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1. Social Movements and the Asia-Pacific The Project has involved participation in a series of conferences mounted by the UTS Institute for International Studies and the University of Guadalajara, to debate aspects of Asia-Pacific regionalization, leading to the publication of four edited collections in 2005. In addition, there are strong linkages with Asia-Pacific Sociological Association research networks, which have led to a number of publications, and also with the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives, ARENA, which is based in Hong Kong. In May 2004 a major discussion, attended by over 120 people, was hosted by the Initiative with academic and commentator Judy Rebick, debating and comparing Australian and Canadian feminism. PhD researcher May Chung is especially associated with this Project. Partner: Asia-Pacific Research Network (Manila), University
of Guadalajara 2. Transnational Corporations and Contestation The Project analyses conflicts between social movements and transnational corporations. It has involved the Asia-Pacific Research Network, a Manila-based research network of Non-Government organizations, and the Mineral Policy Institute, a Sydney-based NGO. The Project has resulted in a major international conference on ‘Corporate Power or Peoples Power’ held in Sydney in 2001, resulting in the publication of conference proceedings by the APRN in 2002. Chapters from this book, along with another book that resulted from the conference – ‘Effective strategies in confronting TNCs’ – are to be edited for a book in 2005. In addition, the project has produced a compilation of perspectives from social movements contesting mining corporations – ‘Moving Mountains: Communities confront Mining and Globalisation’, published by Zed Press in 2002. Project participants are developing a research focus on the changing logic of private finance, centring on questions of sustainability and climate change, ,for 2005. Partners: Minerals Policy Institute (Sydney), Asia-Pacific
Research Network (Manila) 3. Social movements, nationalism and globalism The Project looks at the spatial logic of social movement mobilization, debating impacts and responses to globalism. A colloquium was held under this Project in 2002, ‘Globalism + Nationalism’, and papers from this are to be published in a book coedited with Paul James, from the Globalism Institute in Melbourne. The Project is also associated with a five year project, funded by the Canadian Social Science Research Council, that began in 2002. This compares the impacts of globalism in Norway, Canada, Mexico and Australia, and their experience in responding to globalism. The Project has resulted in a conference series and publications program including six edited books. The penultimate conference of the Project is to be held in Adelaide in April 2005. It is expected that several PhD students associated with the RIIA attend the Adelaide conference. Partners: Arena Magazine; Globalism Institute (Melbourne),
Parkland Institute (Canada) 4. State power and social movements The Project is an on-going series of public explorations into themes of justice, detention, and public protest. The first was held in May 2001, as a forum connecting the experience of refugees and indigenous peoples in Australia. Titled ‘Imprison and detain: racialised violence today’, it attracted several hundred participants to join with a number of activists and academics to discuss urgent issues of racialised detention and violence in Australia. The second, ‘Civil Disobedience Today’, was held at NSW Parliament House immediately prior to the visit of the World Trade Organisation to Sydney. The Forum stimulated public debate on the role and legitimacy of protest in political change and hosted several academic and activist papers. Press coverage of the event led a member of TfC to take a complaint to the Australian Press Council, which was successful. The third stage of this project was held in March 2003, with a series of three forums on the theme of ‘Axis of Hope’, designed as a counterpoint to the proposed intervention in Iraq, offering a critique of the worldview promoted by the US-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’. The forums attracted over six hundred participants, listening to speakers from the US, Indonesia, India and Sweden and Australian, including a number of Australian indigenous speakers. The latest initiative in this series was held in late 2004, with two forums on the theme of ‘Who’s afraid in the War on Terror?’, organised with the UTS Community Legal Centre, the NSW Civil Rights Network and the UTS Shopfront, exploring the impacts and responses to ‘counter-terror’ in Australia and internationally, with participants from affected communities and the non-government sector. PhD researcher Wendy Sargent is especially associated with this Project. Partners: UTS Community Law Centre, NSW Civil Rights Network,
UTS Shopfront The Project brings together a range of agendas centred on the nexus between ecological conservation and social justice. Ecological democracy, environmental justice, ecological debt and broader debate about ‘the commons’ are reflected in a range of activities. Activities include: ARC-funded research into ecology, place and memory, conducted by Heather Goodall; a joint forum on climate change and social justice in 2003 with the Institute for Sustainable Futures; and an edited book on the new eco-social politics, ‘Nature’s revenge: reclaiming sustainability in an era of corporate globalism’. Also, members of the Initiative have been invited to participate in a symposium on the theme of water, borders and commons, organized by the Transforming Cultures research centre that is planned for May 2005. Partners: Parkland Institute (Canada), Commons Institute (Sydney), Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS); Transforming Cultures, UTS. 6. Media, community and activism The project focuses on new media and activism and is engaged with a range of researchers from journalism and the Institute for International Studies. Penny O’Donnell, Chris Conlon and Tanja Dreher have presented material on media activism to forums hosted by the Initiative. Tanja Dreher from the UTS Shopfront is also convening a forum on community media,, ‘Facing fear’, under the rubric of ‘Who’s afraid in the War on Terrorism’. In 2004 forums were organized at UTS with the Italian journalist Ida Dominijanni, and with the media activist Franco Berardi, the latter attended by over 120 people at UTS in September 2004. ARC Linkage research, with the Community Technology Network, into the uses of digital media by indigenous peoples in Australia is underway, funded by a UTS Linkage Seeding Grant and supported by the UTS Transforming Cultures Research Centre. MA student Damien Spry is especially associated with this project. Partners: Community Technology Network (Sydney), UTS Shopfront PROPOSED RESEARCH PROJECTS This is a comparative study of social activism around the issues of technology & environment in three countries: Australia, India & the Philippines. Movements addressed will include those around biotechnology (genetically modified crops); water management (dams, irrigation, privatisation); pesticide & herbicide use; mining; the range of social movement/groups involved including indigenous groups & disability groups. There are three main thematic concerns: contesting commodification; challenging developmentalism; & interrogating the constructions of "local" knowledge. The project seeks to explore ‘netutopias’ through a detailed examination of Internet sites and cyberspace-based experiences that promote new kinds of media practice and new kinds of 'public' discourse. There is interest in not only documenting and analyzing new media initiatives of this kind but also in exploring the conceptual frameworks of the media practitioners and the ways in which their media practices are explicitly and implicitly linked to broader political and social projects. Key questions of concern include: what is virtual social activism, and what is a virtual social movement? What can be done cyberspace? What is the virtual relation to the historical material world? What uses can be made of cyberspace for building social movements around fundamentalism, long distance nationalism, diasporic networks, and indigeneity? iii. Cyberworlds: national and transnational A focus on the generation of identity in the dual contexts of (trans)nationality and virtuality. The project stems from a fundamental questioning of the ways by which national imaginaries may or may not be adapting to the net. Rather than simply making a neat link between existing nation-state formations and cyber-nationality, this project specifically examines the virtualisation of the nation, and the problematic of defining cyber-citizenship, by focusing on non-states and/or sectors traditionally excluded from hegemonic national formations. In some cases the web existence of the non-state is inevitably tied to historical material nation-states. In other contexts, the virtual production of specific identity may enable certain marginalized or pathologised sectors to interrogate dominant national conceptualisation, and to insert themselves in those conceptualisations in unprecedented ways. In all these instances, the virtual (re)production of ethnicised or other identities raise questions about national imaginaries. This project will investigate a range of questions: What is the role of social activism in relation to geopolitical borders? What tactics and strategies come into play at national borders? How does purported border porousness impact on social movements? What role do subnational sectors play in these processes? How is indigeneity constructed within and across national borders? How are media, including "new" media, deployed by movements on the one hand but also construct national and x-national processes on the other? How do geopolitical borders relate to other sorts of borders, such as libidinal or sexual epistemological borders, linguistic borders, ethnic borders, as well as to the shifts in all such borders? What role do borders play in national and subnational epistemologies of resource ownership resulting in particular normative postiions of economic activity. v. Alternatives to Neo-liberalism "Alternatives to Neo-Liberalism" is an investigation of theories of social change in a world shaped by the triumph of neo-liberalism and globalisation. Recognising that theories of social change often arise organically from social movements, this project will examine the differing visions of leaders of social movements and of writers and theorists on social change. The project will explore the possibility of 'new common ground' between the old social movement of labour and the new social movements of feminism and environmentalism. It will consider theories of communitarianism, civil society theories, universalist-based frameworks and syntheses such as the 'Third Way'. It builds on a current research project on the rise of the neo-liberal agenda in the Australian media funded by a UTS Internal Research Grant. The project looks at the globalisation of the western conceptions and identity models "gay" and "lesbian," and their rival, "queer," and the implications of this globalisation for libidinal-based activism. Rather than conceiving of this project in terms of a theory-practice dichotomy, the aim here, in part, is to analyse the interactions and tensions between theorisations of libidinal economies and (homo)sexualised identities on the one hand, and on the other, the forms by which "queer" activism is manifested, often in conflict with theoretical work on "queer." The project will investigate and attempt to sustain dialogues between instances, drawn from around the globe of "queer" and "anti-queer" activism and representation against the grain of libidinal paradigms (hetereonormativity(ies), homonormativity(ies), and "queer(nesses)"). vii. Reclaiming memories of violence This comparative studies project examines movements contructed around the reclaiming and reinterpretation of memories of violence, including Partition [India/Pakistan]; Comfort women [Korea, China, etc and Japan]. and the Stolen Generations [Australia]. The aim is to generate comparative studies of movements that use media and cyberspace to reclaim the interpretative power in relation to these stories. The project also examines the relation between testimony and violence in the public domain.
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