School of Creative Communication

The School of Creative Communication hosted UNAUSTRALIA, the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, over December 6, 7 & 8 2006. The conference featured 187 academic papers on the theme of UNAUSTRALIA, and an on-line art gallery: http://www.unaustralia.com/exhibition/AAUNOZ/exhibition.html

Our international keynote was Professor Jacques Rancière, Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII (1969-2000), author of Disagreement (1998). Professor Rancière spoke on December 8 in the Great Hall of New Parliament House, on the topic of 'What does it mean to be Un.?" Local Keynote addresses were given by Professors John Frow and Larissa Behrendt, Doctor Klaus Neumann and Associate Professor Catharine Lumby.

Topics of papers in the general stream included: refugees, hard rock in Sweden, the Cronulla riots, the gender ambiguities of footballers, utopian landscapes, indigenous festivals, unaustralian architecture, John Howard’s Unaustralia, maternal orgasm, Trash cinema, Muslim Australian identity, westernising plastic surgery and more. For a fully searchable database of UNAUSTRALIA abstracts, press: http://www.unaustralia.com/programme.php

The UNAUSTRALIA website is

http://www.unaustralia.com/