Events

Upcoming events at Western Sydney University are listed below.

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• Oct 14
  ACIAC Exhibition: Essence, Energy, Spirit

  An exhibition by renowned artist Guan Wei, which showcases the connection between the mind/spirit and body.

  Exhibitions and performances; Social events
  General public
  An exhibition by renowned artist Guan Wei, which showcases the connection between the mind/spirit and body.

  Guan Wei chose the artworks for this exhibition, from his own personal collection, as well as deriving the title for it, Essence, Energy, Spirit, which aptly captures the recurring themes of his art’s practice. Guan Wei is renowned for creating works that interlace imagery from his Chinese heritage, his life experience in Australia and his personal iconography, working across painting, sculpture and installation. The exhibition is comprised of three distinct bodies of work. The series, Return to the Origin contextualises our human journey within the Universe. Images of the human figure are juxtaposed with symbols of the cosmos, deliberately drawn upon ceramics; a material that has been used by humans for thousands of years; to remind the viewer of their relatively brief time in history. Humans are portrayed as being part of nature, but a mere speck within it, when one considers how vast and old the Universe is. The series, Longevity for Beginners explores themes of spiritual and physical balance via imagery of both external and internal views of the human body, drawn from traditional Chinese medicine and qi-gong, as well as his own personal symbolism. The underlying narrative of these paintings suggests the importance of the connection between the mind/spirit and body, and that being in balance with nature is essential for good health and general well-being. The final series, which is Untitled, explores the relationship between the subconscious mind and its effect on our individual perception of our daily reality. Some of these works evoke emotional states of fear, uncertainty, anxiety, pressure, powerlessness and entrapment. A prostrate figure is held precariously by a single thread to a more powerful being; demons and animals are depicted biting or nipping at a heel or eating away at what looks like a heart held in a hand. These paintings are interspersed with others which present a floating head on a bed of clouds, in what seems to be in a state meditation. This series of works suggest to the viewer, that to master their subconscious, spiritual practices and/or exercises can assist in transforming their experience to higher states of consciousness, such as peace, joy and bliss. Ultimately these works by Guan Wei, remind us of the consequences of a fast paced, technology driven, western lifestyle, too full of angst, can be transcended, if we remember our essence, energy and spirit and how to nurture them. Monica McMahon Art Curator Western Sydney University.

  Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +1100
• Nov 26
  Art Exhibition: Perspectives

  An exhibition by the students of Hoxton Park High School.

  Exhibitions and performances
  Open to the public
  An exhibition by the students of Hoxton Park High School.

  Perspectives highlights the creative talents of our students at Hoxton Park High School. The works featured celebrate the unique viewpoints of our students as they engage with a variety of media and forms to communicate various concepts. Our students have developed their creativity with the Year 7 Visual Arts classes, exploring traditional drawing media and new media through their themed digital manipulations. Similarly, the Year 8 Visual Arts classes have experimented with digital photography and printmaking as they represent their interpretations of the school environment. ‘Cultural Identity’ was the focus for Year 10 Visual Arts as the class designed, carved, and printed their relief lino blocks to reveal their distinctiveness. The Year 9 Visual Arts class created magnificent ‘Pop Sculptures’, and Stage 5 Photographic & Digital Media students present a wide array of interpretations and manipulations through their digital pieces. Students in the Year 11 Visual Arts class have presented their world with sophistication and insight in their bodies of work. During our opening night on Thursday, 5th December, we celebrate the achievements of our students with performances by our Dance Ensemble and Music students. The evening also features a digital slideshow and the premiere of our Year 10 classes’ Japanese films, showcasing a culmination of collaboration, creativity, and communication.

  Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +1100
• Dec 5
  Trans ageing & care: exploring the later life concerns of trans adults 50+

  This seminar will discuss findings from a study of gender identity, ageing and care in later life, together with two short films

  Conferences and seminars
  staff and students
  This seminar will discuss findings from a study of gender identity, ageing and care in later life, together with two short films This presentation by a visiting academic will examine the ageing-related concerns and expectations of trans and gender non-confirming individuals in mid-to-later life (50+ years of age). A recent review of UK literature on LGBT health inequalities in later life points to the absence of evidence about the lives of older trans people (Kneale, Henley, Thomas and French, 2019). This absence is also mirrored in scholarship on critical gerontology and gender relations (Toze, 2018). Findings will be presented from a mixed-methods study of gender identity, ageing and care in later life, based in Wales UK (2016-19). Findings are from an online survey of health and social care professionals (n=165) and two-part life-history interviews with twenty-two individuals identifying as trans or non-gender conforming (50-74 years). Following the presentation, two short films will be screened from a new series of digital stories titled ‘Growing older as me’, funded through the study and produced by Fox and Owl, trans filmmakers from My Genderation, UK. (https://mygenderation.com) About the presenter Paul Willis is a senior lecturer in social work in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. Paul is a qualified social worker and a researcher in social care with interests in ageing, social inclusion, gender and sexuality in later life (particularly LGB&T ageing), and older men’s experiences of loneliness and social isolation. He is a Senior Research Fellow of the NIHR School for Social Care Research in England. Prior to moving to the UK in 2009, Paul studied a PhD in social work at the University of Tasmania. The seminar takes place in the Lecture Theatre on Level 1 of the Western Sydney University, Sydney City Campus building, 255 Elizabeth Street, Sydney CBD
  Thu, 05 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +1100
• Dec 5
  Art Exhibition Opening: Perspectives

  An exhibition of art and performances by the students of Hoxton Park High School.

  Exhibitions and performances; Social events
  Open to the public
  An exhibition of art and performances by the students of Hoxton Park High School.

  The 'Perspectives' exhibition highlights the creative talents of our students at Hoxton Park High School. The works featured celebrate the unique viewpoints of our students as they engage with a variety of media and forms to communicate various concepts. Our students have developed their creativity with the Year 7 Visual Arts classes, exploring traditional drawing media and new media through their themed digital manipulations. Similarly, the Year 8 Visual Arts classes have experimented with digital photography and printmaking as they represent their interpretations of the school environment. ‘Cultural Identity’ was the focus for Year 10 Visual Arts as the class designed, carved, and printed their relief lino blocks to reveal their distinctiveness. The Year 9 Visual Arts class created magnificent ‘Pop Sculptures’, and Stage 5 Photographic & Digital Media students present a wide array of interpretations and manipulations through their digital pieces. Students in the Year 11 Visual Arts class have presented their world with sophistication and insight in their bodies of work. During our opening night on Thursday, 5th December, we celebrate the achievements of our students with performances by our Dance Ensemble and Music students. The evening also features a digital slideshow and the premiere of our Year 10 classes’ Japanese films, showcasing a culmination of collaboration, creativity, and communication.

  Thu, 05 Dec 2019 18:00:00 +1100
• Dec 6
  Writing & Society Research Centre Seminar Series 2019

  Creativity and calculative action: seminar with Kate Stevens, Richard Garner & Jason Tuckwell.

  academic events; Conferences and seminars
  All welcome
  Creativity and calculative action: seminar with Kate Stevens, Richard Garner & Jason Tuckwell.

  The secularization of modern thought famously put pressure on notions of a transcendent source for creativity. On this account, creativity had its locus in a divine, essential and immaterial donation. Most famously, this culminated in twentieth century post-structuralist and post-modern critiques that brought notions of authorship, genius and intentionality into question. More recently, there has been a revival of interest in creativity, creative processes and practices. In this return, rather than a donation from without or an epiphenomena reducible to deterministic processes, creativity now appears to be a fundamental aspect of cognition and reasoning for humans and non-humans, alike. As such, creativity appears more as a synthetic or emergent property, inseparable from thinking, acting and doing. This seminar will consider these new understandings of creativity, addressing a diverse array of interdisciplinary perspectives—from neuroscience, psychology, mathematics and logic—to directly reconsider or provide resources for thinking again about creative practice and artistic production. Professor Kate Stevens, Director of MARCS at Western Sydney University, will address her pioneering work with The Australian Dance Theatre on creative decision making and improvisation in music and dance performance. Dr Richard Garner, a category theorist in the mathematics department at Macquarie University, will challenge the formalism uncritically applied to mathematical praxis, and draw out the intuitive and creative processes central to theorizing pure mathematics. Dr Jason Tuckwell from Western Sydney University will discuss how creativity is central to technique, via logician Charles Peirce. Peirce argued that abductive reasoning was not only responsible for the creativity of scientific reasoning, but a non-specific creative force, driving evolutionary development. The session will be moderated by Dr Kate Fagan, literary theorist, poet and artist, who will bring her multidisciplinary research and experience as an artistic practitioner to reflect on the discussion.

  Fri, 06 Dec 2019 11:00:00 +1100
• Dec 10
  PhD Masterclass: Racism and Media

  Free Speech Crises in an Era of Abundant Speech.

  academic events; Training and skill upgrade
  Free Speech Crises in an Era of Abundant Speech.

  The question of free speech is never far from the headlines in Anglophone and many European countries. And, in these headlines it is frequently declared to be in crisis. That these dramatic headlines proliferate in societies increasingly marked by abundant communication is curious, but more curious still is why controversies hinging on ‘what can be said’ about particular political, cultural and social issues feature so centrally in free speech crises, over and above, for example, powerful, material and governmental threats to expression. The meaning of racism, in particular, has been integrated to these intense debates about the status and remit of freedom of speech, debates that are conducted in societies not only characterised by endless speech, but by a dominant if intensely disputed sense that racism is largely a problem that has been overcome. This pronounced relation between the meaning and scope of free speech, and the meaning and salience of racism, produces an apparent contradiction. In the public imagination, free speech is celebrated as a fundamental freedom, central to modern emancipation, self-expression, and democratic vitality. In contemporary western societies, it has also become fundamental to an insistent, many-stranded politics that is re-shaping how racism is expressed and legitimised in public culture. The aim of this workshop is to explore this apparent contradiction by:

  * Considering the range of ways in which freedom of speech is mobilised in public discourse, and map the normative and political claims made in recurring forms of public drama;

  * Use this map to examine the conflicting political-analytical vocabularies and frameworks mobilised in debates about free speech, and to evaluate the antagonistic ideas of ‘the public’, communication, consequentiality and subjectivity that they engage;

  * Consider the effects and consequences of connective media and a complex media environment on ideas of speech and conceptualisations of freedom of speech;

  * Consider the specific significance of these conditions and dynamics for the politics of racism and anti-racism The workshop will be conducted through short inputs, discussion of readings, and case study analysis. Given that the question of freedom of speech is approached in overlapping and divergent ways across disciplines, the discussions will pay particular attention to disciplinary and theoretical connections and tensions.

  Tue, 10 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +1100
• Dec 12
  Racism and Media: Lecture and Book Presentation

  The Debatability of Racism: Postracialism, digital media and public culture.

  academic events
  Academics, students, general public
  The Debatability of Racism: Postracialism, digital media and public culture.

  Racism, in public culture, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In the contemporary political context, to speak publicly about racism is to be immediately integrated into an intensive process of delineation, deflection and denial, a contest over who gets to define racism, when ‘everyone’ gets to speak about it. In the postcolonial, migration nations of western Europe and North America, this contestation centres on the dominant imaginary of these societies as ‘post-racial’, socio-political spaces in which, the story goes, the divisive ‘idea of race’ no longer matters, and the violence of racism has been largely transcended. The public cultures of these societies are also shaped by dense transnational networks of media flow and communicative connectivity that provide unprecedented possibilities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images, frameworks and information. The overlap between the two produces what this talk terms the debatability of racism. It argues that in contexts where official narratives and dominant public discourses assume the ‘end of racism’ even as people who experience racism attest to its renewed formations and exclusionary and humiliating force, these everyday communicative concentrations on the status, nature and extent of racism are politically consequential – postracialism functions not only through ‘muting’ and silencing, but through noise. The talk suggests that this debatability, this incessant, recursive attention as to what counts as racism and who gets to define it, has political consequences for practices of antiracism – practices that want to name racism publicly, the better to mobilize to confront it.

  Thu, 12 Dec 2019 18:00:00 +1100
• Dec 17
  Racism and Media: Seminar

  Last night in Sweden: transnational imaginaries in the far right media ecology.

  academic events; Conferences and seminars
  Academics, students
  Last night in Sweden: transnational imaginaries in the far right media ecology.

  This talk examines the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production. Departing from President Donald Trump’s widely-reported remarks, in 2017, as to ‘what happened last night in Sweden’, it examines the racializing discourses through which Sweden is constructed as a dark future to be averted; a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism symbolised by the ‘no-go zones’ held to be dotted, yet denied, in its major cities. While the symbolic production of ‘problem areas’ is a familiar dimension of the politics of immigration, the article explores the transnational investments in whiteness and gendered crisis that explain why Sweden-as-nation is so insistently and intimately reproduced in the ‘revenge fantasies’ of the far-right. On the basis of this discursive analysis, the talk argues that these modes of representation cannot be understood without examining the value of Sweden as a news commodity in the expansive far-right media environment. The analysis offers the idea of ‘taboo news’ to conceptualise putatively ‘alternative’ news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream, and argues that examining the increasing importance of ‘taboo news’ as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.

  Tue, 17 Dec 2019 11:00:00 +1100
• Dec 17
  Good Clinical Practice Workshop

  A TransCelerate accredited Good Clinical Practice (GCP) refresher workshop for anyone working on a clinical trial.

  Training and skill upgrade
  Anyone working on a clinical trial.
  A TransCelerate accredited Good Clinical Practice (GCP) refresher workshop for anyone working on a clinical trial.

  This TransCelerate accredited Good Clinical Practice (GCP) refresher workshop will be run by Diana Karamacoska for all staff (inc. Principal and Sub-Investigators) and students involved in clinical trials research. It's intended for those that have a certificate that's expired or about to expire. This workshop must be attended in person, on Tuesday 17 December 2019 1:30pm - 3:30pm, and will cost $50.00.

  ***Please contact Diana should you wish to use your WSU Professional Development Allowance or WSU HDR Funding to receive your voucher***

  If you have other study personnel (RAs, medical monitors, associate investigators) in need of a refresher, contact Diana (d.karamacoska@westernsydney.edu.au) to organise their attendance. If you have not completed any GCP courses, or are new to clinical trials, you can register your interest for an Introduction to GCP workshop (tentatively scheduled for early February 2020).

  Tue, 17 Dec 2019 13:30:00 +1100
• May 1
  Sculpture Award and Exhibition 2020

  1-31 May 2020

  Exhibitions and performances
  Open to the public
  1-31 May 2020

  The Western Sydney University Sculpture Award and Exhibition will be held on 1-31 May 2020. Winners will be announced at the award ceremony on 30 April. To see the finalists and for more information on the event, visit: virtualtours.westernsydney.edu.au/sculpture-award.

  Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +1000