Population Challenges and Our Data
Symposium
Which Post-Pandemic Population Challenges is Australia Facing, and Which Data is Available and Envisioned to Address Them? Australia is facing various population challenges and unforeseen demographic changes post-pandemic: unprecedented low fertility rates, rising rates of mental ill-health,…
Shanghai Demimondaine: From Sex Worker to Society Matron
Seminar
In this Biography Workshop Nick Hordern explores the hitherto unknown life of Australian woman Lorraine Murray (1910–2000). Arriving in Shanghai in 1933, Lorraine found herself in the sex industry. In 1936 she quit the industry, but struggled to find a new path, until the American author…
States of Subsistence: Methodological Reflections from the Bakery (José Ciro Martínez, York)
Seminar
On any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many as pita. Some rely on this bread to avoid starvation; for others it is a customary pleasure. Yet despite its ubiquity in accounts of Middle…
EP Thompson at 100: History, Law, Politics
Seminar
EP Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the great British historians of the past century. His work reshaped our thinking about the relationship between law and society. His classic texts, such as The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters not only transformed eighteenth- and…
Do climate models leave us cold? Devices, felt-virtualities and the sociology of heat
Seminar
The paper seeks to ground heat and temperature more sociologically. The starting thought, which is possibly completely wrong, is that the modelling of global average temperature undertaken by climate scientists over the last few decades, is affecting a wide range of experiences of heat. Not only is…
Decolonising minority citizenship: promises of an ethnographic sensibility (Sagnik Dutta, OP Jindal Global University)
Seminar
Who is a minority? The answer to this seemingly innocuous question is not obvious. Colonial constructions of the minority were shaped by racialised assumptions about the cultural other. The minority as the cultural other has seeped into nationalist imaginaries of postcolonial nation-states.…
Tom Wills: The Insubordinate Life of an Australian Sporting Legend
Seminar
There are many versions of the origins of our Australian game of football, but all of them include T.W. Wills in some way. A champion cricketer, he had been exposed to the game of rugby when he was at Rugby School in England. In Melbourne in 1858, with several other men, he organised the first…