As 2020 continues to present challenging new stimuli for humanities researchers, we this month highlight Centre for 21st Century Humanities expertise across these compelling themes: digital technology and policing, understanding the past and present lives of people of colour, and coal mining as the basis of historical community formation as well as contemporary community disruption.

Criminology expert in police accountability comments on George Floyd case

The tragic death of George Floyd on 25 May has once again emphasised the significance of bystander video distributed through social media as a police accountability mechanism, says University of Newcastle Criminologist, Dr Justin Ellis.

Dr Justin Ellis studies the impact of digital media technology on crime and criminalisation and how it affects police accountability in cases of police excessive force.

In Dr Ellis’s most recent article into police accountability, drawing on interviews with police and non-police stakeholders, Dr Ellis says the police themselves are fully aware of the implications of how things can look on amateur video on social media, and brief officers about it. But that the police are also having to juggle a whole range of complexities, with safety the first priority.

“Digital technology is an amazing tool of scrutiny, and police are now subject to ‘the social media test’ - how your actions are going to look in a YouTube video or in other social media. Social media has a central and ongoing role to play in providing public institutions with candid assessments of their performance. We see this continuing to play out in Australia with video from 1 June of a case of alleged police assault against an Indigenous teenager in Sydney.” 

Dr Ellis' research was also recently cited in The Guardian.

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A trailblazing American in intimate focus

Dr Troy Saxby’s biography of American activist Pauli Murray, published in March by University of North Carolina Press, brings new attention to an American who “gave all that she could to make the United States confront its failure to live up to its own creed of liberty and justice for all”.

Dr Saxby’s PhD, supervised by Centre member Professor Marguerite Johnson, is the basis for Pauli Murray: A Personal and Political Life. The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (1910–1985) was a trailblazing social activist, writer, lawyer, civil rights organizer, and campaigner for gender rights. In this intimate biography, Troy Saxby provides the most comprehensive account of Murray’s inner life to date, revealing her struggles in poignant detail and deepening our understanding and admiration of her numerous achievements in the face of pronounced racism, homophobia, transphobia, and political persecution.

A new audience for research on Asian and Indigenous male servants in colonial worlds

The book Colonialism and male domestic service across the Asia Pacific co-authored by centre member Professor Victoria Haskins with Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie and Frances Steel, is now available in paperback.

This emphasises the significance of the research and ensures it will reach new readers.

The book, first released in 2019, examines the role of Asian and Indigenous male servants, also known as 'house boys', across the Asia Pacific from the late-nineteenth century to the 1930s. Tracing connections from diverse colonial sites including British Hong Kong, Singapore, Northern Australia, Fiji and British Columbia, French Indochina, the American Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, it delves into the intimate relationships between European and American colonists and their servants. 

“A most valuable social study, which will interest the veteran expatriate and the general reader alike ... There is an excellent collection of photographs, a copious supply of footnotes, and an extensive bibliography.” –  Asian Affairs

Digital humanities conference goes online to great success

When COVID-19 restrictions meant the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) conference in April was cancelled, members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, Canada, created a virtual conference instead so that papers could still be presented and discussed.

The ETCL is directed by the University of Newcastle’s Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities Professor Ray Siemens and works in collaboration with the University of Newcastle’s Centre for 21st Century Humanities.

The conference included recorded presentations of work that sits at the intersection of digital humanities and early modern studies, many of which discussed prominent and emerging digital projects in the field, such as the Virtual St. Paul’s Cathedral Project, MIA (Medici Interactive Archive), The Dalhousie Manuscripts Project, and others.

On the day of the conference, the experience of an in-person conference was replicated on Twitter with scheduled panels, each with several speakers. During each panel, each speaker had a scheduled time in which to post a series of tweets highlighting the key points of their presentation, and other participants and the Twitter community at large were invited to comment and ask questions during and after the event. The tweets were collected using the event hashtag #NTRS20, which are now available for anyone interested in the event to read and respond to.

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Our Human Experience Podcast - Bill Palmer on language landscape and culture

Associate Professor Bill Palmer’s research to preserve endangered Indigenous languages is the subject of the latest episode of the Our Human Experience podcast from the School of Humanities and Social Science.

In this episode Associate Professor Palmer talks about his latest research project which aims to determine how culture and social diversity interact with landscape in representing physical space in the minds and grammars of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages. He is collecting data from 6 Australian Indigenous languages that are endangered to inform us of how the landscape in which we live impacts what words we use. He also shares with us his confronting experiences of living on remote islands while completing his field work and warns that we are facing a dire situation with many of the world’s languages facing extinction.

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New history of music-making in Newcastle mining communities

Senior Lecturer in Music, Dr Helen English, has recently published a book titled Music and World-Building in the Colonial City Newcastle, NSW, and its Townships, 1860-1880.

The book investigates how migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coal-mining regions of New South Wales, particularly Newcastle.

Helen's book has received a glowing endorsement from one of the leading scholars in 19th century popular music Prof. Derek B. Scott:

"Helen English presents a ground-breaking study of the musical activities of migrant miners in nineteenth-century Australia, showing how vitally important music was to the making of new communities, their social values and colonial identity. In this absorbing, historically informed and persuasively theorized study of Newcastle and outlying townships, the author constantly surprises the reader with examples of how people were able to recreate musical practices from Eisteddfodau and brass band concerts to blackface minstrel shows, despite their lack of infrastructure and resources."

The politics of living with coal mines

Anthropologist Dr Hedda Askland, has published a journal article with Cambridge University Press entitled Mining voids: Extraction and emotion at the Australian coal frontier.

The article emphasises the schism that Dr Askland has observed, in which the values, beliefs and practices of small communities at the extractive frontier are juxtaposed to those of industry and government interests.

“In this article, I explore this juxtaposition and seek to bring attention to the power relations that shape experiences of environmental change and, specifically, mining,” she said.

The article focuses on the ongoing ethnographic study Dr Askland is conducting with mining affected communities in New South Wales.

It started with one case study on the small village of Wollar (pictured) in the Mid-Western Region of NSW but it has since expanded to include Wollar’s neighbour village, Bylong and Gloucester, a larger township on the Mid-Coast. The purpose of the study is to investigate lived experiences of mining and cohabitation of land uses, looking particularly at questions of migration and displacement.

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