Seminar Series Hobart - Semester 2, 2009
Seminars are held during semester on Friday afternoons, 2:30pm in Room 319 (Level 3, Arts Building, Sandy Bay campus) - all welcome. Please check regularly for updates.
If you would like to be advised of upcoming seminars, please send an email to Secretary@sociol.utas.edu.au
24 Jul 2009
Dr Max Travers
School of Sociology and Social Work, UTas
Welfare, punishment or something else? Sentencing minor offences committed by young people in Tasmania and Victoria
There is a continuing debate within juvenile justice between the approaches of welfare and justice. Those advancing these arguments often present young people as a deviant group who should be punished by tough measures such as detention, or as victims who require social support rather than criminal sanctions. This, however, may exaggerate the seriousness of offending and the severity of the response in the majority of cases that come before children’s courts. Drawing on observational research in Tasmania and Victoria, this paper describes the minor cases that come before magistrates, and the considerations employed in sentencing. Drawing on interactionism and the sociology of childhood (Waksler 1991), the paper argues that what takes place in children’s courts can equally well be understood as culture contact in which adults spend considerable effort trying to socialise the young, often with limited success. This ethnographic approach raises difficult questions for those who believe that juvenile justice should become more punitive, since the majority of offences are revealed to be quite trivial. Contrary to Livingston et al’s (2008) study in Queensland, practitioners in these states report that most minor offenders appear in court once, and do not become hardened delinquents.
7 Aug 2009
Prof. Adrian Franklin
School of Sociology and Social Work, UTas
Ethical consumerism? The sociology of second-hand markets and consumption
Over the past thirty years the shame and stigma associated with second-hand consumption has given way to a more confident and exuberant championing of second-hand shopping as an ethical (or more ethical) alternative to unregulated and uncontrolled ‘consumerism’. This paper will set out the social and economic dimensions of this growth and explain the arrival of ‘second-handism’ and the second-hand consumption movement from a number of theoretical and empirical angles.
14 Aug 2009
Prof. Bryan Turner
Post-secular society - Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of religion
Professor Bryan Turner, MA (Cambridge), PhD (Leeds), D.Litt (Flinders and Cambridge), FASSA, is Faculty Associate in the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor and Fellow in Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College. He is one of the best known sociologists and most influential public intellectuals, author and editor of over 30 books, including Muslims in Singapore (Routledge 2009), Can we live forever? (Athem 2009), Body and Society (Sage 2008), Rights and Virtues (Bardwell 2008) and Religious Diversity and Civil Society (Bardwell 2007). His books have been adopted as academic texts in sociology for the last 30 years. Professor Turner visits Australia as Professor of Social and Political Thought, University of Western Sydney.
This seminar is a videoconference linkup in the following rooms - Hobart campus: Room 205, Arts Building; Launceston campus: Dean's conference room, Arts Building
21 Aug 2009
Assoc. Prof. Doug Ezzy
School of Sociology and Social Work, UTas
Qualitative interviewing as an embodied experience
The paper argues that the emotional framing of interviews plays a major role in shaping the content of interviews. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jessica Benjamin and Luce Irigaray the paper describes how interviews can be experienced as either conquest or communion. Qualitative researchers typically focus on the cognitively articulated aspects of the interview and elide the significance of their own, and the interviewee’s, emotions. A re-analysis of two previous qualitative interview studies is used to illustrate the difference between interviews experienced as conquest or communion. The paper argues that all interviews are emotional and embodied performances and that good interviewing is facilitated by a reflexive awareness of, and engagement with, the emotional, embodied, and performed dimensions of the interview.
11 Sep 2009
Dr Aidan Davison
School of Geography and Environmental Studies, Utas
A domestic twist on the eco-efficiency turn: technology, nature, home
Somewhere around 1990, a new trajectory became evident in environmental concern in advanced industrial societies. Diverging sharply from counter-cultural narratives of technological alienation from nature and gaining momentum from talk of sustainable development, this new trajectory takes the form of a drive for eco-efficiency. Offered up by the new breed of corporate environmentalist, the goal of eco-efficiency has rapidly penetrated the worlds of business, engineering, design and management. The purpose of this paper is to consider how, in the Australian context, this goal might be deflected by its recent entry into domestic space. Emphasis on businesses as eco-efficient agents of sustainability has been coupled to emphasis on consumers as agents of sustainability. Reflecting this, the householder is emerging as a key player in Australian environmental politics, especially on questions of water and energy efficiency. The theory and practice of eco-efficiency brings with it instrumentalist assumptions that disregard the relational materiality of technology. Given this, it seems interesting to ask how consumer pursuit of domestic sustainability through eco-efficient artefacts is related to affective practices of home-making. In particular, this paper asks how entry of the drive for eco-efficiency into domestic space may further mess up efforts to keep matters of nature separate from matters of technology, in the process further confusing many environmentalists.
9 Oct 2009
Dr Tania Lewis
Charles La Trobe Fellow, Sociology Program, La Trobe University
Tele-ethics: Lifestyle politics and Green TV
The genre of lifestyle TV has recently given birth to a somewhat unlikely format, the green makeover or ‘greenovation’ show. While lifestyle programming is traditionally associated with the promotion of consumerism, recent innovations within the format have seen a growing preoccupation with ethical concerns around consumption and in particular with shaping the values and practices of viewer-consumers as responsible citizens. Australian television has been something of an innovator here, with green shows like the ABC’s Carbon Cops and SBS’s Eco-house Challenge calling upon individual families to makeover their lifestyles for the sake of the nation and the globe. More recently America launched the world’s first 24-hour eco-lifestyle television network, ‘Planet Green.’ Owned by the highly successful documentary-oriented network, the Discovery Channel, ‘Planet Green’ reaches up to 50 million homes. So how might we interpret this green turn on lifestyle TV? Does it mark the extension of lifestyle marketing and branding into the ecological realm, the final triumph of the logic regimes of capital? Or do the lifestyle transformations played out on the small screen suggest the possibility of new forms of micro-political engagement? This paper uses the example of green TV to examine a range of issues around green materialism and ethical citizenship.
Tania Lewis is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at La Trobe University. She is the author of Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Peter Lang, New York: 2008) and editor of TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover Show (Routledge, London: 2008). She is currently editing a collection for Routledge (with Emily Potter) called Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction.
6 Nov 2009
Prof. Kay Anderson
Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney
Thinking with the Head: For a Secular Ethics of Race and Human Being
Spatial histories of imperialism and colonialism after Foucault and Said have adhered largely to a representationalist account of disciplinary regimes. Yet in the socio-cultural sciences more generally, one currently witnesses the mapping of assorted conceptual tools beyond representation - in disparate calls to 're-materialise' cultural analysis. This paper uses the notion of 'assemblage' to connect to some of these efforts, in a focus on the notorious head-reading practices of nineteenth century craniology. Seeking to move the explication of such practices beyond their (too easy) fold into colonial knowledge/power, the paper tracks the sense in which nineteenth century racial discourse was not just an assertion, but something that was materially and precariously achieved. The singular inventions and fundamental instability of race are elicited in an account of the struggle of cranial science to prove the material (rather than metaphysical) existence of human 'mind'. The persistently troubled and only apparently post-Christian attempts to use racial skulls to fix an interval of ‘mind’ separating human from nonhuman, enjoin the ‘natureculture’ intervention in contemporary socio-cultural research to further decentre ‘the human’.
Kay Anderson is Professor of Cultural Geography at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. She is widely published in the fields of race historiography and cultural geography, from the award-winning 'Vancouver's Chinatown' (1991) to the 'Handbook of Cultural Geography' (co-edited with Steve Pile et al, 2002) and her recent award-winning book 'Race and the Crisis of Humanism' (2007). She is an elected Academician of the Academy of Social Science (UK) and elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Click here to view semester 2, 2009 schedule
