Hi all,

After the great success of the YLCT Symposium and the previous as well as following Anthropology Symposia, we decided to re-launch the online proceedings as Volume 2 in the newly created SYDNEY ANTHROPOLOGY SYMPOSIUM SERIES (SASS).

To fullfil the requirements of an academic serial, we need to make certain adaptations to the proceedings (no content changes!).

Therefore, we have to take them offline for the next couple of weeks and we inform you when the re-launch is completed.

Regards

Katarina Ferro

FInally, it is done and the publication of the symposium proceedings are online. Just click on the tab “symposium proceedings” and scroll down to the paper you are interested in.

You can always find the full text with the abstract in front, plus one link with only the abstract for easy browsing.

You can also click on the following names to get the full text papers:

Chapter 1: Gary Robinson: The State, Cultural Competence and Child Development: Perspectives on Intervention in the North of Australia

full text; abstract

Chapter 2: Hae Seong Jang: Social Identity Within Life History: A Portrait of Young Indigenous People in Australia’s Neo-colonial North

full text; abstract

Chapter 3: Laura Moran: Integration, Tolerance and Belonging in Multicultural Australia

full text; abstract

Chapter 4: Kirk Zwangobani: African Australian Youth: Homogenization and the Dynamics of Identity

full text; abstract

Chapter 5: María Florencia Amigó: Young Lives in a Foreign Land: Experiences and Roles of Migrant School Children in Australia

full text; abstract

Chapter 6: Kathryn Robinson: Indigeneity, Locality and Recognition: Young People’s Shifting Engagements with Modernity in an Indonesian Mining Town (Sorowako South Sulawesi)

full text; abstract

Chapter 7: Rosemary Wiss: ‘No Minors Allowed’: Outsider Bar-girls and Trafficking in a Philippines Sex Tourism Industry

full text; abstract

Chapter 8: Allison Pugh: To Raise the Flexible Child: Lessons of Commitment and Betrayal in Postindustrial Insecurity

full text; abstract

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 58 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Young Lives, Changing Times: Perspectives on Social Reproduction.

It was a lively and timely event. Over two days, early career researchers and senior scholars from six Australian and two US universities portrayed the diverse pathways of growing up in the contemporary world. The variety of disciplinary backgrounds (anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, geography) matched the variety of research locales and contexts. The speakers portrayed the lives of African migrant youth in Australia, the meaning of violence for young people in a Colombian barrio, ideologies of parenting in the US, the self-understandings of Aboriginal youth in remote Australian communities, the cultural logic in the ‘unruly’ behaviour of young males in Bougainville, the significance of schools as sites of cultural production, the moral encoding of childhood in the context of transnational adoptions, young Indonesians reworking ‘tradition’ as they become cosmopolitan, cultural identification and inventiveness on Easter Island, and legal and ideological constructions of sex work in the Phillipines.

The two keynote speakers, Professor Cindi Katz from the City University of New York and Associate Professor Gary Robinson from the Menzies School of Health Research in Darwin, gave us different, but complementary, perspectives. Cindi’s presentation, “Accumulation, Excess, and Childhood: Towards a countertopography of risk and waste”, explored changes in the position of modern children as postindustrial states try to deal with economic crises. She is observing a disconcerting ‘trade off’: if not always directly, the well being of children in some parts of the world is achieved through the deprivation of children in others. Gary’s paper, entitled “The State, Cultural Competence and Child Development: Perspectives on intervention in the North of Australia”, described a parenting program that aims to improve the relationship between children and their caretakers in Tiwi families. The location of culture, he argued, cannot be simply found in a catalogue of traits or elements of reified traditions. Rather, in order to grasp cultural competence, we need to first look at the social and emotional dynamics of concretely lived relationships, especially between mothers and children. And further, the viability of any support program hinges on that – genuine relationships between program implementers and families. This reflects a cultural logic and practice that contrasts sharply with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention.

Key themes that emerged across papers include suggestions that young people are mobilising elements of their cultural heritage in order to deal with profound contradictions in their lives. Some of these derive directly from global developments that are transforming domestic and market economies as well as images of a ‘good’ future. One of the consequences is the adjustment of parenting. American families from all class backgrounds, for instance, now seek to raise ‘flexibile’ children, both with a view to work and intimate social relationships. Equally important, there is evidence of resistance (political, cultural) and the grasping of new opportunities among young people in different parts of the world. However, social systems are not necessarily equipped to foster such creative self-assertion. A challenging task then is to safeguard spaces for recuperation and creativity in face of ever-increasing levels of interventions into children’s lives. Finally, the need for interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives was captured with this concluding question: by what conceptual and technical means can we capture the intersections between systemic forces and lived experience?

We aim to release the proceedings online towards the end of this year.

Gillian Cowlishaw and Ute Eickelkamp.

For more information on categories and to register click on the tab Register and follow the steps.

The online registration closes today at 11.59pm

Registering on the irst day of the symposium is possible:

For the concession rate of 25.– we accept cash / cheque payment

however due to university regulations we can ONLY accept cheques for the academic / fully waged category of 85.–.

Either click on the tab Programme,

or download the flashy colour version here.

To view the full list of abstracts, click on the tab Abstracts, or down load as Pdf here.

For a complete list of presenter and convener bios, click here.

Gary Robinson:

2005. ‘Anthropology, Explanation and Intervention: Risk and Resilience in a Parent- and Child-Focused Program’. Anthropological Forum. Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2005, 3–25

No Way To Be: Violent & Suicidal Youth. Full text

2011. Gary Robinson, Sven Silburn, William Tyler and Yomei Jones, Stephen R. Zubrick. ‘Context, Diversity and Engagement: Early Intervention with Australian Aboriginal Families in Urban and Remote Contexts.’ In Children and Society.

Cindi Katz:

2008. ‘Me and My Monkey. What’s hiding in the security state.’ In: Indefensible Space. The Architecture of the national security state. Michael Sorkin (ed). Routledge. pp 305-323

2008. ‘Childhood as Spectacle: Relays of Anxiety and the Reconfiguration of the Child,’ Cultural Geographies 15(1) (2008): 5-17. Full text

2001. ‘The State Goes Home: Local Hypervigilance and the Global Retreat from Social Reproduction.’ Social Justice. 28(3) (2001): 47-56. (Translated as “Der Terror des Wachsamkeitswahns: Sicherheit und Kinderschutzindustrie in den Vorstädtenin,” Widersprüche [Contradictions] 92 (2004).) [Reprinted in T. Monahan (Ed.) Surveillance and Security: Technological Power and Politics in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge.] Full text

Please click on the tab  Registration and follow the steps.

The registration includes tea / coffee breaks, lunch on Wednesday and Thursday, conference materials.

Categories:

Fully waged / academic                                                 AUD 85.00

concession (student, casual, pensioner)                    AUD 25.00

conference dinner (8. June 2011)                              AUD 25.00

at Rowda Ya Habibi (Lebanese cuisine, vegetarian option available)

HOW CAN I REGISTER, IF I DO NOT HAVE A CREDIT CARD?

Registration on the days of the symposium without credit card is possible:

1. concession rate of $25.- can be paid in CASH or with CHEQUE.
2. for the fully waged / academic category of $85.- we can ONLY ACCEPT CHEQUE PAYMENT.

You can download the registration form (also available at the registration desk) here.

Lecture theatre 104, New Law School, The University of Sydney

CONVENORS: Gillian Cowlishaw, Ute Eickelkamp, Anjalee Cohen

School of Social and Political Sciences

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

The University of Sydney

Across the Pacific, in Indigenous Australia and in some parts of Asia and Africa, young people have become the majority population, at a time when postcolonial nation-building, global economic restructuring, urbanization and modernization are changing these societies. Here, children and youth appear as active drivers of change, within systemic constraints and often in the face of extreme hardship and violence. DeBoeck and Honwana (2005) capture these phenomena when they say that young people are ‘important actors in redefining and restructuring existing models of kinship and moral matrices of reciprocity and solidarity. … they are the ones who undergo, express, and provide answers to the crisis of existing communitarian models, structures of authority, gerontocracy, and gender relations’. In contrast, Western societies are ageing, which places young people differently in processes of systemic change. In both cases young people can be approached as a window to understanding broader socio-political and economic transformations. Beginning with the assumption that structure and experience need to be thought together, we see children and youth as neither passive victims nor autonomous agents.

The Keynote Speakers for the symposium are Professor Cindi Katz, City University of New York and Associate Professor Gary Robinson, Charles Darwin University.