SHAPS Digest (February 2024)

K.O. Chong-Gossard and Larissa Tittl (Classics & Archaeology) shared their thoughts on the enduring relevance of classical myths for an article on contemporary plays on ancient themes for the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Joy Damousi and Carolyn Rasmussen (History) were among those interviewed for an audio walking tour of Melbourne CBD sites associated with the anti-conscription struggle, produced by Alexandra Pierce for the Australian Living Peace Museum.

‘Resisting Conscription in World War 1’ features six sites: Parliament House, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Trades Hall, Old Melbourne Gaol, the former Magistrate’s Court, and the site of the Women’s Peace Army headquarters. The Australian Living Peace Museum is an online museum dedicated to telling the stories of Australia’s heritage of peace and non-violence, and how they are based in social justice, in conjunction with Soundtrails, an Australian company specialising in geolocative walking tours.

Antonia Finnane (Professorial Fellow, History) wrote the article ‘Heritage Hunting‘ for Inside Story, overviewing a new collection of essays discussing migration pathways between Sydney and towns in Zhongshan municipality, in Guangdong province, China. The Chinese-Australia Migration Corridor (Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar, eds.) was launched in mid-February and results from the Heritage Corridor project, which began in 2017 at Western Sydney University.

Peter McPhee was profiled in the History Council of Victoria’s ‘Spotlight On …’ feature on Instagram, which celebrates those who have contributed to the practice, teaching, study of and engagement with history in Victoria.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by History Council of Victoria (@historycouncilvic)

Daniel Nellor was interviewed for The Philosophers’ Zone on the ABC about his book, What Are They Thinking? Conversations with Australian Philosophers. The book comprises ten interviews, including with SHAPS philosophers Margaret Cameron, Christopher Cordner, and Daniel Halliday.

Tony Ward (Fellow, History) published an article on the importance of social trust, for Pearls and Irritations.

Academic Publications

Dvir Abramovich (Jewish Culture and Society), The Lost World of Unspoken Horrors: Aharon Appelfeld’s Holocaust Universe (Hybrid Publishers)

This volume offers a close reading of five novels by Aharon Appelfeld (1982–2018), Israel’s most celebrated Shoah author. Fuelled by a desire to introduce this literary giant to foreign language readers, this illuminating collection of essays is a tribute to a prolific writer who, for more than four decades, won international acclaim for his subtle and enigmatic novels, which shimmer with premonitions of the unimaginable horror to come. Overflowing with lucid insights, this deeply reflective study demonstrates how Appelfeld’s stories, usually set in the years immediately before and after the destruction of European Jewry, transform memory into fiction and encase within their midst unfathomable depths in the search for meaning and healing.

Alexandra Cain (Teaching Associate, Philosophy), ‘ “The Wheel is Crooked“, Hannah Arendt on Action, Success and Public Happiness’, Zeitschrift für politisches Denken / Journal for Political Thinking

In ‘Action and the “Pursuit of Happiness”‘, Hannah Arendt tells the story of ‘an inveterate gambler’ who arrives late in a town and goes straight to the gambling place, where he discovers that the wheel he wishes to gamble on is crooked. He gambles anyway, because there is no other wheel in town. The story, she suggests, ‘tells us that there exists such intense happiness in acting that the actor, like the gambler, will accept that all the odds are stacked against him.’ In this article I use this story as a motif to investigate references to success in Arendt’s work. I argue that Arendt sought to preclude action and happiness from utilitarian notions of success, and that she ultimately presents the human impulse toward action as tragic. I also discuss the role of the historian or poet in this tragedy, concluding that what remains unclear in Arendt’s work is how the public happiness of the actor and the pleasure of the historian and poet are related.

Nicole Davis (History/Forum), ‘One of the Sights of the Colony’, History of Retailing & Consumption, Special Issue on Australian Retail history

The arcade is a nineteenth-century architectural and social form long associated with industrial modernity and consumer culture. Better known in the British and European urban landscape, they were also significant in the Australian colonial context from 1853 onwards, in numbers rivalling those in the so-called ‘metropole’. Australian entrepreneurs, architects and shop owners utilised what was seen as a very European form to represent the progress and civilisation of the Australian colonies and their urban spaces, both in capital cities and smaller regional centres. The arcades, including their presence in the landscape, their architecture, and the commodities and leisure activities found within, were regularly invoked by boosters in order to demonstrate the sophistication of these colonial urban spaces. This article briefly discusses the history of the nineteenth-century Australian arcades, the boosterish discourse that promoted them, and how their representation was a way to express the place of the Australian colonies within a transnational milieu.

Winter Greet (BA Honours, History, 2022), ‘Spiritual Armour: Crafting Ukrainian Identity through Vyshyvanka’, in Elizaveta Gaufman and Bohdana Kurylo (eds), special issue on Ukraine in Popular Culture, Czech Journal of International Relations.

The brightly coloured and delicately detailed vyshyvanka, the traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt, has long been a marker of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity. In recent years in particular, the vyshyvanka has become an internationally recognised symbol of ‘Ukrainianness’; and yet despite its importance in Ukrainian identity-building and independence movements, remarkably little scholarship exists on this topic. This lack of academic engagement stems in part from twin forms of domination – colonial domination and gendered domination. Ukrainian history has often been overshadowed by Russo-centrism, while the significance of handicrafts practices such as embroidery has been dismissed because of their association with femininity and ‘women’s work’. Yet the sheer number of digital images of vyshyvanka and the proliferation of vyshyvanka-related designs in light of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, make this a topic worthy of our attention. In this article, I explore how and why the uses of vyshyvanka have evolved over time, charting differences in how the vyshyvanka has been depicted, and used, both by Ukrainians and by those seeking to denigrate or deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation. I focus in particular on the explosion of digital images featuring the vyshyvanka, which have been circulating since the Euromaidan of 2013–14, and on the history of the creation of World Vyshyvanka Day, now celebrated on the third Thursday of May and serving as a vehicle for mobilising solidarity with Ukraine from Taiwan to the UK to Israel.

The article features images of objects held in the Ukrainian Museum of Australia‘s wonderful collection.

Special thanks are due to Dr Yana Ostapenko (Association of Ukrainians in Victoria), Maru Jarockyj (Ukrainian Museum of Australia), and Deanna Ramsey (Monash University library) for their generous assistance and support for this project!

Tom Kehoe and Andy May (History) et al., ‘The Past as Present in Health Promotion: The Case for a “Public Health Humanities”‘, Health Promotion International

Health promotion is conceived as a unifying concept for improving the health of populations. This means addressing the sociocultural, economic and commercial causes of ill-health, which are necessarily informed by past policies and sociocultural contexts. However, historical scholarship has rarely figured in health promotion practice or scholarship. This gap resides in the determinants of health, and notably in the analyses of tobacco control and skin cancer prevention, two long-running campaigns that have shaped modern health promotion in Australia. Both highlight a need for understanding the profound impact of history on the present and the value of learning from past successes and failures. Doing so requires integrating historical analyses into existing health promotion scholarship. To achieve this aim, we present a new ‘public health humanities’ methodology. This novel interdisciplinary framework is conceived as a spectrum in which historical studies integrate with existing health promotion disciplines to solve complex health problems.

We draw on the many calls for more interdisciplinarity in health promotion and derive this methodology from proposals in the medical humanities and cognate fields that have wrestled with combining history and present-focused disciplines. Using tobacco control and skin cancer prevention as case studies, we demonstrate how public health humanities uses interdisciplinary teams and shared research questions to generate valuable new knowledge unavailable with traditional methods. Furthermore, we show how it creates evaluation criteria to consider the powerful impact of issues like colonialism on current inequities that hinder health promotion strategies, and from which lessons may be derived for the future.

Howard Sankey (Philosophy), ‘The Objectivity of Science‘, Journal of Philosophical Investigations

The idea that science is objective, or able to achieve objectivity, is in large part responsible for the role that science plays within society. But what is objectivity? The idea of objectivity is ambiguous. This paper distinguishes between three basic forms of objectivity. The first form of objectivity is ontological objectivity: the world as it is in itself does not depend upon what we think about it; it is independent of human thought, language, conceptual activity or experience. The second form of objectivity is the objectivity of truth: truth does not depend upon what we believe or justifiably believe; truth depends upon the way reality itself is. The third form of objectivity is epistemic objectivity: this form of objectivity resides in the scientific method which ensures that subjective factors are excluded, and only epistemically relevant factors play a role in scientific inquiry.

The paper considers two problems that arise for the notion of epistemic objectivity: the theory-dependence of observation and the variability of the methods of science. It is argued that the use of shared standard procedures ensures the objectivity of observation despite theory-dependence. It is argued that the variability of methods need not lead to an epistemic relativism about science. The paper concludes with the realist suggestion that the best explanation of the success of the sciences is that the methods employed in the sciences are highly reliable truth-conducive tools of inquiry. The objectivity of the methods of the sciences leads to the objective truth about the objective world.

Nicole Tse (Cultural Materials Conservation), with Rosie H Cook, Margaret Kartomi and Luqmanul Chakim, ‘Ontology and Knowing: A Framework for Conserving a Rare Musical Instrument within and beyond the Archive’, in Janet Bridgland (ed.), ICOM Committee for Conservation 20th Triennial Conference Preprints (International Council of Museums)

Conserving cultures other than one’s own and working from the outside provokes questions of authority and the unknown in materials conservation. This paper focuses on identifying knowledge for cultural materials conservation of world culture objects, specifically a rare Indonesian musical instrument known as a bundengan. The study examines the ambiguous tensions surrounding a rare instrument located in an archive geographically isolated from its source community and how it acts as a social trigger to revive living heritage and performance practices, and to build culturally responsible communities of practice in conservation. An ontological framework to expand the knowledge of objects within and outside the archive is presented. The reiterative ontology draws on four disciplinary domains – archives, ethnomusicology, conservation, and performance – to build upon processual knowledge and networks of care, allowing deep connections with contemporary performance communities to emerge.

Awards & Appointments

We are delighted to announce the following new appointments to continuing positions in the School:

• Sam Baron (Associate Professor, Philosophy)
• Kyle Blumberg (Lecturer in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy)
• Tom Davies (Lecturer, Classics & Archaeology)
• Caroline Kyi (Assistant Lecturer, Grimwade Centre)

Congratulations also to our newly appointed Graduate Research Teaching Fellows:

Classics & Archaeology:

• Ronak Alburz
• Nathan Avis
• Christian Bagger
• Christopher Parkinson
• Anastasia Vassiliadis

History:

• Felicity Hodgson
• William Hoff
• James Hogg
• Shannon Peters

Philosophy:

• Callum Alpass
• Fergus Prien

June Factor (Senior Fellow, History) has been awarded a Member of the Order of Australia medal (AM) for ‘significant service to literature, to history, and to the community’.

Cat Gay (Hansen Trust PhD Scholar, History) has received a Hansen Little Public Humanities Grants to co-curate an exhibition on girls’ lives in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Victoria. The exhibition, Traces of Girlhood, is being curated by Cat, together with Annie Muir from Heritage Victoria, Yarra Ranges Council’s Sarah Hayes, and the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). It will be on at Como House and Garden, South Yarra, from 23 August–20 October 2024.

Mary Sheehan (PhD Candidate, History) received a commendation in the History Article Award for ‘A Grassroots View of Spanish Influenza in Melbourne’, Victorian Historical Journal, at the Public Record Office of Victoria 2023 Victorian Community History Awards.

Summer Intensives

This summer the intensive subject Interpreting Material Culture (ANCW20028) ran for the third time. This practical subject introduces students to the interpretation possibilities of everyday items, drawing on the Melbourne Antiquities Collection and the state-of-the-art Object Based Laboratories in Arts West. During daily classes that run over a two-week period, students get acquainted with different specialist fields that engage with ancient artefacts (archaeological conservation, museum studies), and teach them essential skills, such as archaeological drawing; documentation of ceramic, glass and metal artefacts; and stone tool analysis.

City Visions: Melbourne Intensive (HIST20087), coordinated by Andrew May, ran again this summer. It ‘offers an exciting look at the role of people, places, institutions and processes in the historical development of the modern city’, with Melbourne as its case study. As part of the course, students visited a number of local cultural collections. These included the Royal Historical Society of Victoria (RHSV), City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collections, and the Immigration Museum.

SHAPS staff, fellows, students, alumni: if you have news items for the monthly SHAPS digest, email us the details.

^{Feature image: City Visions students exploring the image collection at RHSV with Collection Officer, Helen Stitt}