SHAPS Digest (January 2023)

Ana Maria Theresa P Labrador (Honorary Visiting Fellow, Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation) discussed women’s textile weaving in the Philippines on SBS Filipino.

Grimwade Conservation Service’s conservation of Loong, 龍 , the oldest intact Imperial processional dragon in the world, featured in an article from ABC Ballarat.

Andonis Piperoglou (Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas, History) commented for the Sydney Morning Herald on Australian practices around shortening or adapting non-English names.

Academic Publications

Paula Dredge (Teaching Specialist, Grimwade Centre), Anne Gérard-Austin, Daryl Howard and Simon Ives, ‘Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armour Re-Examined’, The Burlington Magazine

Technical analysis by the Art Gallery of New South Wales of its portrait by Bronzino of Cosimo I de’ Medici in armour has revealed more details of the mysterious underlying portrait first observed in a X-radiograph in the 1980s. It has also established that Bronzino hesitated between making the portrait half-length or three-quarter-length, confirming that the painting is the prime autograph version of the three-quarter-length image.

Niro Kandasamy (PhD in History, 2019; now University of Sydney) with Lauren Avery and Karen Soldatic (eds), Social Inclusion special issue: Networks and Contested Identities in the Refugee Journey (open access)

This thematic issue traverses refugee research that recognises the importance of networks in determining the paths that refugees undertake in their journeys to seek safety and protection. In recent years, scholars have increasingly pointed to the multifaceted nature of networks in the refugee journey. These articles demonstrate the importance of elucidating the distinct influences and factors that shape refugee networks, including the unequal power relations between refugees and refugee aid workers in transit countries, transnational family and community connections, the proliferation of technologies in strengthening refugees’ networks, the role of the state in privileging certain refugee groups over others, and the role of refugees themselves in mobilising both past and existing networks to activate supports.

Kate McGregor (History), Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press)

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognise and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as ‘comfort women’, for decades, with a major wave beginning in the 1990s. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system’s history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself.

Andy May (History), ‘The Troubled House: Families, Heritance and the Reckoning of Empire’, Genealogy

Critical family history expands the frame of a life story beyond the accumulation of facts and figures to an acknowledgement of context, a deeper understanding of structure, a reckoning of circumstance and response and a comparison across time and space. This article explores the complexity of family history in the context of colonial pasts in British India; the possibilities offered by group analysis of colonial actors; and the moral obligation of the family historian to address difficult pasts in all their complexity. Through the migratory careers and migration stories of colonial actors – the dislocated people, objects and memories that sustain identity – a longitudinal dimension is added to family history. Taken collectively, the family history of a domiciled British community in India reveals not just important blood ties, but critical associational links and shared characteristics that structure experience and enhance power. Colonial power must always be measured by its negative effects, but is also relational, situational, variable, commutable and resisted. The article further reflects on the ways in which critical research into settler-colonial migrations delivers our family histories to the doorstep of the present; their possibilities for informing truth-telling at individual and national levels; and the need for a pedagogy of historical contextualisation and ethical citizenship.

Robyn Sloggett (Grimwade Centre), ‘Conservation Skills’, Journal of the Institute of Conservation

The term ‘conservation skills’ is a generic, and somewhat free-floating term, that is often used interchangeably with ‘manual skills’, ‘practical skills’, ‘hands-on skills’ and ‘treatment skills’. Giving weight to the term ‘treatment skills’, this article acknowledges the function of conservation treatment skills as a core conservation competency. It examines the nature of commentary that has sought to demonstrate that this competency has been reduced by a lack of focus on treatment skills in conservation education and, in turn, that this affects student skills and employability. It assesses the evidence on which this discourse has been developed, and in doing so considers the provocative and consequential nature of the discourse as it relates to conservation students and recent graduates. The article concludes that conservation, as a maturing discipline and profession, is defined by a technical, social and intellectual pluralism, and that this is more realistically the challenge for conservation education to advance in the twenty-first century.

Robyn Sloggett and Marcelle Scott, Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage (Routledge)

Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage examines the challenges that environmental change, both sudden and long-term, poses to the preservation of cultural material. This edited collection acknowledges the diversity of cultural heritage across collecting institutions, heritage sites and communities by highlighting how, in Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the quest to preserve such precious knowledge relies on records and narratives being available to inform decisions now and into the future. Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage will be of interest to those engaged in the study of heritage, conservation, archaeology, archives, anthropology, climate change and the environment. It will be also useful to practitioners and others attempting to understand the effect of environmental change on cultural heritage around the globe.

Appointments & Awards

A warm welcome to Pauline Li, who has been appointed to the role of Academic Programs Team Leader.

Congratulations to two of our students, who were successful in the 2022 European Studies Association Australia and New Zealand (ESAANZ) Essay Writing competition:

Ben Mason won the prize for the Australian postgraduate category for his essay entitled ‘Intervention, Ideology, Strategic Imperatives: An Examination of Fluctuating Relations between Russia/USSR and Sub-Saharan Africa’. He produced the essay for the subject International History (HIST90024).

Mal Priestley won in the Australian undergraduate category for an essay entitled ‘Analysing the Treatment of Queer People within the Early Soviet Union’, written for the subject Gender in History, 1800 to the Present (HIST20090).

The prizewinning essays will be published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of European Studies.

Congrats also to historian Pete Minard, who has been appointed Local and Family History Librarian at the City of Melton.

PhD Completions

Alastair James (PhD in Philosophy), ‘Labour Market Justice: Old and New Problems’

This thesis sets out to analyse normatively significant and in some cases under-theorised labour market phenomena to identify forms of injustice and provide philosophically defensible responses that take seriously the feasibility constraints governing policy proposals. Some chapters engage with longer-standing questions, such as exploitation theory, and workplace hierarchy. These chapters are concerned with enhancing our understanding of these concepts as they apply to contemporary labour markets. Other chapters explore labour market trends that have been less studied so far in philosophy, such as the gig economy, and the relationship between working remotely and discretionary time entitlements. These chapters provide insight into specific forms of unfairness and offer suitable policy mechanisms in response.

Part I of the thesis examines some of the contemporary challenges of labour markets. Drawing from both classical and neoclassical approaches towards economics, it provides an overview of intuitive approaches towards labour market justice. Explored are well-known concepts like ‘a just wage’ and ‘exploitation’, which, for the purposes of analysing the subjects under examination in this thesis, are argued to be ill-suited. Separate to these findings, and in response to some of the initial motivations of this project, provided is a theory of exploitation specifically for labour markets. Engaging with recent philosophical literature on exploitation, it explains what makes labour market exploitation distinct from non-exploitation, and provides an account of why this makes labour market exploitation wrong. Part I of the thesis goes on to respond to intuitive worries about exploitation in the gig economy. It diagnoses cases of labour in the gig economy that resemble a rent trap, arguing that, to the extent that gig work does resemble a rent trap, it is unjust and warrants some kind of corrective policy-based mechanism, several of which are proposed.

Part II of the thesis moves on to questions surrounding justice within firms. It begins by examining the compatibility of workplace hierarchy and relational equality. Comparing the respective merits and limitations of trust-based modes of organisation, democratically-owned and/or -run firms, as well as the hierarchical firm, it argues that it is preferable that both hierarchical and non-hierarchical governance structures exist. The project goes on to explore problems surrounding the necessary indeterminacy of the employment contract. To limit the extent to which contract indeterminacy subjects workers to the risk of workplace violations, it proposes two corrective policy mechanisms, an ex ante external mechanism, and an internal mechanism to dispose managers more sympathetically towards workers whose labour processes they supervise and oversee. Finally examined is an overlooked problem within the study of discretionary time. The thesis takes as a starting point the fact that there are discrepancies in workers’ discretionary time entitlements, arguing that these discrepancies arise due to the relationship between a worker’s labour and the specific capital they use to do their job. Provided are two contrasting ways to account for these discrepancies in the discretionary time entitlements of workers.

Supervisors: Associate Professor Dan Halliday, Dr Andrew Alexandra, Associate Professor Holly Lawford-Smith

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Leonard D’Cruz ‘Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy’ (PhD Completion Seminar, Philosophy)

This thesis brings Foucault’s work into dialogue with the tradition of normative political philosophy. More specifically, it draws on his ideas to develop an original approach to normative theorising that emphasises the importance of situated insights in reconstructing our normative political concepts. This involves locating Foucault’s ideas in relation to recent methodological debates in analytic political philosophy. On this basis, the thesis offers an alternative framework that improves on both the dominant paradigm of Rawlsian ideal theory and the resurgent tradition of political realism.

Projects

Digital Studio Graduate Internships

History PhD candidate Aleksandra Riabichenko was a recipient of a Faculty of Arts Digital Studio Graduate Internship in 2022. Working with academic lead Julie Fedor (History), Aleksandra created an interactive digital map based on the Union of Donbass Volunteers’ online database of obituaries of volunteer combatants who fought on the side of the self-proclaimed ‘people’s republics’ in the Donbas region of Ukraine from 2014 to the present. The database includes information on over 1500 combatants and provides insights into the age profiles, places of origin, and in some cases, the background, motivations and life-stories of the fighters, as well as the timing, volume and location of battlefield losses.

Zoë Laidlaw (History) was the academic lead for another project funded under the Digital Studio Graduate Internship scheme: Victorian Legacies ​of British Slavery.

As part of the ARC Discovery Project, Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery (WALBS) project, this internship project focused on the connections between British slavery and Australian colonisation in the context of Victoria, by identifying instances where British Caribbean slave plantation names were re-used in colonial-era Australia.

Interns Ge Tang (School of English & Theatre Studies) & Canaan Zengyu Lan (School of Language & Linguistics) performed tasks involving the processing and cross-linking of different textual sources and historical records relating to Australia, including (1) the digitised almost century-old book, Pastoral pioneers of Port Phillip, by RV Billis and AS Kenyon, in plain text format; (2) the LBS excel file containing the Caribbean estate names; (3) the Time-Layered Cultural Map’s searchable gazetteer (a digital version of the Australian National Placenames Survey, with 300,000 Australian placenames).

The pre-processing tasks involved cleaning up the Victorian pastoral estates text file and producing a merged file containing only the matched names after comparing the processed pastoral estates file against the Caribbean estates excel file. The post-processing tasks included removals of duplicates from the merged file and extraction of coordinates of key pastoral estate locations from the Gazetteer table.

The coincidence of West Indian plantation names and Victorian pastoral estates discovered will contribute to the creation of a database of Australian place names connected to Caribbean slave plantations and the mapping of names on Time-Layered Cultural Map, Australia, as next steps in the future project(s).

Nat Cutter (PhD in History, 2022; Teaching Associate [Periodic]) was the academic lead on the internship project, Mapping Early British-Maghrebi Relations through Book Diffusion (1609–1800), carried out by Fan Xiong.

This project interrogates the cultural and social history of early modern British-Maghrebi relations through the diffusion of books in British society between 1609 and 1800. By tracing books bound in Morocco leather and books written in English about the Maghreb, it aims to reveal how physical encounters with the Maghreb and knowledge about it moved around Britain. Such mapping entails a digital, animated movement of these books over space and time to demonstrate the unexpected extent to which Maghrebi material culture penetrated Britain.

The original information includes 400 plus books, each featuring 17 different fields of data. They are restructured, reorganised, readjusted, or merged, which involves data wrangling and cleaning to make different subsets. Some of these files are converted into kml files through GeoJSON or Quick Coordinates to generate macroscopic, multi-layered, and data-driven movements with the time line on Temporal Earth. Others are mapped onto Google My Maps with affiliated visuals to unravel microscopic details such as obvious change of owner location, year range, and binding colour. Colour coding has also been used to excavate historical layers by identifying individual books stored at one specific location through Google Earth.

Preventive Conservation in Thailand

ASCS 2023: The 44th Conference of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies

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

Feature image: Prof. Frederik Vervaet (Classics & Archaeology) welcomes Christian Hjorth Bagger, MA, at Melbourne international airport. Christian comes to us from Denmark (with a year’s delay owing to the pandemic) and endeavours to undertake doctoral studies into the socio-political role of aristocratic women in the Late Roman Republic (133-27 BCE). A warm welcome aboard your new home, Christian!