ICS Seminar - Anna Denejkina, Valentina Baú and Cammi Webb-Gannon
Scholar(ship) at risk
Date: Thursday, 1 September 2022
Time: 11:30am - 1:00pm
Location: this seminar will be held online via zoom. Please RSVP to e.blight@westernsydney.edu.au before 31 August COB to receive the zoom details.
Panel: Anna Denejkina (WSU), Valentina Baú (WSU) and Cammi Webb-Gannon (University of Wollongong)
Abstract
The war on Ukraine has posed questions about responses to scholars at risk of conflict and persecution. What kinds of support can and have been mobilised, and what are some of the resistances - institutional, governmental, infrastructural - to them? Can we have the same approach to other cases of scholars fleeing conflict or political persecution, and if not – why not? What are the dangers and limits of doing fieldwork in conflict zones? And how should expectations of research be attuned to conditions under which any criticism can be monitored and penalised? Taking its title from one initiative (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/) that involves several Australian universities, this week's seminar invites three scholars who have wrestled with such questions in relation to conflict in Ukraine, Kenya and the Pacific region to share their experiences and views.
Biographies
Dr Anna Denejkina is a lecturer in the Graduate Research School at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on intergenerational trauma transmission, psychological trauma and wellbeing in various communities - with a primary focus on Veterans and defence families.
Dr. Valentina Baú works as a Senior Research Fellow at WSU Institute for Cultural Studies. Both as a practitioner and as a researcher, her work has focused on the use of the media & communication in international development, with a focus on conflict and post-conflict settings. Valentina has worked in different African countries, Asia, the Caribbean and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She has collaborated with international NGOs and UN agencies, both in a research and communication capacity. Her experience involves the implementation of both research and media projects with victims and perpetrators of conflict, displaced people, refugees and people living in extreme poverty.
Dr Cammi Webb-Gannon is a Lecturer with the Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Wollongong. She is a decolonization ethnographer focusing on the Pacific Islands region with a long-term interest in West Papua’s independence movement, Australian South Sea Islander political identity and decolonization in Kanaky (New Caledonia). Cammi is the Coordinator of the West Papua Project at the University of Wollongong and is author of Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua (2021, University of Hawai’i Press).
