IAFOR > The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies (ACCS) > ACCS2019 > Speakers

Speakers

The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies (ACCS) is an interdisciplinary conference held alongside The Asian Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS). Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow delegates to attend sessions in the other.

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

  • 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
    University of Rochester, 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

Previous Speakers

View details of speakers at past ACCS conferences via the links below.

ACCS2018ACCS2017ACCS2016
ACCS2015ACCS2014ACCS2013
ACCS2012ACCS2011
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.

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
University of Rochester, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA. Prior to moving to Rochester, he was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Dean 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 IAFOR. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future

Previous Presentations

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