This panel will be presented at The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2015, held from Thursday, May 28 to Sunday, May 31, 2015, at the Art Center of Kobe, Japan.
An important aspect of undertaking research and advocacy work in the field of human rights and global crises is the need for disciplinary agility. As Edward Said wrote, ‘Survival is about the connection between things.’ In this featured panel, human rights, media, gender and cultural studies scholars will discuss their interdisciplinary research experience. What are the appropriate methodologies for undertaking human rights research? How does one work across and interface with different disciplinary methods? What does it mean to have an interdisciplinary response?
SPEAKERS
Professor Baden Offord
Chair of Featured Panel
Director and Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights, Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia. Vice President-International, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia.
Baden Offord is an internationally recognized specialist in human rights, sexuality and culture. In 2012 he was a sponsored speaker, invited by the European External Action Service and the European Commission, together with the Human Rights and Democracy Network and Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation to the 14th EU-NGO Human Rights Forum in Brussels where he spoke on ASEAN and sexual justice issues. In the same year he conducted a three-week lecture tour of Japan sponsored by the Australian Prime Minister’s Educational Assistance Funds post the Great Eastern Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.
Among his publications are the books Homosexual Rights as Human Rights: Activism in Indonesia, Singapore and Australia (2003), Activating Human Rights (co-edited with Elizabeth Porter, 2006), Activating Human Rights Education (co-edited with Christopher Newell, 2008), and Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices, Contexts (co-edited with Bee Chen Goh and Rob Garbutt, 2012). His most recent co-authored publication in the field of Australian Cultural Studies is titled Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values (with Kerruish, Garbutt, Wessell and Pavlovic, 2014), which is a collaborative work with the Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy. His latest chapter, ‘Queer activist intersections in Southeast Asia: human rights and cultural studies,’ appears in Ways of Knowing About Human Rights in Asia (ed. Vera Mackie, London, Routledge, 2015).
He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona, La Trobe University, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and Rajghat Education Centre, Varanasi. In 2010-2011 he held the Chair (Visiting Professor) in Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo. In Japan he has given lectures and research seminars at Chuo, Otemon Gakuin, Sophia, Tohoku and Keio Universities.
Prior to his appointment at Curtin University, he was Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University, where he was a faculty member from 1999-2014.
Professor Donald E. Hall
ACCS2015 Featured Panelist
Lehigh University, USA
Donald E. Hall, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA, has published widely in the fields of British studies, gender theory, cultural studies, and professional studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirteen years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has taught also in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.
His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.
Professor John Erni
ACCS2015 Featured Panelist
Hong Kong Baptist University
John Nguyet Erni (PhD – Illinois; MA – Oregon; LL.M. – HKU) is Chair Professor in Humanities and Head of the Department of Humanities & Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. He also serves as Adjunct Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, after having served as Head of that Department in 2010-13. Previously, he taught at the City University of Hong Kong, as well as the University of New Hampshire and the University of Wisconsin in the U.S. A former recipient of the Rockefeller Humanities Research Fellowship, he worked at Columbia University’s School of Public Health in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights. He is also an elected Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely on international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth popular consumption in Hong Kong and Asia, and critical public health. His books include Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP, 2014), Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations (Routledge, 2011), Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (with Ackbar Abbas, Blackwell, 2005), Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities (with Siew Keng Chua, Blackwell, 2005), and Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS (Minnesota, 1994). Currently, he is completing a book project on the legal modernity of rights.
Professor Gerard Goggin
ACCS2015 Featured Panelist
University of Sydney, Australia
Gerard Goggin is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of Media and Communications, the University of Sydney. He is widely published on digital technology, with books including Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories (2016; with Mark McLelland), Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (with Larissa Hjorth), Technologies and the Media (2013), Global Mobile Media (2011), Cell Phone Culture (2006), and the co-edited collections Locative Media (2014), Mobile Technology and Place (2012), Internationalizing Internet Studies (2009), and Mobile Technology. In addition, he is well-known for his work on disability and media, including, with Katie Ellis, the books Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (2016) and Disability and the Media (2015), and with the late Christopher Newell, Disability in Australia (2005), and Digital Disability (2003). For details of his Future Fellowship project on disability, digital technology and human rights, see http://disabilitydigitaltech.net.
Professor Amanda Third
ACCS2015 Featured Panelist
University of Western Sydney, Australia
Associate Professor Amanda Third (PhD) is Principal Research Fellow in Digital Social and Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Amanda’s research focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of young people’s technology use, with particular emphases on the intergenerational dynamics shaping technology practice, and vulnerable young people’s technological engagements. Since 2010, Amanda has led Research Program 2: ‘Connected and Creative’, of the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre, which unites young people with researchers, practitioners, innovators and policy-makers from over 75 partner organisations across the not-for-profit, academic, government and corporate sectors to explore the role of technology in young people’s lives, and how technology can be used to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people aged 12 to 25. The research program Amanda leads investigates how to better connect vulnerable young people with their communities by enhancing and leveraging their technology practices and their creative engagements. She is also Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Industry Linkage project entitled “Young People, Technology and Wellbeing Research Facility” that examines cross-sector knowledge brokering practices. She has been a member of the Australian-based ‘Technology and Wellbeing Cross-Sector Roundtable’ since 2008.
Professor Angela Wong Wai Ching
ACCS2015 Featured Panelist
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Angela Wong Wai Ching received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She teaches at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, serves as the Deputy Chair of the Department and a Director of the MA Programme in Intercultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has engaged deeply in the development of the Gender Studies Programme, headed the Graduate Division of Gender Studies and is presently the Co-Director of Gender Research Centre of the University. Her research interests include: gender and sexuality, religious fundamentalism and Asian culture, women in Islam, Buddhism, Daoism and Christianity, and postcolonialism and religions in Hong Kong. Her works have been published in many professional journals both in Chinese and English. Some representative publications include: “The Poor Woman”: A Critical Analysis of Asian Theology and Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Women (Peter Lang, 2002), co-ed. with CHOI Poking, Chinese Women and Hong Kong Christianity: An Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2010), co-ed. with Siumi Tam, Yip Hon Ming, and Lo Ka Wing, Gender Awareness: Gender Studies in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China (Commercial Press, 2012), and co-ed. with Siumi Maria Tam and Danning Wang, Gender and Family in East Asia (Routledge, 2014).
Image courtesy of Zoriah/Flickr.