WSU and Chile strengthen research partnership

Caption: Punta Arenas, where WSU researchers are working to enhance the city's custodian sense of its relation to Antarctica.

Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) has signed Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs) with four leading Chilean Institutions in a move to formalise and strengthen existing research partnerships, and drive new and innovative collaborations.

Chile is one of 10 international strategic research sites for ICS, and the MOUs come ahead of the 2017 Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies conference (KCE 2017) in Santiago de Chile – presented by ICS and the four Chilean Institutions. They also come off the back of a number of existing collaborative research projects including an ARC Discovery Project and the international ARC Linkage Project Antarctic Cities and the Global Commons with the Chilean Antarctic Institute and the University of Magallanes.

According to ICS Director Professor Paul James, the Institute has been focused on developing strong institutional partnerships in Santiago and Punta Arenas intensively for the past two years – building upon previous collaborations in Chile.

“In Santiago, we are partnering with Universidad Diego Portales and Universidad Católica to host a major conference on ecologies. In Punta Arenas we are working to enhance the city's custodian sense of its relation to Antarctica, a global commons that is central to the future of the planet,” says Professor James.

“These are partnerships that will hopefully make a positive difference to sustainable urban living.”

KCE 2017 – the fourth conference in the Knowledge/Culture series created by the ICS and first to be held outside of Australia – will bring together hundreds of academics, practitioners and activists from 32 countries. They will debate the shifting roles of knowledges, cultures and environments in historical, contemporary and future scenarios of crisis and resilience; environmental justice and inequality; governance; socio-environmental change; and reckonings with nature.

According to convenor of the conference, Associate Professor Juan Francisco Salazar from the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Research Director of the ICS, the event is set to generate a lot of international interest due to the calibre of the international keynote speakers and urgency of the themes being debated.

“The idea of the ecological has undergone massive renovation across numerous disciplines, so a key aim of this conference is to explore current transformations in socio-ecologies and to generate knowledge practices capable of understanding their formation and complex reverberations,” he says.

The four institutions who have signed MOUs with the University are:

Ends

2 November 2017

Emma Sandham, Senior Media Officer