Upcoming Student Events

In our next seminar on 5th August at 11:30am, Professor Anthony Fung, will present on ‘Culture as logistics: Infrastructure, power and China’. The seminar will take place via Zoom, all welcome. To receive the Zoom meeting ID and password, please RSVP to e.blight@westernsydney.edu.au by 5:00pm Wednesday 4th August and the Zoom details will be sent to you Thursday morning before the seminar. For full seminar details, please visit: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/events/ics_seminar_series

Beyond Artistic Borders And Into The Future: Cross-artform collaboration and its potential to foster new audiences and innovative practices for writers and storytellers with Felicity Castagna, Marian Abboud, Sheila Ngoc Pham, & Emma Saunders In artistic disciplines such as the visual and performing arts collaborations between artists working in different modes are commonplace, unlike the field of writing where the general attitude towards collaboration is much more conservative and practitioners have traditionally chosen to stick to their own discipline. The competition for audience and the increasingly limited funding and platforms in the current climate of crisis for the arts means that writers need to be looking at artistic partners and new contexts for making work. This seminar will put forward the argument that collaboration opens up a whole new territory, where artists are challenged and inspired to find new societal contexts to present their art and engage with new audiences in new spaces. Being curious about the work of others and working collaboratively is a powerful tool for writers and artists who want to make powerful art. In this seminar Dr Felicity Castagna will be in conversation with some of the most dynamic and interesting multi-disciplinary artists working across the fields of writing, dance, documentary-making, sound installation and science. Cross-artform collaboration happens in an unpredictable way. It challenges our experience of making art and shifts our focus away from our individual skills, to our capacity to engage in creative dialogue within a new territory. This seminar will explore this new territory by asking the questions: How can we understand each other’s artistic work? How do we communicate to be able to work together? What skills from our individual fields can be supportive to this collaboration? How do we rethink how we work in environments where the emphasis is often on presenting process and exploration rather than working to a predesignated result from the start? How do we create new settings to present such work and build on existing and new audiences?

Hepatitis B is a major public health issue in China and an estimated 90 million Chinese are living with chronic hep B, accounting for 1/3 of the world total cases. Hepatitis B is also prevalent in Australian Chinese community, currently 220,000 and the number is increasing.

Unfortunately, people with chronic hep B are often asymptomatic so many of them don’t know that they have the infection. This is the most scaring part as chronic hep B can progress into advanced liver diseases like cirrhosis and liver cancer without showing obvious symptoms.

We hope to increase hep B health literacy so that our community can take proactive actions. We also invited someone who is living with hep B to talk about her own personal story.

The event will be delivered in Chinese Mandarin. If you or someone you know might be interested in hep B information, please register and pass it on.

please register your attendance by contacting Shan Tao.

NICM Health Research Institute presents Professor Christopher Scarlett, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle. Join guest seminar speaker, Professor Scarlett on 19 August, as he discusses novel therapeutic approaches in the treatment of pancreatic cancer. ABSTRACT Pancreatic cancer is a devastating disease with an abysmal survival rate of approximately 10% at five years. In Australia there were 3,900 new cases and 3,300 deaths in 2020. Current therapies are palliative at best highlighting the urgent need for novel therapeutic agents targeting molecular phenotypes not responsive to current treatments. The highly heterogeneic and metastatic nature of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a type of pancreatic cancer, presents a major challenge in therapeutic development. Professor Scarlett, along with the Pancreatic Cancer Research Group he leads, are searching on land, at sea, and within the laboratory for potential therapeutic agents targeting molecular mechanisms that contribute to these aggressive, metastatic subtypes. WHEN: Thursday 19 August 2021 TIME: 12.00pm - 1.00pm AEST VENUE: Zoom webinar COST: Free and open to all RSVP: Register by visiting https://nicm.edu.au/news/events

In The Mother Wound, Amani writes with power, fury and grace on how we inherit violence and trauma, but also strength, resilience and joy. She writes from the intersection of her experiences as a victim of crime, a lawyer, an Arab-Australian, a woman, daughter and a mother. Poetically combining memoir, social commentary and legal analysis, this is a powerful story of female resilience and motherhood you won’t easily forget.