Read on to learn about the research and activities being undertaken at the University of Newcastle's Centre for 21st Century Humanities.

C21CH.2020 Showcase

The Centre for 21st Century Humanities invites all Centre members, Faculty of Education and Arts members, and HDR students to join us at our end of year showcase event on Monday 11th November 3pm - 4pm, at the University Gallery.

Join us to review and celebrate our research and achievements to date. We will launch our new theme for 2020 and formally invite expressions of interest for membership in 2020. Those interested in joining the centre are particularly welcome to attend the event.

Please RSVP to C21CH@newcastle.edu.au.

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Seminar: Minefields, a performative lecture

The Centre invites you to this seminar with Associate Professor Sam Spurr and Dr Eduardo Kalruz on the topic "Minefields, a performative lecture".

Architecture’s constant wrestling with the problem of scale makes it an ideal discipline through which to engage with and visualise some of the most pressing issues of our time: the Anthropocene, global warming, big data, and late-capitalism.  Minefields is a project that looks at problems of representation in the new climatic regime, and how architecture and critical spatial practice might contribute to developing a new ‘resistance aesthetics.’ 

Join us for this talk on Wednesday 30th October, 2-4pm at the Lambert Lounge.

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Dr Askland part of research project to study advocacy coalitions

Deputy Director of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, anthropologist Dr Hedda Askland, is part of a new $418,828 multi-institutional research project led by Dr Alfonso M. Arranz at the University of Melbourne, which aims to better understand and utilise the mechanics of “advocacy coalitions” for low-carbon technologies.

The study will explore who forms the advocacy coalitions that operate in the NSW low-carbon technologies space and what their belief systems are. This process will facilitate identifying ‘key opinion leaders’ (KOLs). Dr Askland said the study seeks to learn from interactions between KOLs in order to identify and better understand the social dynamics of new, broader coalition building.

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Symposium: Knowledge creation in the 21st century

A symposium, Knowledge Creation in the 21st Century: Approaches to Open, Digital Scholarship, will be held at New Space, Newcastle on December 6-7 2019 and will consider how to model open social scholarship practices and behaviour.

Emeritus Professor Hugh Craig and Global Innovation Chair in the Digital Humanities Professor Ray Siemens, both of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities are on the conference organising committee.

Professor Siemens said anyone interested in exploring and understanding new horizons for academic research should attend the conference.

"If you're interested in new ways of doing research, new manners of connecting research with interested communities on campus and in the engaged public, new types of collaborations and new partners to work with – then there will be something for you at this gathering, either in the presentations by member of the community of academic researchers, librarians, advanced graduate students and postdocs, software developers, those in memory institutions, and representatives of organisations serving these groups, or in the discussions in and around the examples of and ideas in and around open scholarship that they present," he said.

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Dr Julie McIntyre - History Now! presentation

Centre Wine Historian, Dr Julie McIntyre recently gave a talk at the History Now! series at the University of Technology Sydney. The series unites researchers, practitioners and friends of history from across the Sydney region, inviting all to reflect on what makes history real and vibrant.

Dr McIntyre gave a talk titled 'Re-entangling soil and labour with science and capital as sources of modern Australian wealth, from an environmental perspective'.

The talk argued that because the health of land for capitalist food and fibre production has little interested either unionists or ecological conservationists, these landscapes have few advocates critical of capitalist production, apart from the landowners themselves. Soils – although a fragile and finite source of life and wealth – have therefore been mainly subject, as Marx feared, to a state-capitalist nexus of political economy and science for industry.

Cultural film night success

The Wollotuka Institute, the Centre for 21st Century Humanities and the Societies, Cultures and Human Services Cluster hosted a film night on Friday 27th September at The Royal Exchange Salon Theatre. 

Those who attended enjoyed an evening of Brazilian and Aboriginal cultural collaboration through film, music, dance and food tasting. 

The film “We must be dreaming” by David Dhert was screened. It explores what the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games have brought to the lives of the people of Rio de Janeiro.