Distinguished Professor Ien Ang's Address to the Professoriate Dinner 2018

Distinguished Professor Ien Ang

12 October 2018

Check against delivery.

To begin with, let me acknowledge that we are here today on the land of the Darug people, the Traditional Owners of this land. I also wish to acknowledge the past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who have resided in this area of what we now know as Parramatta.

When I first came to this university more than 22 years ago, I had no idea that I would still be here today, and even less that I would be standing here talking to you this evening. And because I have been here for such a long time, longer probably than most of you, I can also testify how much this university has changed over the years. In 2018, Western Sydney University is a very different institution from what it was back in 1996, when I arrived here. So let me share with you what I have experienced and learned in these past two decades as a professor at this university.

Before coming here, I had spent five years at Murdoch University in Perth. I actually did my education and my early career years at the University of Amsterdam, so leaving Europe for Australia – or more precisely, Perth – was considered a choice to go to the arse end of the world by my northern hemisphere colleagues. But I had been attracted to Murdoch because at that time it had a vibrant and world-class environment for Cultural Studies, my chosen field of scholarship. In fact, I also think that coming to Australia via Perth was a great advantage, as it taught me very clearly that Australia should not be equated with Sydney and Melbourne. You see the world in its greater diversity and complexity from a position in the periphery.

But when I was approached to apply for a position as Professor of Cultural Studies at what was then UWS Nepean, I jumped at the opportunity to be less in the periphery and closer to the centre of action in Australia: Sydney. Except that, of course, coming to UWS was not exactly coming to the centre, but to another kind of periphery! When I came for the job interview, I was put up at Penrith Panthers – of all places - and was immediately confronted with the apparent vast wasteland of Western Sydney during the long taxi ride from the airport. Needless to say I did not go gambling that night, but started thinking about what it would mean to come to this embryonic university, which hardly had any professors in its staff at that time and hardly a research culture to speak of. I must admit that I had my doubts, but in the end I did decide to come. I was recruited to come here with a specific mandate to develop the university’s research, and I became director of a fledgling research centre which was then called the Centre for Intercommunal Studies.
This in itself was not easy, as there was not much research capacity or experience among the staff in the Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences, most of whom were relatively junior academics or staff from the former teacher’s college. The university gave me a postdoc and an admin assistant to get started, and a small space in the basement of building AD at Werrington North, long before it was renovated into the swish corporate centre of the university later. The three of us worked our buts off to galvanise the troops and make a name for ourselves by organising some highly topical conferences, setting up a cutting-edge journal, and of course by applying for research grants. We were quite successful at this, and soon acquired a reputation for being a dynamic, happening place, where doctoral students wanted to come to and young postdoctoral researchers wanted to be. So when Jan Reid came as VC and integrated the university into a single institution, and decided to consolidate the university’s research effort by establishing a number of university research centres, I applied for us to become one of these centres. This was when we became the Centre for Cultural Research, and it was an important moment for us, as it was the beginning of this university’s strategic focus on selectivity and concentration in research policy, and significant investment in areas of excellence. I can still remember what a game changer it was when I was told by the then Dean of Arts, professor Wayne McKenna, that I should identify and recruit up to four internationally recognised professors to join the centre and lift its work to new levels of achievement. These should be not just ordinary level Es, but E+ professors, he said, people who are true international leaders in the field. And so we did. And as a result of this, the centre was able to gain critical mass, not just at the junior level, but importantly, at the senior, professorial level. Although what I have learned is that such generous resources are a necessary, but not a sufficient investment if you want to build a high-performing research centre. To begin with, you must avoid appointing divas or bullies, but find excellent scholars who are cooperative, collegial and institutionally minded. And then you have to put in effort in the slow, painstaking work of developing a research culture where such values thrive.

By 2005 we were successful in five ARC grants in one year alone, and I myself had success in winning an ARC Professorial Fellowship – the first ever for this university. It was this success, by the way, that led Jan Reid to give me the title of Distinguished Professor. The next significant moment, in 2011, was when the university decided to apply the selectivity and concentration strategy even further by establishing research institutes. So this is how we became the Institute for Culture and Society in 2012. I stepped down as director at the end of 2014, but I am pleased to say that the institute continues to do wonderful work to this day, under the leadership of professor Paul James.

I can frankly say that the creation of this institute has been the most gratifying accomplishment of my career. There’s something about institution building that is truly challenging as well as satisfying, when things go well. And I am adamant to say that I could only have done this at a university such as this one. This is one important reason why I have stayed here throughout all these years. In fact, I have often been asked why I wasn’t moving on to a more prestigious university, meaning, a G08 university. The truth is that I would never have had the opportunity to do what I have done here at one of the sandstones. It also has something to do with being on the periphery. Western Sydney is not just geographically in the periphery, as we all know, but also socially and culturally. We’ve all heard the common joke that Sydneysiders don’t generally go further out on Parramatta Road than Leichhardt, if that. But in my experience precisely this peripheral status gave working here, ‘out west’, a special energy. What has also been important is the distinct social mission of the university, its commitment to contributing to the social, economic and cultural development of the Western Sydney region. This provided a compelling focus for our work. So one of the things that was most challenging but also extremely energising in my years as director of ICS was that we needed to develop a research ethos that is resolutely outward-looking, positively collaborative, and engaged with communities and the real world outside. Today this is something that all universities tend to take for granted, but twenty years ago the idea of developing partnerships with external parties was pretty new, especially in the humanities. Seeking partners for ARC Linkage grants was (and is) really difficult, especially as many organisations that we engage with don’t have a lot of money, but a rewarding exercise when they are successful. For me, it has resulted in some of the most interesting projects I have been involved in, with partners such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the City of Sydney, and SBS, as well as various cultural centres in Western Sydney.

So working in the periphery that is Western Sydney has paradoxically, for me, led to a much more cosmopolitan research practice than I ever envisaged when I started my career, which was definitely more focused on climbing the ivory tower than roaming through the lowlands of engaged research!

Much has changed of course since I first came here in 1996. The university has grown up (but it is still young), Western Sydney is no longer quite the periphery it used to be, and the higher education landscape has changed dramatically. For one thing, we now have ERA to contend with, and now we are having impact assessment as well. Not to mention that increasingly influential, if not aggravating role played by global rankings. All this means that we have to mind our place in both the ivory tower and the engaged research lowlands at the same time! And I know that this is a very difficult and anxiety-producing situation, especially for our younger, early and mid-career colleagues.

I should say in this regard that the undue emphasis on measurement that is creeping in everywhere now, including in performance management, can be a real trap. It can actually be quite counterproductive, discouraging the pursuit of more ambitious but risky projects, and punishing failure, even though we know that being able to fail is a necessary condition for eventual success. In short, it could result in impeding innovation – another thing that we have started to talk so much more about in the last 20 years.

Speaking about innovation, let me dedicate my last words tonight to my own field, cultural studies, in the current context. Most of you probably do not know what ‘cultural studies’ is, being a relatively recent FOR code, straddling the humanities and social sciences. What we do is really at the meeting point of a range of disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, communications, geography, linguistics, the arts, and so on. We are therefore an inherently interdisciplinary field, and our focus – which is reflected in the work of ICS – is on addressing the pressing challenges of our contemporary world: the social and cultural challenges facing cities and economies, heritage and the environment, diversity and globalisation, and digital life. In this context, I have frequently tried to advocate for a broader, more comprehensive understanding of innovation. People often tend to think about the inventions of science and technology when talking about innovation, but I think it is absolutely crucial that we also think about innovation in the social and cultural realms. So this points to the importance not just of STEM, which is rightly getting a lot of policy attention now, but also of HASS – the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. In fact, any new scientific or technological innovation – think the internet, for example, or drones – should ideally also be considered in terms of their social and cultural ramifications.

As the acclaimed writer Yuval Noah Harari has observed in his recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century: ‘Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam across it that it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system’. Quite so, and this includes the social and cultural ecological system that human beings are living in.

In a time of rapid global change, where science and technology play an increasingly pivotal role, there’s thus much to be said for much more collaboration between STEM and HASS researchers, something we don’t yet do much of here at Western or anywhere else. But this won’t be easy, not least because of the very different research orientations between the two domains. It is therefore risky, and prone to failure. So it would require long-term investment, and the slow and painstaking development of a shared research culture. The university could do worse than give some younger, talented professors who value cross-disciplinary collaboration and are institutionally minded, the time and resources, like I had, to build such an innovative, transdisciplinary venture to address some of the most urgent challenges of the 21st century.