ACCS2019


Conference Theme: "Reclaiming the Future"

May 24-26, 2019 | Toshi Center & Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioicho, Tokyo

We live in a period characterised by rises in regionalism, nationalism and authoritarianism; a time of great global uncertainty and anxiety, as well as inequality and iniquity which both reflects and drives political divide, and undermines international systems of cooperation. Clashes of identities, beliefs and ideologies are evident in academia, media and the arts, contributing to a feeling that humanity is spiraling out of control; that our relationships with each other, as well as with the earth and environment, have never been worse.

Yet, as humans, we are not conditioned by fear alone, but instead by a remarkable ingenuity, and a capacity for hope, self-reflection, activism and action. This agency to improve our own lives, and those of others, is the theme of this international conference, inviting us to consider the ways in which we contextualise and process the past, reimagining ourselves, our relationships, and our environments; driving positive change and reclaiming the future as a time we look towards with hope, and even optimism.

ACCS is organised by IAFOR in association with the IAFOR Research Centre at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) in Osaka University, Japan.

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Conference Report

Above left: Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero delivers a powerful dramatic reading from her internationally-renowned play, Frida K. at the concurrently held Asian Conferences on Cultural Studies and Asian Studies (ACCS/ACAS2019) in Tokyo. Above right: Professor John Nguyet Erni, of Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, used his Keynote Presentation “Inhabiting the Open” to explore ideas of the self and the other and how people find belonging in the world.


Above clockwise from top left: Winner of the 2018 IAFOR Documentary Photography Award, Ezra Acayan, talks of his work as a documentary photographer in the Philippines, in an interview with Professor Donald Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA. Filmmaker Keiko Bang of Bang Singapore Pte Ltd, Singapore, discusses the spread of fandom and what applications the findings could have in spreading information beyond pop culture. Professor Sue Ballyn of Barcelona University, Spain, in her keynote presentation, “Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures”, responds to questions relating to how the elderly are being failed. In his own Keynote Presentation, titled “Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future”, Professor Donald Hall spoke to the conference theme of “Reclaiming the Future” by embracing positive narratives, concentrating on the possible, and encouraging artists, writers, philosophers, and theorists to “challenge and change the world”.

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Speakers

  • Ezra Acayan
    Ezra Acayan
    Documentary Photographer
  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    Barcelona University, Spain
  • Keiko Bang
    Keiko Bang
    Bang Singapore Pte Ltd
  • John Nguyet Erni
    John Nguyet Erni
    Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, USA
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Baden Offord
    Baden Offord
    Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

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Programme

  • I am a Fan of Fandom
    I am a Fan of Fandom
    Keynote Presentation: Keiko Bang
  • Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
    Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
    Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall
  • Inhabiting the Open
    Inhabiting the Open
    Keynote Presentation: John Nguyet Erni
  • Love as an Algorithm
    Love as an Algorithm
    Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero
  • Frida K. – a dialogue for a single actress
    Frida K. – a dialogue for a single actress
    Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero
  • An Eco-humanising Post To The Future
    An Eco-humanising Post To The Future
    Keynote Presentation: Baden Offord
  • Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures
    Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures
    Keynote Presentation: Sue Ballyn
  • IAFOR Documentary Photography Award & Interview
    IAFOR Documentary Photography Award & Interview
    IAFOR Documentary Photography Award Screening & Interview: Ezra Acayan, Donald E. Hall

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Organising Committee

The Conference Programme Committee is composed of distinguished academics who are experts in their fields. Conference Programme Committee members may also be members of IAFOR's International Academic Board. The Organising Committee is responsible for nominating and vetting Keynote and Featured Speakers; developing the conference programme, including special workshops, panels, targeted sessions, and so forth; event outreach and promotion; recommending and attracting future Conference Programme Committee members; working with IAFOR to select PhD students and early career academics for IAFOR-funded grants and scholarships; and overseeing the reviewing of abstracts submitted to the conference.

  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    Barcelona University, Spain
  • Joseph Haldane
    Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, USA
  • Baden Offord
    Baden Offord
    Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
  • Seiko Yasumoto
    Seiko Yasumoto
    University of Sydney, Australia

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ACCS/ACAS2019 Review Committee

  • Dr Hang Kuen Chua, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
  • Professor Jimmy Soria, University of Northern Philippines, Philippines
  • Dr Adriano Balagot, City University of Marikina, Philippines
  • Dr Alexandre Avdulov, Saint Mary's University, Canada
  • Dr Yoshihiko Yamamoto, Shizuoka University, Japan
  • Dr Durgesh Kasbekar, Independent Scholar/Researcher, Canada
  • Dr Helena Vasques de Carvalho, ISCTE-IUL, Portugal
  • Dr Joy Spiliopoulos, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, China
  • Professor Jungman Park, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea
  • Dr Mutiara Mohamad, Fairleigh Dickinson University, United States
  • Dr Nishevita Jayendran, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India
  • Dr Preechaya Krukaset, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Thailand
  • Dr Sarath Simsiri, Suan Dusit University, Thailand
  • Dr Susan Bacud, University of the Philippines Los Banos, Philippines
  • Dr Anand Wadwekar, School of Planning and Architecture Bhopal, India
  • Dr Xuying Yu, The Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

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IAFOR Research Centre (IRC) – “Innovation and Value Initiative”

The IAFOR Research Centre (IRC) is housed within Osaka University’s School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), and in June 2018 the IRC began an ambitious new “Innovation and Value Initiative”. Officially launched at the United Nations in a special UN-IAFOR Collaborative Session, the initiative seeks to bring together the best in interdisciplinary research around the concept of value, on how value can be recognised, and measured, and how this can help us address issues and solve problems, from the local to the global.

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Ezra Acayan
Documentary Photographer

Biography

Ezra Acayan is a documentary photographer based in Manila whose work primarily focuses on social issues and human rights. Currently, he is working on a documentary reportage on the suffering and abuse experienced by communities under the Philippine government's war on drugs.

In 2017, together with a team of Reuters journalists, Ezra was awarded a special merit at the Human Rights Press Awards for multimedia reporting on the drug war. In 2018, he received both the Ian Parry Scholarship Award for Achievement and the Lucie Foundation Photo Taken Emerging Scholarship, as well as being named Grand Prize winner at the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award and Young Photographer of the Year at the Istanbul Photo Awards.

This work—along with work by other journalists who cover the drug war—has been exhibited in Geneva for two straight years as part of the Universal Periodic Review of the Philippines at the United Nations Human Rights Council. It has also been exhibited at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Thailand (FCCT), in France during the Prix-Bayeux Calvados Award for War Correspondents, in Sarajevo during the WARM Festival, and in Germany during the Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism.

He has done multimedia work for various outfits such as Reuters, European Pressphoto Agency, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and the French Society magazine. He has also done work for NGOs such as Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, Care International, and the French Red Cross. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Vice, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, Stern, Paris Match, and more.

Featured Presentation (2019) | Presentation information will be added here shortly
Sue Ballyn
Barcelona University, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986, she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian poetry, the first PhD on Australian literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation in 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990, she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory-Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25, 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University, Spain, which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020, a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures

Previous Presentations

Spotlight Presentation (2017) | “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Keiko Bang
Bang Singapore Pte Ltd

Biography

Keiko Hagihara Bang is the founder and CEO of Bang Singapore Pte Ltd, a boutique media firm focused on fandom, influencers, branded content, e-commerce and technology-led storytelling. Her 35-year career spans time serving as a reporter for media such as CNN, NHK and what is today CNBC, and as a creator of critically-acclaimed independent documentaries for the world, from the Asia-Pacific region. She has produced more than 50 award-winning films including: Zheng He: Emperor of the Seas, Mysterious Hanging Coffins of China, Guge: The Lost Kingdom of Tibet, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Hip Korea, Secrets of the Samurai and many others.

In Japan, she successfully created a landmark co-production with PBS, TV Asahi and ZDF of the first non-Japanese documentary on the Battleship Yamato as seen from the Japanese point of view. Bang also worked for 5 years with the Ministry of Information and Communications (Somusho) on pioneering co-production schemes which engendered more than 40 hours of programming between rural Japanese broadcasters and other Asian countries, and culminated in Bang’s launch of Asian Side of the Doc (French) in Tokyo, the first ever major documentary conference to be held in Japan. Bang was also the first independent Asian production company to rank on Realscreen’s “World’s 100 Most Influential Documentary Companies”. In addition to her work on the creative side, Keiko is a serial entrepreneur and has worked with more than 150 companies, 7 governments and 50 media partners on co-productions, country branding and C-Level media strategy across twenty-four countries in Asia. Bang is a Member of the International Academy of Arts & Sciences, Chairperson of the New Media Taskforce and Advisor to the Documentary Committee of the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, and to the VR Braintrust (IDFA). She is also a Member of the Asian Academy Awards, and Advisor to the Emerging Future Institute, The Rohingya Blockchain Project, and Teach North Korean Refugees. She is the Founder of The Beautiful Minds Global Girls’ Education Broadcaster Project with UNESCO.


Previous ACCS Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2019) | I am a Fan of Fandom
John Nguyet Erni
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Biography

John Nguyet Erni is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics, Chair Professor in Humanities, and Head of the Department of Humanities & Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2017, he was elected President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. A recipient of the Gustafson, Rockefeller, Lincoln, and Annenberg research fellowships, and other awards and grants, Erni has published widely on international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth popular consumption in Hong Kong and Asia, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of 9 academic titles, among them Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (Routledge, 2019); Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (Springer, 2017); Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP, 2014); Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations (Routledge, 2011); Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (with Ackbar Abbas, Blackwell, 2005); Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities (with Siew Keng Chua, Blackwell, 2005); and Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS (Minnesota, 1994).

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Inhabiting the Open

Previous ACCS Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2015) | Convergence or Collision – Human Rights with or without Cultural Studies
Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and The Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of the IAFOR Academic Governing Board.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | The Work of the University in Perilous Times

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2023) | There Is No New Normal
Keynote Presentation (2020) | Dislocation/Invitation
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
Keynote Presentation (2018) | The Cities We Fled
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Love as an Algorithm
Baden Offord
Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Biography

Baden Offord was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand of Maori and Pakeha heritage, and has lived most of his life in Australia, as well as several years in Spain, South India and Japan. Baden holds the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights and is a Senior Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights and Director of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. His research focuses on human rights, belonging, sexuality and gender, refugee studies, critical suicide studies, critical race studies, disability, eco-cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona; Critical Studies in Education Te Kura O te Kōtuinga Akoranga Mātauranga, University of Auckland; Kinsey Institute, Indiana University and Rajghat Centre, Varanasi, India. He was the 2010-2011 Chair (Visiting Professor) of Australian Studies in the Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo, and is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. His most recent critical/lyric essay is: “Beyond Our Nuclear Entanglement,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, (2017), 22:3, 17-25. More recent articles include: "A case for reimagining Australia: Dialogic registers of the Other, truth-telling and a will to justice." (with Chan, Farquhar, Garbutt, Kerr, Shiosaki and Woldeyes), Coolabah 24 & 25: 199-212, 2018; and "Decolonizing Human Rights Education: Critical Pedagogy Praxis in Higher Education." (with Woldeyes) The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 17 (1): 24-36, 2018.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | An Eco-humanising Post To The Future
I am a Fan of Fandom
Keynote Presentation: Keiko Bang

The internet today and its wired world of users, connectors and creators has served not only as a tool for curation of those things they are passionate about, it has created fandoms. Fandoms were first recorded in the late 19th century when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes and caused pandemonium by protesting fans at the publisher’s office. We have them to thank for another decade of Sherlock’s adventures. Through the years and particularly with the birth of television, fans began to become passionate about programs, their characters and entire genres in turn launching Trekkie and Star See Wars conventions. Today, the world is awash in fandoms, from Comic Con, to Bronies (fans of My Little Pony), Potterheads and of course A Song of Fire and Ice (Game of Thrones). But no other fandom has entirely captured a fandom as large, broad and engaged as that of Korean pop music. According to Google, there are more than 600 million K-Pop fans across 235 countries with over 80 billion clicks on YouTube. Never has such a fandom emerged entirely on the internet without television or radio and without the help of the US entertainment industrial complex. The behaviours manifested by this fandom augur a future where fandoms coalesce around what they truly love, “passion communities” that act in unique and innovative ways. The way in which these fans both follow K-Pop as well as are manipulated in a subtle fashion by Korean entertainment companies offers a view on the way the internet is likely to transform in the future. As we transform from an era of aggregation to curation, these fandoms will provide people with passion about everything from fishing to collecting iguanas, from knitting to playing chess, affecting even academia; enabling amateur researchers both to provide diverse input and serve as a powerful and cost-effective means to contribute to the greatest questions of all time.

Read presenter biographies.

Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

While the current political moment certainly invites a sense of defeatism among those of us in arts, humanities, and cultural studies—and makes a retreat into cynicism and political apathy an attractive option—the times call for a renewed sense of commitment and a much more assertive response. We on the cultural left—especially in higher education—have a base level responsibility to lead the way out of our climate of reactionary nationalism and anti-intellectualism. We are the ones best able to imagine a different future and articulate its desirability. Practitioners in the arts, humanities, and cultural studies are best positioned to provide the utopic thinking that has the power to motivate. In returning to some of the core tenets of activist-based queer theory, and melding those with the tentative and probing dialogics offered by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, we have tools to rally those who feel oppressed and defeated by current political rhetoric. A calculated, cautious, but deliberately vocal optimism serves the interests of our students, our profession, and our fellow citizens. The cultural right asks us to withdraw, to be silent, to give up hope—our best response is to do the opposite. By imagining and articulating a more egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and desirably queer future, we can direct attention to the true cynics—those who believe that top-down power will be accepted without question and that sexism/racism/homophobia can be normalized in order to divide, scare, and manipulate the masses. We—artists, writers, philosophers, and theorists—have the creativity and mental nimbleness to challenge and change the world, if we accept our responsibility as educators and re-commit ourselves to doing so.

Read presenter biographies.

Inhabiting the Open
Keynote Presentation: John Nguyet Erni

In its engagement with community life, especially through educational spaces, cultural studies plays a special role in instilling a determination for struggle for freedom and a strong sense of creativity, both of which are much needed in times of increasing global complexity. For many of us who work with young people in educational settings, we have learned that one of the keys to unlock their critical imagination for a liveable future – one underscored by freedom and creativity – is about “being open.” Yet how many times have we encountered the saying “to be open”? Especially in an education environment, we craft our visions around the need to train our students to be open-minded individuals who are, ideally, cross-culturally exposed, multiply linguistically competent, and globally actionable. In modern education, to meet the challenges of this increasingly complex world, we liberal thinkers form our curricula around “the open,” through theoretical variants like comparative culturalism and moral variants like diversity training. Yet once we try to pin down “the open” within established categories and conventions of thought, no experience could be more elusive. What is the open? Based on my cultural research on minorities, I shall share my thinking on how not to “exhabit” the social and cultural horizon so as to be poised to reclaim the future.

Read presenter biographies.

Love as an Algorithm
Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero

While cognitive scientist Steven Pinker keeps assuring us that prosperity, safety, peace and even happiness are on the rise worldwide, other scientists and philosophers as diverse as Stephen Hawking, Timothy Morton and Yuval Noah Harari warn us that the world as we have known it, and even ourselves, are on the verge of a devastating change. Climate catastrophe might well lead to global destruction, while artificial intelligence and biological engineering threaten to make human beings redundant. Extinction, we are told, is the norm, survival the exception. Living amidst the devastating possibilities which in this age of acceleration could prove remarkably close, have we humans already been subject to a mutation: a growing fear translated into a generalized disregard for the other, a refusal to pay attention and accept responsibility if it threatens our own comfort, even a developing propensity for hate? As conscious beings with the ability to distinguish between cause and effect, means and ends, we are witnesses to what goes on in our world. While many of the practical and ethical decisions vis a vis the immediate future need to be made with knowledge and power beyond that of the ordinary citizen, my personal conviction is that Love presents each and every one of us with a clear and vital algorithm for our endurance. Love in its most comprehensive connotation as a recognition of our profound interrelatedness – humans, animals, plants, the earth itself, the stars – every single element in the universe. True awareness of this extraordinary interconnection demands an attentiveness to what is going on, exacts not only an active concern for the other but an outright respect for our differences, along with the ineluctable conviction that only by sharing responsibility can we hope to survive. As we are thrust headlong into the pending Anthropocene, Love might well be our one viable path to a future.

Read presenter biographies.

Frida K. – a dialogue for a single actress
Keynote Presentation: Gloria Montero

"… a wonderful play… absolutely rivetting … astounding … if you have ever wondered about the power of theatre, go see this show”. CBC Toronto


Gloria Montero's award-winning Frida K., written for her daughter, actress Allegra Fulton, takes place on the day of Frida’s first and only solo exhibition in her native Mexico. Devastated by broken health, Frida reminisces and rages as she recounts her tormented marriage to muralist Diego Rivera, his many infidelities, her own affairs with Trotsky and others, all told against a background of the fashionable art scenes of Paris and New York, the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. As Frida prepares not only for her exhibition but for her approaching death, she reveals how a life of crippling pain has been transformed into paintings of terrifying power.

Frida – who lived intensely through the political and artistic revolutions that shaped the 20th century – is truly a woman of our time. Vulnerable and provocative, Frida is a classic modern heroine. The myth she fabricated out of the tragedy of her life holds its own beside those of Medea, Antigone and Electra of ancient times.

Frida K. was first produced in the Toronto Fringe Festival with Metal Corset Co., in 1994, starring Allegra Fulton and directed by Peter Hinton. From 1995 to 2011, Frida K. was produced in Canada, the UK, the USA, Spain, Czech Republic, Sweden, Poland, and Latvia. The play has won rave reviews and received multiple awards.

Read presenter biographies.

An Eco-humanising Post To The Future
Keynote Presentation: Baden Offord

Reclaiming the future requires a deep contextual and complex effort combining intellectual and creative energies focussed on the active/present connectedness of things, or otherwise, “staying with the trouble” as Donna Haraway puts it. This presentation, which will be in the form of a post to the future, explores the question: What is a decolonial, queer, eco-cultural approach to the possibilities of alternative, eco-humanising futures other than those that dominate our troubled and dangerous world? What is the measure of coherence needed to get beyond the ongoing nature of our current complicit futures? Through a lyrical, second person perspective, the post will speak to the imperative of “staying with the trouble”, of grappling, stirring and dealing with what makes us complicit to living without participating in connectedness, of ignoring the everyday encounter with otherness (human and non-human) in all of its rich forms. It will be argued that in reclaiming the future there is no such thing as an innocent bystander. You sense there is urgency in all this. As Greta Thunberg says: “Our house is burning”.

Read presenter biographies.

Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures
Keynote Presentation: Sue Ballyn

“From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning back.”
― Franz Kafka

Much as I would like to believe that there is a future or futures that are reclaimable; that social and political balance, compassion, love, peace, together with a long list of other hopes, will be restored and a better world/planet emerge, I sincerely believe that we are reaching Kafka´s path of no “turning back”. We are at that “certain point onward”, the Anthropocene, which is affecting not just the planet but every aspect of human life and from which there seems to be no return. A long and painful downhill ride lies ahead of us. When climate and social change manifest their destructive power, will the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and countries be able to break the ancestral chain of their oppression of the other?

As educators in the humanities, are we able to swing any change in our current systems and the prospect ahead of us? The Call for Papers for this conference has a utopian tone to it, offering hope in humanity’s ability to regenerate into the positive. I do not believe we can do much in the current avalanche to the extreme right/left wing, to the rise in racism, homophobia, entrenched fear of the other and the list goes on. If, in a class of fifty of whatever political and social standing, I could swing two students into a conscious awareness and proactive mindset regarding what is happening to the world and the future, I would call it a sign of hope.

History repeats itself, so is it feasible for us to believe that we and future generations will be able to avoid the mistakes made in the past and the mistakes we are making now? As history rewrites itself, each period provides its own new horrors. “…isms” are proliferating at an ever increasing speed but there are two disturbing “..isms” that were not nearly so prevalent in the past as they have become in very recent decades; I-ism and ageism. The former, describes a society where the self, ego, the “I” stand at the centre of individual perception of the world. The latter ageism, although not a recent phenomenon, has gained footage and visibility over the last few decades.

In this paper, I want to draw attention to the insidiousness of ageism on the one hand and the irretrievable future that confronts the over 65s and groups within the euphemistically named “golden generations”. Society today, for the bulk of the elderly and ageing is indeed bleak and they will be one of the first to suffer in the anthropogenic breakdown of our societies.

Read presenter biographies.

IAFOR Documentary Photography Award & Interview
IAFOR Documentary Photography Award Screening & Interview: Ezra Acayan, Donald E. Hall

Ezra Acayan, Documentary Photographer, Philippines
Donald E. Hall, University of Rochester, United States

The IAFOR Documentary Photography Award was launched by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) in 2015 as an international photography award that seeks to promote and assist in the professional development of emerging documentary photographers and photojournalists.

As an organisation, IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, facilitate intercultural awareness, encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and generate and share new knowledge. In keeping with this mission, in appreciation of the great value of photography as a medium that can be shared across borders of language, culture and nation, and to influence and inform our academic work and programmes, the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award was launched as a competition that would help underline the importance of the organisation’s aims, and would promote and recognise best practice and excellence.

Now in its fifth year, the award has already been widely recognised by those in the industry and has been supported by World Press Photo, British Journal of Photography, Metro Imaging, MediaStorm, Think Tank Photo, University of the Arts London, RMIT University, The Centre for Documentary Practice, and the Medill School of Journalism.

This session will include a screening of the most recent (2018) award winners selection, and will be followed by a discussion on the importance and relevance of documentary photography and photojournalism with the 2018 Grand Prize Winner, Ezra Acayan, an internationally published, award-winning photojournalist from the Philippines; and Professor Donald E. Hall, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA.

Read presenter biographies.

Sue Ballyn
Barcelona University, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986, she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian poetry, the first PhD on Australian literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation in 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990, she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory-Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25, 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University, Spain, which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020, a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures

Previous Presentations

Spotlight Presentation (2017) | “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s current research concentrates on post-war and contemporary politics and international affairs, and since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within Osaka University.

A Member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network for Global Governance, Dr Haldane is also a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), a Visiting Professor at the School of Business at Doshisha University (Japan), and a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the College of Education of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (USA).

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

Panel Discussion (2020) | Communication, Technology and Transparency in Times of COVID
Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and The Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of the IAFOR Academic Governing Board.

Keynote Presentation (2024) | The Work of the University in Perilous Times

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2023) | There Is No New Normal
Keynote Presentation (2020) | Dislocation/Invitation
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
Keynote Presentation (2018) | The Cities We Fled
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Baden Offord
Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Biography

Baden Offord was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand of Maori and Pakeha heritage, and has lived most of his life in Australia, as well as several years in Spain, South India and Japan. Baden holds the Dr Haruhisa Handa Chair of Human Rights and is a Senior Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights and Director of the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University. His research focuses on human rights, belonging, sexuality and gender, refugee studies, critical suicide studies, critical race studies, disability, eco-cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona; Critical Studies in Education Te Kura O te Kōtuinga Akoranga Mātauranga, University of Auckland; Kinsey Institute, Indiana University and Rajghat Centre, Varanasi, India. He was the 2010-2011 Chair (Visiting Professor) of Australian Studies in the Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo, and is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. His most recent critical/lyric essay is: “Beyond Our Nuclear Entanglement,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, (2017), 22:3, 17-25. More recent articles include: "A case for reimagining Australia: Dialogic registers of the Other, truth-telling and a will to justice." (with Chan, Farquhar, Garbutt, Kerr, Shiosaki and Woldeyes), Coolabah 24 & 25: 199-212, 2018; and "Decolonizing Human Rights Education: Critical Pedagogy Praxis in Higher Education." (with Woldeyes) The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 17 (1): 24-36, 2018.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | An Eco-humanising Post To The Future
Seiko Yasumoto
University of Sydney, Australia

Biography

Dr Seiko Yasumoto lectures and carries out research on Japanese and East Asian media and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. Her primary research, which she has published widely, includes Japanese government media policy and broadcasting media within the domain of popular culture. The scope includes transmission of content, textual analysis, copyright, media industries, adaptation theory, youth culture, audience analysis and trans-national media cultural flows in Japan and East Asia. She is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies, guest editor of the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia special edition on Global Media 2010 and co-editor of the scholarly journal Ilha Do Desterro a Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies: Expression, Identity and Society.Vol.2006. She was the Japan and North, East Asia regional representative of the Asian Studies of Association of Australia (2009-2012), is an editorial board member of the Oriental Society of Australia, the East Asian Popular Culture Association and Journalism and Mass communication USA. She holds a prestigious Teaching Excellence Award from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney, Australia.


Previous Presentations

Spotlight Presentation (2017) | Cross-Cultural Engagement and Media Integration in Japan and East Asia