SEMINAR SCHEDULE - WOLLONGONG - 2006: ABSTRACTS

22 November : Australian Military Administration and the Wartime Collaboration Issue in Northwest Borneo, 1945-1946

Professor Keat Gin Ooi
Associate Professor in the School of Humanities, University Sains Malaysia

Abstract:
The 20th and 24th Brigade of the 9th Division Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) launched an amphibious landing on Brunei Bay and Labuan Island on 10 June 1945. In less than a fortnight all initial targets of this OBOE VI operation were secured owing to the fact that the Japanese 37th Army had, prior to the Australian assault, moved inland. By mid-August when Japan announced its unconditional surrender, Australian forces were in general control of northern Sarawak, Brunei, and North Borneo, all the former territories collectively referred to as British Borneo in the prewar period. Accompanying the AIF was the British Borneo Civil Affairs Unit (BBCAU) that progressively established civil administration in the territories re-occupied. In the interior upriver areas, guerrilla units of the Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD), an Allied unit (though mainly British with Australian and New Zealand personnel) dropped behind enemy lines from May 1945, had established de facto civil administration in various localities. BBCAU, headed by Brigadier C.F.C. Macaskie and his majority Australian officers, were in charge of civil administration from September to December 1945. In January 1946 the British Military Administration (British Borneo) or BMA (BB), mainly a British unit, assumed control from BBCAU; some Australian personnel continued to serve in this new outfit still headed by Macaskie.
An evaluation of the military administration of Sarawak and its impact on post-war developments is the primary objective of this study. Primarily, it focuses on the part played by the military administration on two interrelated issues, viz. the collaboration problem and inter-ethnic relations.

Bionote:
Keat Gin Ooi is an Associate Professor and coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Research Unit (APRU) (www.hum.usm.my/apru.asp) in the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia. His publications include World Beyond the Rivers (Hull, 1997), Of Free Trade and Native Interests (Oxford, 1997), Japanese Empire in the Tropics, 2 vols. (Ohio, 1998), Rising Sun over Borneo (Macmillan / St Martin’s, 1999), and From Colonial Outpost to Cosmopolitan Centre (Academia Sinica, 2002). Dr Ooi is also the editor of the award-winning Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, 3 vols. (ABC-Clio, 2004), and is the chief editor of the International Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies (IJAPS) (www.usm.my/ijaps/).

6 November : Indian Pre-Nationalist Anxiety and the Agony of Transition: Disruptions in Socio-Economic Identity in Colonial Bengal (1757-1885)

Dr Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay
Professor of English and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian Studies at Burdwan University, India

Abstract:
This paper tries to handle a crucial time frame from the Battle of Plassey (1757) to the formal inauguration of the Indian National Congress (1885). It looks at this time frame as a phase of pre-nationalist anxiety, and focuses on the commercial transactions between the "Banians" (indigenous merchants) and the Englishmen settling in and around Calcutta. This paper will show the gradual transformation of the "Banians" into "Babus" which disrupted the traditional class structure of Indian society through an acceptance of trans-cultural negotiation; but distrust and dislocation at different levels subalternised the Muslim community.

Bionote:
Dr Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay is Professor of English and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian Studies at Burdwan University, India. He is a leader in the promotion of Australian Studies in India and has interests in history and postcolonial studies. Professor Bandyopadhyay is currently visiting UNSW as an Australia-India Council Australian Studies Fellow.

25 October : Embracing the Canonical: Identity, Tradition and Modernity in Indian Classical Music

Professor Lakshmi Subramanian
Senior Fellow in History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta

Abstract:
This paper focuses on the social processes and impulses behind the making of a classical tradition for music in modern South India. This is known as the Karnatik form of music and, while sharing several aesthetic features with its counterpart in Northern India, has a very specific regional circulation. The regional dimension of the musical form is determined largely, but not exclusively, by the language of the song texts and by the network of devotional and court sponsored musical activity. Implicit in the construction of a classical cannon lay the issue of identity and the construction of a modern self by elite groups whose engagement with music (especially in South India) was part of their engagement with modernity. I hope to demonstrate how in the production of a discourse for classical music, its preservation and dissemination, ideas and categories of tradition and modernity were alternatively deployed and how these inflected the art form and transformed the social base and orientation of its practitioners.

Bionote:
Professor Lakshmi Subramaniam's research focuses on music and performance in Modern South India, diasporic cultural production and practices with special reference to Tamils in South East Asia and the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Her recent publications include From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (2006).

19 October : The Indernet – Negotiating ‘Indianness’ in German

Dr Urmila Goel
Researcher in Cultural and Social Anthropology, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt

Abstract:
The internet portal http://www.theinder.net, called the Indernet (merging the German word for Indians Inder with internet and thus making it the network of Indians), forms a virtual space of ‘Indians of the second generation’ for ‘Indians of the second generation’ in German-speaking Europe. Using transnational technology, a space has been created which is clearly geographically localised both by the use of language and the topics of content. While referring symbolically to an (imagined) ‘India’, the users’ practical point of reference is the Germany (Switzerland or Austria) which determines their everyday lives. Here they experience othering and exclusion; here they face the demands of univocal ‘national’ belongingness. The internet portal provides them with their own space in which they can explicitly and implicitly exchange their experiences and, in doing so, negotiate their own interpretations of ‘national’ belongingness. The paper discusses how ‘Indianness’ is imagined in German(y).

Bionote:
Urmila Goel is currently a visiting scholar at the Asia Centre of the University of New England in Armidale. She is a researcher in cultural and social anthropology affiliated to the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. Urmila is working on the research project ‘The virtual second generation – On the negotiation of ethnicity on the internet’. Her research interests cover the construction of ethnic identities, othering and racism, second generation migrants, migration from South Asia to Germany as well as the role of the internet in this. For more information please visit www.urmila.de.

11 October : UNappreciated, UNderfunded, UNsustainable? Australia and the UN

Dr Alison Broinowski
Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW and ANU

Abstract:
The United Nations in its 61st year is about to get a new Secretary General. Among his more urgent tasks, he will have to renovate the New York headquarters; restructure the Secretariat; stop the genocide in Darfur; stop the US attacking Iran; stop the civil war in Iraq; negotiate a new Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty; and get the member states to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. He can’t expect to succeed. Australia and the United States will give him much less than full support. Other member states are threatening to take the UN out of the US. What’s going to happen to the UN?

See News Article >>

Bionote:
A former Australian diplomat, Dr Alison Broinowski has written or edited nine books on aspects of the interface between Australia and Asia. Her best known books are The Yellow Lady – Australian Impressions of Asia (OUP 1992 and 1996), About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia (Scribe 2003), and Howard’s War (Scribe, 2003). Her latest book, co-written with James Wilkinson about the United Nations, is The Third Try: Can the UN Work? (Scribe Publications, 2005).  Copies of this latest book will be available for purchase at the seminar.
Dr Broinowski is a graduate in Arts from the University of Adelaide, and her PhD in Asian Studies is from ANU. She has lived in Japan, Burma, Iran, South Korea, and Mexico, and worked as a diplomat in Japan, the Philippines, Jordan, and New York (UN). A frequent speaker and broadcaster, she was a co-signatory in 2003 with the ‘43 Immortals’, Australian former defence chiefs, heads of Commonwealth government departments, and senior diplomats, of a public statement calling for truth in government.

27 September : Shifting Nikkeijin Identity and Citizenship: The Politics of Recognition by a Multiethnic People of the Philippines

Dr Shun Ōno
The Australian National University, Faculty of Asian Studies

Abstract:
The Philippine Nikkeijin (Nikkei) are descendants of pre-Pacific War Japanese immigrants to the Philippines. As they sided with the Japanese forces during the war, they were stigmatised as ‘Hapon’ (Japanese) and ‘collaborators’ in post-war Philippine society. After the 1980s, they commenced their unique identity politics to regain their ‘lost’ Japanese names and even Japanese nationality, and have claimed themselves as ‘Firipin Zanryū Nihonjin’ (Japanese left behind in the Philippines), the same as ‘Chugoku Zanryū Nihonjin’ (Japanese left behind in China).

Bionote:
Dr Shun Ōno was a staff writer, foreign correspondent, and assistant editor for Japan’s nationwide newspaper Mainichi Shimbun for over 20 years. He completed his MA at the University of the Philippines and his PhD (East Asian and Southeast Asian Studies) at the Australian National University. His publications include Japanese Diasporas (co-authored book) and Hapon: Firipin Nikkeijin no Nagai Sengo [The long agony of the Philippine Nikkei after the war]. Dr Ōno joined CAPSTRANS in June 2006. He will shortly be leaving UoW to take up his new position as professor at Kyushu University Asia Center (contemporary Asian culture and society) in October 2006.

20 September : LOVE AND SORROW IN ANCIENT JAVA - their representation in temple reliefs, poems and songs

Lydia Kieven
PhD candidate
CAPSTRANS and the School of History and Politics
University of Wollongong

Abstract:
The princess is sitting on the lap of the prince, he is playing music on a stringed instrument for her, in the background there is water running from a well ....
This and similar scenes are depicted in the reliefs of Hindu-Buddhist temples of ancient Java. Other reliefs tell of longing for love and the sadness of lovers separated from each other. The presentation of examples from temple reliefs will concentrate on the East Javanese period (about 1300-1500) and demonstrate interesting features in iconography. Love, longing and beauty are also the subjects of Old Javanese literature whose poetic verses often correspond to the relief-depictions. During the seminar Ms Kieven will read texts from Old Javanese love literature and sing traditional Javanese songs (macapat).

Bio-Note:
Lydia Kieven M.A. has studied Malaiologie and History of Art in Cologne, Germany. For many years she has been undertaking research in ancient Javanese temples. Her special areas of inquiry are the reliefs of East Javanese temples and the corresponding literature. Ms Kieven joined the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong in May 2006 as a PhD student. She is supervised by Professor Adrian Vickers and is currently researching her thesis on Panji reliefs.

5 September : Between the Lines: An Analysis of the Language of Indonesian Reporting of Military Clashes in Aceh

Professor Philip Kitley
Head of School
School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication
Faculty of Arts
University of Wollongong

Abstract:
In this paper I explore how the kidnapping and later death of television journalist Ersa Siregar was reported in Indonesia, looking particularly at the grammatical and linguistic tactics used by the press in stepping around the dangers in reporting the mysterious death of one of their colleagues. I will also take the opportunity to reflect on the ethical tensions involved in researching events that are painful for informants.
In 2003 the Indonesian government imposed martial law on the north Sumatran province of Aceh. It introduced what it described as a more open media policy for reporting on the armed struggle being waged against the Free Aceh Movement which was fighting for the separation of Aceh from Indonesia. The military authorities offered to protect journalists representing national level press and broadcasting media if they agreed to report events in a balanced, non-partisan manner. The military authorities were also keen to embed journalists much in the way that the United States had in the second Iraq war. The Jakarta press resisted embedding but welcomed the opportunity to investigate the situation in Aceh and looked forward to the new professional freedoms held out to them by the top echelon of the military command. In the field, however, journalists found that military commanders did not share the views of the military elite. They took the view that any reports that seemed to favour the guerrilla forces were tantamount to a betrayal of Indonesia.

Bio-Note:
Professor Philip Kitley is Head of the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication in the Faculty of Arts at UoW. His research is concerned with the mediatisation of social, cultural and political change in Indonesia and Malaysia. Professor Kitley’s recent work has focused on the question whether regulatory regimes in Asian countries are hospitable to civil society. Related research is concerned with opportunities and trends towards “publicness” in Indonesia, which he is investigating across a number of sites such as election campaigns, the law, the changing role of the parliament and public broadcasting. A third area of research is concerned with the growing interest television stations have in adapting licensed formats. Professor Kitley was in Jakarta in April 2006 where he investigated new legislation and practices related to the Indonesian national parliament. His research focused on the extent to which the parliament has become a more constituency or public centred institution.

23 August : Enhancing Regional Economic Integration: the Role and Contribution of SMEs

Associate Professor Charles Harvie
School of Economics and Information Systems,
University of Wollongong

Abstract:
Over the past decade the economies of East Asia, and APEC more generally, have been opening up their markets and in the process have achieved significant gains in exports and economic growth. In conjunction with this increased economic integration there has been increased recognition by regional governments of the potential for a substantial increase in the participation by small businesses in the generation of regional income, employment, exports, investment and expanded economic growth. Advances in information and communications technology add credence to this potential. In addition, developing economies are especially seeing small businesses as potential instruments for the alleviation of poverty and regional development.
This paper reviews the contribution of the SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) sector to the growth and development of the East Asian economies, and their increasing importance in the attainment of economic growth, employment, trade and investment and the development of globally competitive economies. In doing so identification of the potentially important role of SMEs in facilitating and bringing about the practical benefits of closer economic integration are emphasised. To enable this to occur it is important to identify within the region: barriers to their development; key factors essential for their capacity building; strategies to enhance their competitiveness in the global marketplace; key components relating to their export success; and their role and importance in facilitating regional economic development, reducing income inequality, and empowering regional involvement in the global economy.
Those interested can view the pdf version of the powerpoint slides for this presentation by clicking here.

Bio-note:
Associate Professor Charles Harvie is Co-director of the Centre for Small Business and Regional Research in the Faculty of Commerce, UOW. His research interests are in the areas of international trade and economic integration in East Asia, small business development in East Asia, and economic development in China, Korea and Vietnam. His recent book publications include: Contemporary developments and issues in China’s economic transition (editor), Vietnam’s reforms and economic growth, (authored with Tran Van Hoa), Korea’s economic miracle: fading or reviving? (authored with Hyun-Hoon Lee), and New East Asian Regionalism: Causes, Progress and Country Perspectives (edited with F. Kimura, and H.H. Lee). He has also recently completed a four volume edited series of books with Edward Elgar on SMEs in East Asia with Dr Boon-Chye Lee. Dr Harvie has recently published in the Journal of the Korean Economy, ASEAN Economic Bulletin, The ICFAI Journal of Monetary Economics, Singapore Economic Review and the Australian Economic History Review.

9 August : Empowering Innovation in the Third World: The Case for Promoting a New Global Localism

Professor Stephen Hill
Honorary Professorial Fellow
CAPSTRANS, University of Wollongong

Abstract:
This seminar is based on my United Nations experience across the region assisting governments to develop their national innovation strategies and laws, and puts together conclusions on innovation strategies for developing countries that allow realistic linkage of national innovation - at all levels of the society - into the international flows of scientific knowledge within a globalised economy. I pay particular attention to the linkage that is often forgotten or marginalised in national innovation debates, the empowerment of local and village based innovation and its connection into the dominant national systems and the capture of international flows of knowledge. In discussion, I will reflect my direct field experience (including countries such as Mongolia and North Korea) of these issues against my professional background as an international scholar of S&T policy and development: prior to joining the UN, I was Director of the University of Wollongong's Centre for Research Policy, an ARC Special Centre, where amongst other roles, I was advisor to the Prime Minister's Science Council (under Keating) on Australia's S&T relations with Asia.

Bio-note:
Stephen Hill retired from the post of Director, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Office, Jakarta at the end of 2005 after working for UNESCO for 10 years. In that position he was Regional Director for Science for Asia and the Pacific and additionally UNESCO Representative or Ambassador to Brunei Darussalem, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Timor Leste and Envoy of the Director General to Singapore. He was responsible for designing and implementing the United Nations strategies related to education, science, environment, culture, world heritage, communications, the media and peace building through the region, and particularly, for empowerment of the poor through S&T, a phenomenon often overlooked in the excitement of high tech national innovation strategies. Since retiring from UNESCO, Professor Hill was appointed by the Director-General as his Special Representative to lead diplomatic missions to Brunei and Singapore and foster regional diplomatic relations for UNESCO.

19 July : Democratization and the Middle Class in China

Professor Xiaobo Hu
Clemson University, USA

Abstract:
The talk intends to examine the origins of the new Chinese middle class by analyzing a particular business segment that has emerged since the post-Mao reforms. It will investigate its relationship with the state and how this relationship would affect the prospect for democratic development in China.

Bio-note:
Xiaobo Hu is Professor of Political Science and Director of the China Program at Clemson University. He has been National Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center; and Research Fellow at East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. His current research interests include politics of economic reform, property rights transformation, and other related issues. His latest publications include China After Jiang (Stanford University Press; co-editor and contributor).

7 June : Analysing Indonesian history and politics: the ideas of Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Max Lane
University of Sydney

Abstract:
This paper will look at the issue of class in the context of the class role in Indonesia's national and social revolutions before 1965. It will use some of the ideas implicit in and explicitly espoused by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in trying to understand the relationship between national and social revolution in Indonesia and counter-revolution after 1965. It will take up the issue of how completing a revolutionary process, dismantling feudalism and laying the basis for industrialisation occurs in a society where a bourgeoisie has not yet developed.
In these circumstances, what classes can take up that task and what are the political processes that must be passed through? What happens when the political organisation and culture of the popular classes also suffers demolition in a counter-revolution?

Bio-note:
Max Lane is currently a PhD candidate in CAPSTRANS at the University of Wollongong and lectures in Asian studies at the University of Sydney. He is the translator of five novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, including the Buru Quartet novels, as well as the plays and poems of W.S. Rendra. He is the author of two published monographs on politics in Indonesia and the Philippines. Mr Lane is also a regular contributor on Indonesian issues to the Jakarta Post and Green Left Weekly.

17 May : Micro-finance, Micro-enterprise and the Cultural Logistics of Poverty Alleviation in the Pacific

Professor Donna Kerner
Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts

Abstract:
Almost three decades following the first experiment of micro-credit lending by the Grameen Bank to poor women in Bangladesh, the twin pillars of micro-enterprise and micro-credit have become enshrined as a general panacea for poverty alleviation world-wide and linked to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals of reducing hunger, eliminating HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, empowering women and improving their health, educating children, and lowering infant mortality. This working paper draws on recent analyses of problems with adapting the Grameen model cross-culturally and explores some of the implications of this development strategy in the context of globalisation processes in the Pacific.

Bio-note:
Donna Kerner is Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. In 2005-06 she is serving as Resident Director of Wheaton’s Study Abroad Programs in Australia/New Zealand and is a Senior Visiting Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at UOW. She has conducted research on gender and micro-enterprise development in Tanzania and in Fiji during the 1990s. Her other research interests include: education and social class, food security and famine prevention, and memory and material culture.

26 April : The international transfer of HRM policies and practices in a low power host country

Dr Anne Vo
Associate Lecturer
School of Management & Marketing
Faculty of Commerce, University of Wollongong

Abstract:
This paper aims to examine the interaction between ‘country-of-origin’ and ‘country-of-operation’ effects in determining human resource management (HRM) policies and practices in multinationals (MNCs) within the context of globalisation. As national institutional patterns can penetrate into a firm’s internal operations, this study investigates the transmission and adaptation of the home country’s HRM traits at the MNC subsidiaries in the developing host country. Based on an investigation of the reward systems and performance management of US and Japanese companies in Vietnam, this paper argues that while ‘low power’ environments pose little in the way of formal constraint mechanisms they can facilitate the penetration of novel HRM practices. They also suggest a complex and challenging situation for MNC operations, requiring a very high level of adaptation and flexibility on the part of the host country firm.

Bio-note:
Dr Anne Vo completed her doctoral studies in the HRM Department, De Montfort University, the United Kingdom, in 2004. She then went back to Vietnam and worked as a HR Manager for British American Tobacco Company. Dr Vo joined the University of Wollongong as an Associate Lecturer in November 2005, and currently researches in the areas of international and comparative HRM (with a focus on Asian countries), the transfer of multinational companies' IR/HRM policies and practices across borders, and the transformation of HR systems in developing countries.

5 April : Discussing ‘Race’ on the Japanese Internet: the Case of 2-channeru

Dr. Mark McLelland
Lecturer in Sociology
School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication
Faculty of Arts
University of Wollongong

Abstract:
Much English-language research into the Internet that discusses "our" use of the medium assumes an Anglophone "we" (that we are all English speakers – native or otherwise) and that the Internet itself is primarily an Anglophone medium. Given the current language makeup of the world's online population, this is an increasingly unhelpful perspective and in the case of languages like Japanese is extremely distorting. Although Japanese is the Internet’s fourth most populous language group (after English, Chinese and Spanish), it does not function as a language of diaspora, or as a lingua-franca among diverse peoples with common cultural ties and backgrounds; on the contrary, it is argued that Japan's digital face is largely exclusive to the Japanese.

This paper investigates Japan’s notorious “2-channeru” (Channel 2) BBS, one of the world’s most visited Internet sites. One “board” is analysed in particular, that dedicated to debate about “race”, in order to investigate the relationship between the Japanese language and the “Japaneseness” of the participants. Lisa Nakamura’s (Cybertypes) contention that the Internet is “a place where race is created as an effect of the Net's distinctive uses of language” is taken as a starting point to investigate the differences between Japanese and Anglophone racial categories and to draw attention to the particularities of racial discourse in this virtual Japanese space.

Bio-note:
Dr McLelland is a sociologist and cultural historian of Japan specialising in the history of sexuality, gender theory and new media. His recent publications have focused on the postwar history of Japanese queer cultures and the development of the Internet in Japan, especially the use of the Internet and other new media by minority communities in Japan and throughout Asia