nation that exists world-wide. This paper proposes a different way of approaching the issue of transnationalism, for if we distinguish the nation from the state we discover that mobility and border crossing are already features of the phenomenon we call the nation. To this end I propose the concept of the Transnation, which is the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. This internal border crossing raises the question: Where is home? To answer this I deploy the utopian philosophy of Ernst Bloch to demonstrate varieties of the concept of Heimat in literature beyond any idea of the nation. The discussion will show that the transitive nature of the contemporary nation has been demonstrated in postcolonial writing for some time.

Read presenter biographies.

Holding to Account: Visualising Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Betrayal
The 4th Kathleen Firth Keynote Lecture: Professor Baden Offord

The global city has become a place where truth is abstracted and betrayed on an everyday basis, an ideological matrix where the cosmopolitan spirit is caught up and held in by society. How do I/we respond to this betrayal of what the global city promises in terms of the axiology of human rights in contemporary city life, where commonality and difference, sameness and diversity and, importantly, refuge are brokered and negotiated at every street corner? As Edward Said once noted ‘Every human being is held in by a society, no matter how free and open the society, no matter how bohemian the individual.’ In this presentation I grapple with these thoughts. First, I follow the insight of Juhani Pallasamaa, that ‘I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience.’ I do this through aspects of my sensorial experience of the city, as a place that I wander, explore, discover, observe, interact with and so much more. Second, I link this cosmopolitan capacity for meeting others in my/our everyday life with the values of human rights, specifically the notion that social recognition is crucial for a culture of human rights to exist. Third, I focus on a case study of how visualising human rights through the embodied experience of the refugee and asylum seeker brings the global city into stark relief. Is the ‘new’ global city a place of cosmopolitan exclusivity? To what extent is such a city a refuge? I will present a recent moment in Australian democracy intervention and advocacy where visualising human rights became the aperture through which to see the relationship between the city and refugee as embodied experience and cosmopolitan betrayal. I examine the ‘Holding to Account’ national campaign in late 2015 organised and articulated through the civil action group Researchers Against Pacific Black Sites. This is my attempt at holding to account the society that holds me/us in.

Read presenter biographies.

Crime Fiction – A Global Phenomenon
Keynote Presentation: Professor Bill Phillips

This presentation, through the research project POCRIF, is financially supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad.

American hard-boiled crime fiction may be traced back to the frontier narratives of the nineteenth century and the emergence of a conspicuous working class model of masculinity in the United States in the early twentieth century. As shaped by best-selling authors such as Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, the hard-boiled fictional detective is characterised by his misogyny, racism and homophobia, his alcoholism, and his inability to form lasting affective relationships. Not inconsistently, then, fictional detectives such as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Spillane’s Mike Hammer are firmly placed within the patriarchy, on close professional terms with the police, judiciary, municipal authorities and other institutions of patriarchal power.

During the 1970s and into the 1990s a series of writers began questioning, deconstructing and rewriting the hard-boiled genre. In 1970 Joseph Hansen published Fadeout, the first of 12 crime novels featuring Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who also happened to be gay. In 1972, the Barcelona-based writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán published Yo maté a Kennedy (I Killed Kennedy) the first of a series of crime novels which set out to comprehensively explode every aspect of the conventional hard-boiled genre. Other writers such as Walter Mosley and Sara Paretsky began exploring the possibilities of creating, respectively, black and female hard-boiled detectives and in doing so inevitably introduced issues such as discrimination, corruption, poverty and social injustice into their work.

By the twenty first century the crime novel had, to a large extent, become the social novel of our time. Much of the interest garnered by Scandinavian crime writers such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson was precisely because of their investigation into the hitherto hidden inequities of contemporary Swedish society. The same can be said of American crime writers such as Dennis Lehane and James Lee Burke, the Scottish crime writers Val McDermid and Ian Rankin, or the Irish crime writer Ken Bruen. Not surprisingly, then, crime fiction has, in recent years, flourished around the world, and particularly in a postcolonial context. Postcolonial literatures, pretty much by definition, are concerned with social issues such as migration, identity, poverty, corruption and gender, as a legacy of the colonial period. India which is, of course, home to many of the richest and most ancient cultures in human history, has long had a fascination with crime fiction. Satyajit Ray’s Sherlock Holmes-inspired detective Feluda first saw life in 1965, but more recently there has been an outpouring of crime –writing in English by authors such as Kalpana Swaminathan, Aravind Adiga and Vikram Chandra.

In Australia, crime writers such as Peter Temple and Philip McLaren have highlighted postcolonial issues, and in South Africa a new generation of writers such as Deon Myer, Mike Nicol, Roger Smith, Margie Orford and Gillian Slovo (among many others) use the crime genre to assess the progress of post-Apartheid society and government.

Crime fiction is flourishing everywhere – from Pakistan to Jamaica and from Hong Kong to Catalonia. From its North American and European origins it has become a truly global genre, snooping into the darkest corners of a wanting world.

Read presenter biographies.

Filling in the Lonely, Empty Places
The 14th Doireann McDermott Lecture: Gloria Montero

‘Whoever reflects recognizes that there are empty and lonely places between one’s experiences’
– Jerome Bruner (cognitive psychologist).

Using my work, particularly my book All Those Wars, as a thread I will explore some of the ideas that have occurred to me in what Joan Didion so aptly calls ‘the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience’ showing how it has given me storylines that have gone way beyond anything personal, cutting through the wide-reaching cultural and political boundaries that have defined my life: growing up in tropical Australia in an immigrant family from Asturias in northern Spain, then living for many years in Canada where our children were born and where I began to write while becoming active in working with immigrants and refugees as military juntas took hold in Argentina and Chile; at the same time doing what we could to hasten the end to the Franco dictatorship in Spain. When finally we were able to make our home again in Spain, there were the early turbulent, euphoric years of the Transition to democracy, through the consolidation of the European Union, right up to the present moment where we attempt to define what it means now to be a world citizen at a time when, as the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote: ‘On becoming aware one perceives life as a war.’

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Recovering the Memory of Barcelona’s Shanty Towns
The 17th Doireann MacDermott Keynote Lecture: Alonso Carnicer

Barcelona is a major tourist destination and is well known internationally for its urban transformation. But it also has a hidden history of hardship. The tides of immigrants who arrived in Barcelona from impoverished areas of Spain from the 1920s to the 1960s, came to work in the expanding city but often found no other place to live than the shanty towns which spread along the coastline and up the hills. They endured discrimination and repression, in daily fear that their shacks would be torn down.

Most slums had no running water, light or sanitation. At first, they had no schools or clinics. Up to a hundred thousand people lived in these conditions for decades until they were housed on new estates hastily thrown up in remote areas. It took a long time for their living conditions to be improved. Just before the 1992 Olympics the last shanties were demolished.

Barcelona is swift to forget its troubled past. Urban development has wiped out the traces of the settlements. But they live on in the memories of their dwellers. To understand today’s city, the “other” story must also be told.

The documentary “Shanty towns, the forgotten city”, directed by Sara Grimal and Alonso Carnicer for the Catalan TV, told their story in their own words. As a result a movement arose, a petition was presented to the city authorities and now monuments are being put up to honour those who lived much of their lives in such conditions.

Housing is once again a problem for many people in Catalonia. Property prices have put decent housing beyond the reach of newcomers and in some areas there are people who find no other place to live than makeshift constructions under threat of demolition. That is why it is worth remembering that not too long ago around 7 per cent of the population of Barcelona eked out their lives in shantytowns.

Read presenter biographies.

Speculations on Posthuman Love – Nalo Hopkison’s Response to Neoliberal Necropolitics
Keynote Presentation: Professor Belén Martín-Lucas

Numerous critics of globalisation, including Manuel Castells, Saskia Sassen, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have repeatedly denounced the expulsion of a majority of the population from the networks of economic globalisation and from Life itself, as an effect of the implementation of neoliberal necropolitics: within the virtual economy disposable bodies become disposable lives. This paper will discuss TransCanadian author Nalo Hopkinson’s critique of this devastating regime in her diverse speculative fiction texts, from her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) to her latest collection Falling in Love with Hominids (2015). Hopkinson’s powerful defence of glocal knowledge –combining Indigenous and Afrosporic epistemologies— and her depiction of posthumanist affective bonds that are more enabling and empowering for the currently oppressed will be foregrounded as pedagogical tools for survival.

My analysis will make use of critical posthumanism, affect theory, postcolonial literary criticism, and feminist theories to engage with the current philosophical interrogation of the human and the posthuman in the context of this inhumane new world order carried out by prominent feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles and Rossi Braidotti. Just as these theorists have often turned to speculative fiction to illustrate their analysis of current affairs and in search for alternatives, the present paper will interrogate this potential in Hopkinson’s work while expanding on it to offer strategies of resistance.

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Global Studies in Challenging Times – Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Keynote Panel Presentation: Professor Baden Offord, Professor Donald E. Hall, Professor Sue Ballyn, Professor Bill Phillips

The panelists will open with brief overviews of financial and political challenges to education and research in the arts, humanities, and cultural studies in their respective national contexts. This will be followed by an open discussion with audience members about their own experiences and strategies for advocating for the resources they need to pursue their research and teaching in their home institutions.

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City Poems – Readings
Featured Presentation: Professor A. Robert Lee

These readings address a selection of international cities and are taken from A. Robert Lee’s recent published collections. They range East and West, Asia and Europe, the Americas north and south.

Read presenter biographies.

Walking the Global City – Journeys in World Literature
Keynote Presentation: Professor Myles Chilton

Walking has been both a trope and a mode of reading the city ever since Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin introduced us to the flaneur. Literary modernism developed that figure to the point where Blanche Gelfant, in her landmark book The American City Novel, emphasised that city literature represented not just perceptions of the city, but the very fact of perception. The perceptive faculties figure as the object of reading in urbanist Kevin Lynch’s analysis of how cognitive maps localise and navigate the built environment. Michel de Certeau develops this idea through the ‘spatial stories’ city dwellers construct while walking in their cities, tactical narratives that resist the effects of the capitalist city. In my presentation, I will explore what happens to the perceptive equipment of the literary city walker when read across cultures in the globalised present. My focus will be refracted through world literature’s transcultural reading strategies, ways of reading that account for the alterity of both reader and subject matter, and add another layer of complexity to the fact of perception.

Read presenter biographies.

Professor Bill Ashcroft
University of New South Wales, Australia

Biography

Professor Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, founding exponent of post-colonial theory, co-author of The Empire Writes Back, the first text to examine systematically the field of post-colonial studies. He is author and co-author of sixteen books, variously translated into six languages, over 180 chapters and papers, and he is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. He has recently completed an Australian Professorial Fellowship at the University of NSW and produced his latest monograph Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures.

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2016) | Transnation - the Transnational Within
Professor Belén Martín-Lucas
University of Vigo, Spain

Biography

Belén Martín-Lucas is an Associate Professor at the University of Vigo, Spain in the fields of Postcolonial, Diasporic and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on modes of resistance in TransCanadian women’s fiction, with an emphasis on genre innovations. She has coauthored the volumes The Transnational Story Hub: Between Self and Other (2016) and Transnational Poetics. Asian Canadian Women’s Fiction of the 90s (TSAR 2011) and contributed to the recent collections Understanding Canada and CanLit’s Transnational Circulations (U of Alberta Press, forthcoming 2017), Literature and the Glocal City. Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary (Routledge, 2014), and Differences in Common: Gender, Vulnerability and Community (Rodopi, 2014), among others. She has co-edited several scholarly collections and journal special issues on the topic of Globalization and Nationalism. In 2010 she co-founded the electronic journal Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies and since then she co-organizes biannual conferences associated with the journal. From 2010 to 2013 she directed “The Global Cultures Project” and, in collaboration with Dr Merlinda Bobis, “The Transnational Story Hub”, a transnational creative writing hub with participants from Vigo (Spain) and Wollongong (Australia). She is currently directing the international research project “Bodies in Transit: Making Difference in Globalized Cultures” (2015-17), involving researchers from 15 institutions in Europe and North America.

Keynote Presentation (2016) | Speculations on Posthuman Love - Nalo Hopkison’s Response to Neoliberal Necropolitics
Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Featured Panel Presentation (2018) | How can writers respond when the future looks fearful?

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2017) | My Barcelona – The City as Answer to a Personal Question
Dr Bill Phillips
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Bill Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in English literature and culture at the University of Barcelona and head of the English and German Studies Department. He lectures on British poetry, crime fiction and other contemporary fiction. He has published widely on poetry, focusing particularly on the Romantic period, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial studies, gender studies and popular fiction, including detective fiction, science fiction and zombies.

He is head of POCRIF (Postcolonial Crime Fiction: a global window into social realities), a research project on postcolonial crime fiction financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competividad. The project’s team are members of the Australian Studies Centre, based at the University of Barcelona, and the group’s research forms part of the wider academic and investigative work carried out by the Centre.

Keynote Presentation (2018) | Catalonia’s Referendum on Independence from Spain

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2016) | Crime Fiction - A Global Phenomenon
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times - Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Alonso Carnicer
TV3, Spain

Biography

Alonso Carnicer is a news reporter at TV3, the Catalan Television, where, together with Sara Grimal, he has directed documentaries and long form videos concerned with urban history and transformation, industrial heritage, architecture, memory and landscape. Barraques. L’altra ciutat (2009), for the programme 30 Minuts described life in the shanty towns of Barcelona between the Civil War and the Barcelona Olympics of 1992. This project developed into the 75 minute documentary Shantytowns, the forgotten city (2010) which has won several international awards and has been the origin of a project aiming at recovering the memory of that period of the history of Barcelona which has created a series of landmarks in the city.

Alonso Carnicer was born in Barcelona, 1956. He received an MA in English at Cambridge University and a degree in English Philology at Barcelona University. He was a lector in Spanish at Bristol University, and professor of English at the History Faculty at Barcelona University. He studied cinema in Barcelona and Florence. He has worked as a translator and interpreter from English into Spanish. He is a news reporter at TV3 since 1984. Together with Sara Grimal he has been the author of the documentary series Retrats d’indians (2001) about the legacy of the Catalans who made their fortune in the Americas and returned to their home towns in Catalonia and Majorca to build houses. Retorn a l’Edèn (Els jardins penjants, 2003), a documentary about the creation of landscapes and gardens in the city. At TV3 they have worked for the programmes Actual, Trossos, Trenta Minuts and Sense ficció with the documentaries La química natural (1993), Els senyals del temps (1993) and El paisatge de la cançó (1994) about the culture of the rural world. For ‘Trenta Minuts’: Marcats pel temps (1995) about the relation of people with the cycle of the seasons and weather; El valor d’un paisatge (2006), on the transformation of landscape and the attempt to preserve and restore its values; and Barraques. L’altra ciutat (2009), and for ‘Sense ficció’, Barraques. La ciutat oblidada (Shantytowns, the forgotten city) (2010). Sara Grimal and Alonso Carnicer are working on the documentary Donde las Hurdes se llaman Cabrera, 50 años después, an independent production, set in the mountains of León.

Alonso Carnicer has also curated exhibitions and published articles, video interviews and a book about the life and work of his father the writer Ramón Carnicer.

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2016) | Recovering the Memory of Barcelona’s Shanty Towns
Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is Professor Emerita at Barcelona University from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official Barcelona University Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Prof. Lucy Frost. 2016 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn is part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2016 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as part of this project. These oral stories are the result of field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She is also involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF) This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. She currently holds the position of Profesor Emerita and Founder/Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre, at Barcelona University.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times - Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Professor Myles Chilton
Nihon University, Japan

Biography

Myles Chilton (BA University of Toronto; MA and PhD University of Chicago) is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Nihon University. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Chilton has been in Japan for over twenty years, writing about relationships between contemporary world literature and global cities in Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and in journal articles such as Comparative Critical Studies, The Journal of Narrative Theory, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. He also focuses on global English and literary studies in such books as the monograph English Studies Beyond the ‘Center’: Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English (Routledge 2016); and in chapters in the books The Future of English in Asia: Perspectives on Language and Literature (Routledge 2015), Deterritorializing Practices in Literary Studies (Contornos 2014), and World Literature and the Politics of the Minority (Rawat 2013). Chilton has also presented papers on these and other topics at universities around the world. He is also on the editorial board of the IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Keynote Presentation (2016) | Walking the Global City - Journeys in World Literature
Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Cornelis Martin Renes graduated from the University of Barcelona with a BA in 2001, an MA in 2006 and PhD in 2010. He joined the English and German Philology staff in 2001. His main teaching areas have been English poetry from the Renaissance to contemporary times, and postcolonial studies with a special emphasis on the Asia-Pacific area and Australia in particular. He wrote his thesis on indigenous Australian literature and identity formation. He co-directs the Australian Studies Centre at the university, which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Centre in 2000. Since the 2000s his main area of research has been indigenous Australian literature, and more recently he has become a member of a research project, POCRIF, which looks at postcolonial crime fiction and is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. He currently holds the positions of Adjunct Lecturer, Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, and Member of the EASA (European Association for Studies of Australia) Board. He maintains steady contact with Australian academia through visiting fellowships.

Featured Presentation (2018) | ¡A España no hay presos políticos! / In Spain there are no political prisoners!

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2016) | Postcolonial Crime Fiction - A Global Phenomenon
Dr A. Robert Lee
Nihon University, Japan (retd.)

Biography

A. Robert Lee, a Britisher who helped establish American Studies in the UK, was Professor in the English department at Nihon University, Tokyo from 1997 to 2011, having previously taught for almost three decades at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He now lives in Murcia, Spain. He has held visiting professorial positions in the US at the University of Virginia, Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, the University of Colorado, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico.

His academic books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Postindian Conversations (1999), with Gerald Vizenor; Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009) and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). Has also been responsible for collections like Other Britain, Other British (1995); Beat Generation Writers (1996); China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (2008); The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes (2010); with Deborah L. Madsen, Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (2010); Native American Writing, 4 Vols (2011), African American Writing, 5 Vols (2013), US Latino/a Writing (2014); and, with Alan R. Velie, The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (2013).

His creative work is reflected in Japan Textures: Sight and Word (2007), with Mark Gresham; Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011); and the poetry collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012); Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013); Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013); Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette (2015); Password: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016); and Aurora: A Spanish Gallery of Image and Text (IAFOR Publications on-line, 2016).

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Featured Presentation (2016) | City Poems - Readings
Dr Maria Grau Perejoan
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Maria Grau Perejoan is a lecturer of literatures in English at the Universitat de Barcelona. She pursued a B.A. in English Studies at the Universitat de Barcelona and a B.A. in Translation and Interpreting at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She holds an MPhil in Cultural Studies from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago, where she also worked as a Visiting Lecturer in Spanish from 2005 to 2008. In May 2015 she finished her PhD thesis titled “Reterritorialising the Caribbean: Marching alongside Earl Lovelace” which revolves around the figure of Caribbean writer Earl Lovelace. In the dissertation the figure of Lovelace – one of the few non-diasporic writers of the region – serves to reclaim the importance of Caribbean-based narratives, and proves that the emphasis on the deterritorialisation of the Caribbean and the focus on transnationalism has meant that what is produced within its geographical boundaries is sidelined in favour of what is produced beyond them. Her research interests cover Postcolonial Literatures, in particular West Indian Literature, and Literary Translation.

She is part of the project POCRIF (Postcolonial Crime Fiction: a global window into social realities), a Ministerio de Economía y Competividad financed research project on postcolonial crime fiction. She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Australian Studies Centre based at the Universitat of Barcelona.

Recent publications include “‘The grass that they cut and trample and dig out and sprout roots again’: The Spiritual Baptist Church in Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment” in Coolabah, 2014; “West Indian Translators who Do Not ‘Translate as Well’: The Case of Trinidadian Writer Earl Lovelace” in Tusaaji: A Translation Review, 2014; and “Mar” a translation into Spanish of Trinidadian writer Jennifer Rahim’s short-story “Sea” in Revolución y Cultura, 2015.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2016) | Postcolonial Crime Fiction - A Global Phenomenon
Professor Donald E. Hall
Lehigh University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times: Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Professor Baden Offord
Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Biography

Baden Offord is an internationally recognized specialist in human rights, sexuality, education and culture. In 2012 he was a sponsored speaker to the 14th EU-NGO Human Rights Forum in Brussels where he spoke on ASEAN and sexual justice issues. In the same year he conducted a three-week lecture tour of Japan sponsored by the Australian Prime Minister’s Educational Assistance Funds post the Great Eastern Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.

Among his publications are the books Homosexual Rights as Human Rights: Activism in Indonesia, Singapore and Australia (2003), Activating Human Rights (co-edited with Elizabeth Porter, 2006), Activating Human Rights Education (co-edited with Christopher Newell, 2008), and Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices, Contexts (co-edited with Bee Chen Goh and Rob Garbutt, 2012). His most recent co-authored publication in the field of Australian Cultural Studies is titled Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values (with Kerruish, Garbutt, Wessell and Pavlovic, 2014), which is a collaborative work with the Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy. His latest chapter, ‘Queer activist intersections in Southeast Asia: human rights and cultural studies,’ appears in Ways of Knowing About Human Rights in Asia (ed. Vera Mackie, London, Routledge, 2015).

He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona, La Trobe University, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and Rajghat Education Centre, Varanasi. In 2010-2011 he held the Chair (Visiting Professor) in Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo. In Japan he has given lectures and research seminars at Chuo, Otemon Gakuin, Sophia, Tohoku and Keio Universities.

Prior to his appointment at Curtin University, he was Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University, where he was a faculty member from 1999-2014.

Previous Presentations

Featured Presentation (2017) | Refuge: Refugee: Moonlight and Precarious Love
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
The 4th Kathleen Firth Keynote Lecture (2016) | Holding to Account: Visualising Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Betrayal
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times: Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Dr Catalina Ribas Segura
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Catalina (Caty) Ribas Segura lives in Majorca as she joined the Languages Department at the University College for Higher Education Alberta Giménez (www.cesag.org) in 2006, where she teaches English at the faculties of Education and Communication. She has also run its International Relations Office and now manages its English Language School.

She studied a BA in English Literature and Language (2003), a postgraduate course on Teaching English as a Foreign Language (2003), an MA on Greek-Australian Literature and Identities (2005) and a PhD on Greek-Australian and Chinese Australian prose fiction and the concepts of duty, obedience and identity (2013). She studied these degrees at the University of Barcelona and she spent two semesters in Australia as an exchange student: one at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, and the other one at Southern Cross University, in Lismore (NWS). She visited the country for a third time to continue with her research for her PhD thesis and plans to go back again this year. Her research is now focused on crime novels and TV series as she is a member of the research project POCRIF (Postcolonial Crime Fiction: A Global Window into Social Realities), financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona.

She is an executive member of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, has participated and been part of its organizing committee in all its conferences since she finished her BA (2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2016). She has also guest edited the 1st issue of its journal Coolabah, titled This Foreign Country (2007), its 16th issue, After the Water has been Shed (2015), and of a forthcoming one. She has also participated in more than 20 congresses in Australia, Denmark, Hungary, Japan and Spain.

She has published more than 20 texts, mainly articles in double-blind peer-review journals. Her latest publications include “Identity and Belonging in Aristides George Paradissis´ Dragonsleep (1995)” in Antipodes 61 (tribute issue to Dr Paradissis) (2015); “Global citizenship in Aristides George Paradissis´ Dragonsleep (1995) and “Another Happy Day in Hobart” (1998)” in the Journal of Australian Studies (Japan) 28 (2015); “Identity and Friendship in Hsu-Ming Teo´s Behind the Moon (2000)” in Coolabah 16 (2015); “Greek, Australian, Greek-Australian or something else? Alternative identities and communities in John Charalambous´ Furies (2004)” in the Modern Greek Studies Australia and New Zealand: A Journal 16-17 (2013-14); “Multiculturalism and Language in A.G. Paradissisʼ The Shanghai Chronicles. The Day after Pearl Harbor and Other Stories (1998)” in Antipodes 60 (2014); and “Language and Bilingualism in Antigone Kefala´s Alexia (1995) and The Island (2002)” in Coolabah 13 (2014).

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2016) | Postcolonial Crime Fiction - A Global Phenomenon
Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is Professor Emerita at Barcelona University from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official Barcelona University Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Prof. Lucy Frost. 2016 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn is part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2016 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as part of this project. These oral stories are the result of field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She is also involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF) This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. She currently holds the position of Profesor Emerita and Founder/Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre, at Barcelona University.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times - Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Dr A. Robert Lee
Nihon University, Japan (retd.)

Biography

A. Robert Lee, a Britisher who helped establish American Studies in the UK, was Professor in the English department at Nihon University, Tokyo from 1997 to 2011, having previously taught for almost three decades at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He now lives in Murcia, Spain. He has held visiting professorial positions in the US at the University of Virginia, Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, the University of Colorado, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico.

His academic books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Postindian Conversations (1999), with Gerald Vizenor; Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009) and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). Has also been responsible for collections like Other Britain, Other British (1995); Beat Generation Writers (1996); China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (2008); The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes (2010); with Deborah L. Madsen, Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (2010); Native American Writing, 4 Vols (2011), African American Writing, 5 Vols (2013), US Latino/a Writing (2014); and, with Alan R. Velie, The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (2013).

His creative work is reflected in Japan Textures: Sight and Word (2007), with Mark Gresham; Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011); and the poetry collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012); Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013); Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013); Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette (2015); Password: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016); and Aurora: A Spanish Gallery of Image and Text (IAFOR Publications on-line, 2016).

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Featured Presentation (2016) | City Poems - Readings
Professor Donald E. Hall
Lehigh University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Previous Presentations

Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times: Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies
Professor Baden Offord
Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Biography

Baden Offord is an internationally recognized specialist in human rights, sexuality, education and culture. In 2012 he was a sponsored speaker to the 14th EU-NGO Human Rights Forum in Brussels where he spoke on ASEAN and sexual justice issues. In the same year he conducted a three-week lecture tour of Japan sponsored by the Australian Prime Minister’s Educational Assistance Funds post the Great Eastern Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.

Among his publications are the books Homosexual Rights as Human Rights: Activism in Indonesia, Singapore and Australia (2003), Activating Human Rights (co-edited with Elizabeth Porter, 2006), Activating Human Rights Education (co-edited with Christopher Newell, 2008), and Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices, Contexts (co-edited with Bee Chen Goh and Rob Garbutt, 2012). His most recent co-authored publication in the field of Australian Cultural Studies is titled Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values (with Kerruish, Garbutt, Wessell and Pavlovic, 2014), which is a collaborative work with the Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy. His latest chapter, ‘Queer activist intersections in Southeast Asia: human rights and cultural studies,’ appears in Ways of Knowing About Human Rights in Asia (ed. Vera Mackie, London, Routledge, 2015).

He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona, La Trobe University, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and Rajghat Education Centre, Varanasi. In 2010-2011 he held the Chair (Visiting Professor) in Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo. In Japan he has given lectures and research seminars at Chuo, Otemon Gakuin, Sophia, Tohoku and Keio Universities.

Prior to his appointment at Curtin University, he was Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University, where he was a faculty member from 1999-2014.

Previous Presentations

Featured Presentation (2017) | Refuge: Refugee: Moonlight and Precarious Love
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
The 4th Kathleen Firth Keynote Lecture (2016) | Holding to Account: Visualising Human Rights and Cosmopolitan Betrayal
Keynote Panel Presentation (2016) | Global Studies in Challenging Times: Focussing on the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Studies