Whiteness and the Horizons of Race
Posted on | November 18, 2005 |
7-9 December 2005
A conference hosted by the Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland
Please click here for a printable registration form.
International Keynote Speaker: Professor David Roediger.
Professor Roediger is currently Chair, the Department of History, University of Illinois. His current research is on immigration and racial formation in the United States. He has written extensively on whiteness, race and class. Professor Roediger’s forthcoming book is entitled Working toward Whiteness: How American Immigrants became White (May 2005).
National Keynote Speakers: Dr Suvendrini Perea.
Dr Perera is based in the Faculty of Media, Society and Culture at Curtin University of Technology. She has published widely on a range of issues including race, ethnicity and multiculturalism and her current research interests are in histories of coexistence in multiracial societies. She is author of Reaches of Empire (1991).
Professor Marilyn Lake.
Professor Marilyn Lake is Professor of History at La Trobe University, where she currently holds a Professorial Research Fellowship researching the gendered and racial identity of the colonial white man. She has published widely on subjects ranging from republicanism to sexuality and race. Her most recent book is entitled Faith: Faith Bandler Gentle Activist (2002).
Race and Whiteness are inextricably connected to the formation and politics of modern nation states and the communities which inhabit their territories, shaping identity, gender, class, representation, subjectivity, nationalism and institutions such as the law. At this time in world history and global politics questions about race and whiteness require critical investigation and engagement. The conference will provide a new intellectual space to investigate their nature and morphology.
For historical and other reasons whiteness and race have seldom been subject to critical scrutiny. The current political moment presents new opportunities and imperatives to do so in a constructive and informed spirit. As Ghassan Hage notes ‘we Australians are witnessing what is perhaps the most successful project of white Restoration ever witnessed in the West’. An academic conference on the historical, gendered, social, political, cultural, economic and discursive constructions of race and whiteness can make an important contribution to broader public debates. It provides the opportunity to examine popular understandings of race and whiteness and to evaluate the ways in which current and historical debates have taken and are taking shape.
This conference is an interdisciplinary project and we welcome contributions from sociologists, social anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, educationalists, economists, literary scholars, legal scholars, media scholars, philosophers, historians, feminists, Indigenous, multicultural, Australian, postcolonial and cultural studies scholars.
Convener: Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Organising Committee: Dr David Carter, Dr Fiona Nicoll, Dr Maryrose Casey and Ms Marilyn Barton
Click here to download the program.
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