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 This workshop, focusing on the topic of food, represents the next step in targeted international linkages between the Faculty of Arts at UoW and the University of British Columbia.
Professor Sneja Gunew of UBC has devised a multidisciplinary cross-institutional investigation of how gender, ethnicity, diaspora, etc. shape social practices around food. The UBC project "Food and Human (In)security: Cultures in Health" has received pilot funding with the likelihood of further funding in the near future. The project covers five clusters: indigenous/traditional knowledges; narratives of food practices; (anti)globalization movements; eating disorders; traveling food. There are significant intersections between the UBC research and similar projects at Wollongong spanning Arts, Health & Behavioural Sciences, and Human Geography.
The Faculty of Arts welcomes Professors Sneja Gunew, Margery Fee, and Coll Thrush (UBC) to the workshop where they will present project findings, generally and in specific papers, as well as helping Arts staff with methods of planning and running multidisciplinary, cross-institutional projects. In return, staff and postgraduates from Wollongong will present papers on our work that will complement and extend the Canadian activities.
Sneja Gunew is Professor of English & Women's Studies - she was educated at the Universities of Melbourne, Toronto, Leeds, and Newcastle, NSW. She has taught at various universities in England, Australia and Canada. Sneja has published widely on postcolonial, multicultural and feminist critical theory and is also currently Director of the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations at UBC.
Margery Fee is currently Chair of the Canadian Studies Program, Director of Arts One, Director of Intercultural and Community Programs, and the Graduate Advisor in the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender Relations at UBC. Upon moving to UBC in 1993, Margery began to specialize in post-colonial studies, particularly in the comparison of indigenous literatures in Australia, New Zealand-Aotearoa and Canada. She is currently collaborating with Sneja Gunew on a SSHRC funded project, Diaspora, Indigeneity, Ethnicity.
Coll Thrush gained his doctorate from the University of Washington in 2002, where he taught into the UW Program on the Environment. Since joining UBC in 2005, Coll's place-based research and teaching continues to focus on the Northwest Coast and the American West; aboriginal history and the cultures of colonialism, environmental history, and the history of food.
Draft programme [pdf 29kb]
Enquiries regarding the Food Workshop to June Aspley, Ext 5581 or email: june@uow.edu.au
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This exploratory workshop will be held at the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, 13-14 June 2006. The workshop will examine a range of issues that arise when the terms 'commons' and 'colonialism' intersect. The first is conceptual/ethical - whereas many historians tend to look at the commons in Britain or Europe as an unambiguous good, the issue of indigenous land title and practice means that it is not quite so easy to have this perspective in colonised societies. How can we usefully conceive of 'the commons' in this context? A second issue is to unravel the array of empirical political, social, cultural and economic factors that governed the creation and use of common land in colonial societies - at precisely the time (in the case of Britain/Australia, anyway) that they were being resumed in Britain. The third issue is the more general one of the process of commodification of land, and how this related to spaces like commons, Crown Land and other non-or semi-commodified spaces across the colonial world. For instance, what were the varieties of approach to common and other communal land holding tenures? How were these spaces/tenures 'dealt' with by colonial powers? What relation did these spaces have to processes of indigenous dispossession and colonial class formation?
The workshop will consider themes such as these from political, philosophical, ethical and historical standpoints. It is not confined to Australia, as it aspires to consider the Colonial Commons across a wide range of colonial examples. It is also open to papers that consider the commons conceived of more broadly and contemporarily, perhaps under the rubric of the 'Postcolonial Commons'.
Workshop programme [pdf 13kb]
Contact: Ben Maddison
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