In another Swiftposium-related SHAPS post, republished fromPursuit, Gender Studies PhD Candidate Dana Fahadi examines Taylor Swift's feminism, exploration of hegemonic masculinity, and how she can do more as a role model.
I’m going to say at the outset, I am a Taylor Swift fan. She is my Goddess and I am one of the millions of very excited Swifties going to her Eras Tour.
‘The Man’ came out in 2019, as a part of her seventh studio album, Lover. In this song, Taylor addresses gender bias, namely how it manifests in the workplace and its disproportionate impact on women.
The official music video for The Man features Tyler Swift – an ‘alpha’ male persona that Taylor adopts – who struts with hypermasculine traits like aggressiveness, entitlement complex, excess and promiscuity.
The message of the song and video is that while women like Taylor Swift face criticism and judgement for behaviour like this, men’s behaviour is normalised and even praised by society standards and values.
The Man reflects the idea that women need to ‘rise’ to a certain standard to be regarded as valuable as men. But this standard has always been determined by men.
And so we find ourselves walking right into the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ trap on our way to break the glass ceiling.
Hegemonic masculinity, a term coined and developed by Australian sociologist RW Connell, is a masculinity built on domination over women, as well as a sense of superiority over other men who do not have certain qualities of what we know better as the alpha male: think aggressive, powerful, physically strong, natural-born leaders, having no interests in their own or other people’s feelings, the breadwinner. You get the picture.
Other features of hegemonic masculinity include being part of the dominant social groups: heterosexual, cisgender, upper/middle-class, Caucasian, citizens of the Global North, and the list goes on.
The Man reflects the idea that women need to ‘rise’ to a certain standard to be regarded as valuable as men. Photograph: Screengrab from Youtube.
But what does Taylor have to say about this?
“I would be complex, I would be cool, they’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to, and that would be okay for me to do, every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you
I’d be a fearless leader, I’d be an alpha type
When everyone believes ya, what’s that like?”
Taylor’s lyrics describe what is rewarded in the capitalist-liberalist society we live in. She sings about ruthlessness, the ‘fearless leader’, ‘conquests’ and ‘playing the field’.
Because men are encouraged to have these qualities, she says, women should be too – instead of being shamed for them.
“They’d say I hustle, put in the work, they wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve
What I was wearing, if I was rude, could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves
… If I was out flashin’ my dollar, I’d be a bitch not a baller …”
Her lyrics are consistent with the concept of neoliberal feminism, which is the main -ism of feminism promoted in mainstream media and popular culture. The influential 2019 book Feminism for the 99% argues that (neo)liberal feminism is based on the notion of “leaning in” and “cracking the glass ceiling”.
Neoliberal feminism supports the capitalism agenda by creating more opportunities, in areas like education and a career, for women who ultimately would still make the ‘one per cent’ the principal beneficiaries.
In a capitalist society, productive work is valued more than reproductive work.
A woman needs to be ruthless and aggressive in the workplace and play by the men’s rules to even be given a chance to advance.
In the eyes of the 99 per cent, instead of fighting to erase social hierarchy, (neo)liberal feminism simply diversifies the social hierarchy itself, ‘empowering’ socially advantageous women to rise to the top and leaving the ‘others’ stuck at the bottom.
‘Others’ here refer to working class, ethnic, racial and linguistic diverse women, as well those of other minority groups.
In other words, neoliberal feminism is just hegemonic masculinity in a cloak.
“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man
And I’m so sick of them coming at me again, ‘cause if I was a man, then I’d be the man"
For me, lyrics like this promote qualities that are destructive instead of nurturing, competitive instead of collaborative, fostering a ‘law of the jungle’ mentality.
It assumes that everybody starts from the same starting point, while in reality, some are given much more of a head start than others as part of a more privileged social group.
While it is important to address the issues faced by women like Swift – cisgender, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, neurotypical, ethnically and socially-privileged women – it is even more necessary to prioritise autonomy and social protection from an oppressive system to try and improve the quality of life of the 'other' women.
And Taylor could be leading the charge.
Swiftposium is an academic conference for scholars discussing the impact of Taylor Swift. It runs at the University of Melbourne from 11 to 13 February 2024 with public events on Sunday 11 February and recordings of the keynote presentations available online after the conference.
Feature image: Taylor Swift Eras Tour: Lover Set, 2023. Photographer: Paolo Villanueva via Flickr
Ahead of Taylor Swift's Australian tour, in this article republished from Pursuit, SHAPS History Lecturer Dr Sarah Walsh talks about the drama with another celebrity, Kanye West, that occurred almost 15 years ago, and some of the nuance that has been lost in the discussion over time.
Based on the numbers alone, I am a much bigger Kanye fan. I’m old enough to tell you that, when it came out in 2004, I bought College Dropout on CD and played the crap out of it in my extremely crappy 1989 Toyota Corolla on the way to my even crappier, first post-university job.
https://youtu.be/C41TEXVIaEg?si=vcewQr5NoKthcG4I
WATCH: ‘The 1’, Taylor Swift. Video: YouTube
When it comes to Taylor Swift, I’m always happy to hear her most popular songs when they end up on my playlist, but that’s about where my fandom ends.
This information seems important to share before diving into exactly what happened on MTV VMA night fifteen years ago.
This incident garnered an incredible amount of media coverage in the days following, but where did the media focus our attention at the time and who was perceived as the wronged party – Taylor or Kanye?
And actually, as time has passed, I think the real survivor of this incident is someone you might not expect. Pun intended.
Part of what makes answering this question in 2024 challenging is that it is very difficult to find footage of the entire 2009 broadcast. YouTube, newly minted in 2005, was not yet the home to all content.
But, after some internet perseverance, I found it.
The show kicks off with a heartfelt speech by Madonna about the sudden passing of Michael Jackson.
In it, she talks about the difficulties of being a child star; something that ended up as a contributing factor in how the interaction between 19-year-old Taylor and 32-year-old Kanye would be portrayed in the media: she as a child and he as a grown man.
The speech is followed by a long dance montage featuring mostly white performers doing Jackson’s iconic moves (poorly). This context will be important soon.
She stands holding her Moon Man and thanks the crowd for the recognition despite performing 'country music'. Kanye appears seemingly out of nowhere. Taylor hands him the mic confusedly, but without complaint.
He then goes on to say that Beyoncé had made, “one of the best videos of all time”, but doesn’t say that she should have won. As soon as he finishes, the crowd erupts into boos.
He hands the mic back and Taylor tries to say something, but MTV has cut her sound and she walks off stage. Cut away shots to Beyoncé during this debacle show her frozen, not knowing how to react.
And then comes the moment we’ve all forgotten.
Demonstrating that her work speaks for itself, Beyoncé wins the top award of the night, Video of the Year, to close the show. But, when she takes the stage for her acceptance speech, she gives up her time to Taylor.
The crowd goes crazy with applause. By way of explanation, Beyoncé says that she was 17 when she got her first Moon Man and it was an incredible moment for her. She wanted Taylor to have that same moment.
In the days immediately after the incident, Kanye shared a variety of reasons for his outburst and expressed genuine remorse for raining on Taylor’s parade. Among the various excuses West made, there was one genuinely fair point: racism.
Kanye said he had never heard of Taylor and was upset that she won for a run-of-the-mill 'country music' video, while the video Beyoncé made, which inspired an international dance sensation, went unrecognised.
Nonetheless, the media narrative was that a Mean Black Man had made a White Girl Child cry and there was plenty of outrage to go around about that (see: Dr Phil).
Whether out of a desire for damage control or sincerity, Kanye got in touch with Taylor to personally apologise a few days after the event. We know this because she talked about it publicly.
Taylor Swift, Sydney, 2012. Photographer: Eva Rinaldi, via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED
She also decided to perform Innocent at the 2010 VMAs, which many perceived as being about this incident. It was this decision that launched a feud with Kanye that would last for years. This feud would prove valuable to both performers, as it regularly kept them in the entertainment news cycle.
Clearly, Taylor needed the media to come to her rescue as much as Beyoncé needed Kanye in 2009.
So, what should we make of this in 2024? In the wake of #metoo, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Taylor’s 1989, and Kanye’s descent into madness, the real takeaway is that men should be aware that publicly airing their grievances comes at a cost.
And they really ought to avoid ‘defending’ women (see: the Chris Rock/Will Smith/Jada Pinkett Smith Oscar’s moment).
Women don’t need men to defend our honor or protect us from the harsh realities of life.
That said, the person who lost out biggest of all in this fiasco was Beyoncé.
Taylor did deserve her moment. But, it wasn’t Beyoncé’s problem to fix and the sacrifice of black women is so normalised that no one even remembers this part of the story.
Taylor Swift The Eras Tour: Fearless Set Era, SoFi Stadium, Inglewood, California, 9 August 2023 (detail). Photographer: Paolo Villaneuva, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 DEED
In a live broadcast, MTV showrunners could’ve kept Taylor’s mic on after Kanye stopped shouting. They could’ve adjusted their schedule and let her come out later in the show to speak if she wanted.
At the very least, Taylor could’ve thanked Beyoncé for doing this unsolicited good deed in her acceptance speech. She didn’t.
What did Taylor say when asked about Beyoncé’s decision? She was touched and repeatedly said how “classy” a move it was.
Sadly, in 2009, the notion that a black person could be classy or articulate still was newsworthy (see: Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign). However, the press was more interested in following the story of a poorly behaved black man and his white girl ‘victim’. Shocker.
In the end, there are two morals of this story.
One is that women do not need men to protect or defend them, but our voices are still not as respected as they should be. This is especially true of powerful, successful women in the public eye.
The equally important lesson is to remember that women of colour, especially black women, are not here to make the rest of us feel good. Taylor’s hurt feelings should not have been assuaged by the sacrifice of Beyoncé’s own voice and joy.
Fifteen years later, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in both respects.
Swiftposium is an academic conference for scholars discussing the impact of Taylor Swift. It runs at the University of Melbourne from 11–13 February 2024 with public events on Sunday 11 February and recordings of the keynote presentations available online after the conference.
Liam Byrne (Honorary, History) made a video for Unions Australia on the 40th Anniversary of Medicare.
Medicare is 40 years old today! I made this vid for the @unionsaustralia TikTok channel on the union history of how Medicare was created. Check it out if you like stories of worker struggles making transformative change https://t.co/iW7iD0GUnd
Oleg Beyda (Hansen Lecturer in History) featured on the podcast Game of Life with Dave and Harman, exploring the meaning and purpose of doing History today.
An article by Cat Gay (Hansen PhD Scholar in History), "'All the Perils of the Ocean": Girls' Emotions on Voyages to Australia, 1851–1884,' received the second-highest number of views online in Australian Historical Studies for 2023. The article is currently available Open Access on the Taylor & Francis website.
Tamara Lewit (Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) was interviewed about four millennia of changing traditions of New Years' resolutions for ABC Rural and ABC Victorian Country Hour.
Grimwade Masters students Fen Reyes, Camille Calanno and Sarah Soltis, wrote about their research and conservation project on the Philippines’ Kabayan Fire Mummies in Pursuit.
History staff and post-graduate researchers Oleg Beyda, Mark Edele, Julie Fedor, George Fforde, Aleksandra Riabichenko and Joshua Strong visited the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University to take part in a Hokkaido-Melbourne University Joint Seminar on 'Eurasian Migration: Past, Present and Future'. The visit was hosted by Professor Akihiro Iwashita and co-organised by the East Eurasian Studies Project, National Institute for the Humanities; the Eurasia Unit for Border Research at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University; the Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space (RIPSS), Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne; and the Research Unit for Ukraine and Neighbouring Areas at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University.
Presenters from both institutions shared their work on a range of topics related to border crossings in Eurasia, including the history of Russian migration to and from the Far East (Oleg Beyda and David Wolff); the re-mapping of national identities and narratives of imperial history in contemporary Russia and Ukraine (Yoko Aoshima and Julie Fedor); the plight of Ukrainian evacuees in Japan (Naomi Chi); oral history as a source on the experiences of Russian displaced persons of Kalmyk descent (Takehiko Inoue); migrant landscapes in marketplaces in Russia (Norio Horie); illegal border crossings in the Soviet period (Mark Edele and George Fforde); the post-war fates of Soviet Nazi collaborators in Australia (Aleksandra Riabichenko), and the migration of Stalinist Socialist Realist architectural language from the USSR to East and South-Asia (Joshua Strong). Mark Edele, Julie Fedor, Akihiro Iwashita and Mie Nakachi acted as commentators on the presentations and led a lively and productive discussion which we hope will lead to ongoing collaboration. We thank our Japanese hosts for their warm welcome and generous hospitality!
Ever since some traditional protagonists made the intriguing claim that the Vedas (canonical Brahmāṇical texts) are an inviolable resource of authority on significant matters, extensive debate has raged in Indian thought as to whether word can rightfully be accepted as pramāṇa or autonomous mode of knowing; in western epistemological terms, as testimony? At the mundane level the doctrine underscores the capacity of language, i.e., words and sentences (sabda), to disseminate knowledge from speaker/author to hearer/audience; at a transcendental level it adverts to wisdom-texts delivering knowledge about supramundane matters.
Unlike the former, the words of the latter may be literally authorless: truth is begot from what the sages of yore simply ‘heard’, somehow, and came to know. But J N Mohanty has rejected this doctrine, arguing that sentences can certainly generate linguistic meaning or intentionality – understanding that p. But since this does not come stamped with evidential warrant (‘fact’), it may not amount to knowledge that p; at best it may generate belief about injunctions and imperatives (‘ought’ but not indicatively ‘is’, nor objective moral knowledge). The chapter is a response to what I call the Mohanty-Gettier Paradox, and a case is argued for the viability of śabda-based testimony, drawing on phenomenology of language and hermeneutics.
This article explores how the thought that language is expressive, in the sense of bearing emotional or affective meaning, can be made sense of, with particular attention to two authors for whom this thought plays an important role. It begins by introducing the idea of language being “expressive” and using Charles Taylor's work to consider its potential interest, before showing how the expressiveness of language might be accounted for by a position that seems particularly suited to this task, namely Merleau‐Ponty's view of embodied expression in Phenomenology of Perception. I then set out a significant challenge to that position based on Wittgenstein's “private language argument”, which implies there is no necessary connection between language use and a subject's internal (affective) states, thus contesting Merleau‐Ponty's explanatory emphasis on the body. I therefore propose a revised “complex” view of language's expressiveness that meets this Wittgensteinian challenge by reconceiving the body's role. Finally, I draw out some implications of this revised view, arguing that while language itself cannot be considered expressive, it remains significant that we can experience language as expressive. I also suggest that, although apparently threatened, Taylor's position can not only accommodate, but be better understood with, this revised view.
Ravando (PhD in History, 2023), Karsa dan Karya Demi Kemanusiaan: Yayasan Kesehatan Telogorejo untuk Indonesia (Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2023).
On 29 November 2025, Rumah Sakit Telogorejo (Telogorejo Hospital) will celebrate its centennial milestone. Over the course of a century, the hospital has made significant contributions to the improvement of the healthcare sector, particularly for the residents of Semarang (Central Java) and its surrounding areas. Originating from a humble rented building located in a small Chinatown called Gang Gambiran, the initial founders of the hospital embarked on their grand vision to enhance the quality of life for the less privileged, as they often found themselves to be the most vulnerable in the highly discriminatory colonial healthcare system. This book demonstrates how, through this institution, the ethnic Chinese community helped to protect and help those in need. In this book I examine the history of the Telogorejo Hospital from its founding in 1925 up until 2023. Through archival and newspaper research, I unearth how the doctors and nurses working for this hospital not only served the community but also engaged in health activism to prevent disease and increase hygiene amongst the broader public.
This article argues the importance of animal spirits throughout the economy in improving productivity performance. It overviews the idea of animal spirits and people's level of confidence in undertaking economic activity. It then notes a gap, a missing residual, in economists' efforts to understand productivity growth. Two well-documented measures indicating animal spirits are the level of social trust and of corruption. Surveying the literature, the article shows both of these correlate with economic performance, and demonstrates they are correlated with each other. A case study of the impact of changes in corruption levels shows animal spirits can have significant effects.
Awards & Appointments
Nat Cutter (History) was one of a team (with Rachel Fensham and Tyne Sumner) who received the 2023 Research Infrastructure Excellence Award for Excellence in Innovation and Contribution to Research for their work on the Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-Engine).
Brent Davis (Classics & Archaeology) was awarded funding for a collaboration with Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) to support his project, Using Deep Neural Network Models to Aid in the Decipherment of Linear A.
Linear A is a script that was used on Crete and its surrounding islands by the Minoan civilization during the Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1450 BCE). It was first discovered in 1900 at the site of Knossos, alongside another related, but slightly later script called Linear B, which was associated with Mycenaean Greek culture (ca. 1400–1200 BCE). Linear B was shown to represent an early form of ancient Greek in 1952, but Linear A remains undeciphered and appears to encode an unrelated language.
Attempts at decipherment using conventional, manual methods have proven unsuccessful to date, owing in no small part to the restricted size of the current corpus of texts. However, in recent years, deep learning techniques have shown great success as a tool in deciphering other ancient scripts. By combining expertise in Aegean scripts from the University of Melbourne’s Classics and Archaeology department with the technical capabilities of the MDAP team, we are hoping to investigate the nature of Linear A through language models trained via deep learning, working towards an effort at machine decipherment.
The primary aims of this project are to gain further insights into the nature of the language that the Linear A script encodes, and to contribute to the efforts at decipherment through potentially identifying and/or eliminating candidate cognate languages. The identification of a potential cognate language for Linear A as a part of this project would be a fundamental step towards machine decipherment of the language. Conversely, the inability to identify any cognates would be equally informative, strengthening the case for Linear A as a language isolate, and indicating that alternative approaches need to be sought for its decipherment that do not rely on the knowledge of related languages.
C&A PhD student Abby Robinson was awarded the 2023 Archaeological and Anthropological Society of Victoria (AASV) Alpha Prize for best student presentation. Each year the AASV welcomes students from Monash, La Trobe and University of Melbourne annually to present their work to the society, which gives a prize for the best talk for the year at the AGM.
In 2023 University of Melbourne was represented by Cassandra Kiely (Borderline Life in the Mediaeval Mountains of Southwest Georgia) and Abby Robinson (A Darker Version of Home: Surviving the Turbulent Middle Ages in the Highlands of Southwestern Georgia).
Abby talked to Forum and told us a little about the project for which she won the award:
My talk was based on data from an extensive archaeological field survey that I worked on with my Georgian colleague, Giorgi Khaburzania. The project comes under the auspices of the long and successful collaboration between the University of Melbourne and the Georgian National Museum, which also encompasses Andrew Jamieson and Claudia Sagona’s excavations at Rabati. Over a period of five years or so, Giorgi and I covered around 1,300 km2 of the southwest Georgian borderlands, on foot and by car, collecting material for my PhD thesis and other projects.
Exploring the mountainous northwestern edge of the survey area, 2017. Photographer: Giorgi Khaburzania
From the outset, we were struck by how common it was to encounter stone-built and rock-cut shelters and defences of various kinds: fortress complexes made of local stone occupied and monitored the narrow river valleys; human-made and remodelled caves were cut into the rocky walls of the gorges; and underground shelters called darnebi were hidden away beneath settlements on the highland plateaus. This defensive landscape reflects the turbulent Middle Ages in this region. The eighth to eleventh centuries CE were a time of continual struggles for power and territory, involving forces from both inside and beyond its borders, and culminating in a devastating invasion by the Seljuk Turks in c1065.
Survey on the Niala Plateau, site of many darnebi', 2013. Photographer: Giorgi Khaburzania
My talk focused on the darnebi, which are common in this part of Georgia but very rarely seen elsewhere. Concealed beneath the remains of many (perhaps most?) medieval villages, they had benches, alcoves – even the means to prepare food during prolonged confinements. In sum, they were a dark and dismal version of home – but they also represented salvation. Hidden away and safeguarded by narrow entranceways and effectively impassable stone doors, the villagers who worked in the fields, cared for the animals and built the defences could be kept safe from attacks there. Whatever damage was done above ground, in time they could emerge and rebuild. What we see here and throughout the survey area is tangible evidence of how the combination of builders and landscapes, culture and nature, resulted in a barrier against all comers that ultimately stood the test of time.
Andrew Turner (Classics & Archaeology) was awarded funding for a collaboration with Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP) to support his project, Determining the Sources for Nicholas Trevet's Commentary on Livy.
Livyʼs Roman History is a seminal historical work from the ancient world, and its text has been studied intensively, but the English mediaeval scholar Nicholas Trevet wrote a Latin commentary on Livy which may have been highly influential in its day, but which has never been published. There are fundamental scholarly questions about Trevetʼs sources and the subsequent influence of this text which have been impossible to address because of the absence of a modern critical edition of this work.
This project aims to understand better the manuscript sources used by Nicholas Trevet to establish his commentary on Livy. Due to severe losses of relevant material, it is extremely unlikely that any one manuscript could ever be identified as Trevetʼs source, but knowing what general family of manuscript he used can give us more precise information on where he wrote his own commentary and when. The amount of material needed to study the Livian manuscript tradition properly is vast, and to analyse it in a tradition manner for this project would require not only enormous man-power resources but also expense, since many manuscripts are not freely available online but images must be purchased. But select manuscript readings, which have already been compiled in some modern editions, in some ways behave like biological data, in that common characteristics can show lineage and affiliation. Our aim therefore is to use techniques developed to treat comparable biological problems in conjunction with MDAP to speed up the processes of identification of Trevetʼs likely source.
PhD Completions
Laura Jocic (PhD in History, 2024) 'Dress in Australia: The Materiality of a Colonial Society in the Making'
The study of surviving items of dress offers a vital material source for historians that is commonly ignored. Dress sits at the intersections between necessity and self-representation, the assertion of social standing and cultural, economic and technological aspects of society. Yet writings on dress in the Australian colonial context have largely overlooked the extant items, focusing instead on images and text. 'Dress in Australia: The Materiality of a Colonial Society in the Making' takes a material culture approach to the history of colonial era dress from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the late-nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the early years of colonisation and development of colonial society in the years up to the early 1870s.
The research methodology, which uses the study of a selection of garments in public and private collections, which are known to have been either made or worn in Australia, places surviving items of dress and their materiality to the fore in discussions of European colonisation and Australian settler culture. The close examination of surviving items of dress, coupled with contextual interpretation of objects based on archival research using letters, journals and correspondence, as well as visual material, demonstrates how such an approach enables historical interpretations that would not have been possible from a narrower methodological base. Through the detailed analysis and contextual interpretation of objects, this thesis shows how their materiality prompts new directions and expanded ways of thinking about the significance of dress within a rapidly changing settler society
Supervisors: Professor Antonia Finnane, Dr Carolyn Rasmussen, Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy
This thesis offers a history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the Redfern Black Movement from 1968 to 1973. Recognising the central place of women within the Movement, it crafts a platform for their voices to be properly heard within historical scholarship for the first time. The PhD candidate, Elizabeth (Beth) Muldoon worked with eight founding foremothers of the Movement as co-researchers to develop a historical analysis of its origins, philosophy and praxis based on their oral histories. The anti-colonial methodology of the collective research underpinning this thesis enabled joint control of every component, from its guiding questions to its budget. This methodology responds to the longstanding demand of Aboriginal activists and scholars, including Black Movement activists in the 1970s, for Aboriginal communities to be in control of research about them.
The historical analysis of this thesis is informed by the theorisation of Aboriginal sovereignty as lived, embodied and inalienable by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Crystal McKinnon and other Aboriginal scholars who articulate an Aboriginal ontology that co-researchers share. When viewed through this theoretical lens, the Redfern Black Movement can be understood as an assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty that displayed significant continuities with prior assertions. The oral histories of co-researchers reveal that such assertions did not only take the form of organised and spontaneous confrontations with colonial power, but also the daily acts of care, protection, education and cultivation of kinship that have always sustained Aboriginal communities. Attentive to the diverse ways through which Aboriginal sovereignty is asserted, this thesis traces the origins of the Movement through co-researchers’ personal and community histories in rural New South Wales, Townsville, Cairns and Darwin. It then demonstrates that their connection to a long legacy of Aboriginal community defence and nurturing on Gadigal Country (where Redfern is located) was vital to the emergence of the Movement.
Additionally, this thesis maps the philosophy and praxis of the Movement, showing how four key strategies – 'direct action', 'sharing and caring', 'unity', and 'solidarity' – grew from the ancestral knowledge of co-researchers and other the Movement activists in response to new circumstances, relationships and ideas. The oral histories of co-researchers reveal that each of these strategies contributed to the strength of the Movement yet carried significant challenges, which opponents of the Movement have, over the past fifty years, exploited to undermine the Movement’s pursuit of 'self-determination', understood by co-researchers as entailing 'land rights' and 'community control'. The political objectives of Movement women and the strategies that they developed to attain them were grounded in their theorisation of their unique position of subjugation within settler-colonial society as Black women, yet the indivisibility of their struggle for liberation with that of Black men. By contextualising women’s participation in the Movement within a long tradition of Aboriginal women’s political leadership and Women’s Business in south-eastern Australia, this thesis demonstrates that we cannot understand the Movement without grasping the perspectives of Movement women.
Supervisors: Professor Gary Foley, Professor Sara Wills, Professor Barry Judd
Eliza O'Donnell (PhD in Cultural Materials Conservation, 2024), 'The Painting is Broken: Understanding Issues of Authenticity and Art Attribution in Contemporary Indonesia'
The circulation of counterfeit paintings in the Indonesian art centres is a sensitive issue that threatens the cultural record and intellectual property of artists and their legacy. Since the beginning of Indonesia’s first art market boom in the late 1980s, paintings falsely attributed to prominent modern and contemporary Indonesian artists have slid into the secondary art market, changing hands through auction houses, galleries, art dealers and private transactions. While the unauthorised use of intellectual property that infringes on the copyright of the artist is a pervasive and longstanding issue in Indonesia, as it is globally, the study of painting attribution from a conservation perspective is limited.
This thesis employs an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in cross-cultural engagement, technical art history, archival research, and interviews with art world practitioners, to investigate the relationship between the booming art market and the circulation of counterfeit paintings falsely attributed to Indonesian artists. Reviewing current approaches for art attribution in Indonesia, this thesis asks, how is painting authenticity understood in the Indonesian context? This question is examined across six themed chapters focusing on: 1) terminology, 2) the Indonesian copyright framework, 3) the art market, 4) art market processes, 5) art archives and 6) technical art history. An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to this study enabled a nuanced exploration of knowledge representation, verification, and the societal implications of painting forgery in the Javanese arts communities of Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Bandung where this research is located.
Key findings drawn from artist interviews, archival sources and technical art history highlight the extent to which contemporary living artists, in addition to the twentieth-century modern masters, have been victims of art fraud, from the early 1990s until today. These findings demonstrate the tangible impact of forgery on the individuals who are affected when counterfeit works are produced and traded. This study seeks to elucidate the strategies that contemporary Indonesian artists have adopted to protect themselves from intellectual property theft in the absence of a robust copyright framework, and examines integrated approaches to building secure artist records and archives for future studies of attribution.
Overall, this thesis underscores the pressing need for interdisciplinary collaboration and ongoing discourse to address the particular challenges posed by painting forgery in the Indonesian art market. Inauthentic cultural material is harmful to Indonesian artists, communities, and the cultural record, and finding effective and empowering ways to manage this issue is of great interest to artists, curators, art historians, conservators and others. Painting forgery in Indonesia, and in the global art world, is an active and ongoing issue, and current understanding is continually evolving as new evidence is brought to light. This thesis is a scholarly contribution to advancing existing knowledge on art attribution and authenticity in Indonesia, deepening collective knowledge of the complexities inherent in the Indonesian art world and its broader implications for the global art community.
Supervisors: Associate Professor Nicole Tse and Professor Robyn Sloggett (Grimwade), Associate Professor Edwin Jurriëns (Asia Institute)
Feature image: L to R. Norio Horie, Naomi Chi, George Fforde, Julie Fedor, Josh Strong, Oleg Beyda, Mark Edele, Aleksandra Riabichenko, Takehiko Inoue, Akihiro Iwashita, David Wolff, Mie Nakachi, at the Hokkaido-Melbourne University Joint Seminar, 'Eurasian Migration. Past, Present and Future', Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University, 12 January 2024
The University of Melbourne has been collaborating with Silpakorn University, Thailand, since 1995. Most recently, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts and Silpakorn University’s Faculty of Science and Faculty of Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts. In March 2023 the University of Melbourne hosted an Incoming Research and Training Visit for residents of Silpakorn University’s Faculty of Science. During the visit, Assistant Professor Sutinee Girdthep and Dr Nattawan Worawannotai presented their work on the conservation of Thai heritage. Recent Master of Cultural Materials Conservation graduate Gen Schiesser reflects on the presentations below.
Nature has a specific way of informing our practices. When it rains, we bring in the sheets. The weather forecast tells us how to dress and the climate determines what we can grow. We might eat more salads in the summer and cook more soup in the winter. We are constantly mitigating and navigating nature. We adapt because it is critical and vital and because we know that the variable forces of nature will outlast us if we do not.
Nature, in many such cases, is also the reason for our ingenuity. We make umbrellas to walk in the rain and air conditioners to keep us cool. At Silpakorn University, scholars are working to find ways to apply science to solve real-world problems, including those linked to the preservation of art and culture in different natural environments. Assistant Professor Sutinee Girdthep (Nan) and Dr Nattawan Worawannotai (Nat) are investigating ways to slow damage to Thailand’s most significant monuments and artworks, including the nineteenth-century Wiang Ta murals and the mosaics on the Phra Maha Dhatu stupas. Instead of seeking to control nature, Nan and Nat look to creative, less invasive solutions based on a deeper understanding of the materials, their origins and context, and their environment.
Conservation in Humid Climates
Thailand is a humid country, experiencing an average of 60 to 80 percent relative humidity yearly. This level of humidity can be problematic for cultural objects and artworks. The increased water content in the air can cause materials to swell, shrink, rust, and grow mould. The thermal properties in materials can also change, causing objects that are usually hard or ‘glassy’ in colder temperatures (e.g., wax and glues) to soft, rubbery, and viscous when warmed. Paraloid B72, for example, is an adhesive used commonly in the conservation of pottery sherds – but only if the temperature remains below forty degrees Celsius.
So much of modern conservation and museum practice tells us to keep our cultural heritage materials within certain relative humidity and temperature ranges. In addition, many conservation materials, such as Paraloid B72, are designed for cooler maintained temperatures. It is worth noting that a lot of conservation knowledge is coming from the larger conservation epicentres of England and Europe, where the climate is temperate and thus, in some respects, more manageable.
In humid and/or tropical climates, it is not always sustainable, affordable or feasible to power HVAC systems. When it comes to protecting cultural heritage, the impact of nature is a real and severe problem and, in places like Thailand, total control over the atmosphere is an impossible goal. Much like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill for eternity, in highly humid environments you may find yourself continuously cleaning mould off artworks only for it to reappear just weeks later.
This is where conservation gets interesting – when it addresses the threaded nature of science, art and the environment. Controlling the temperature and relative humidity of a space is not all we can do to protect our cultural heritage from the intensity of tropical climates. Research undertaken by Nan and Nat is meeting Thai humidity on its own terms.
Understand the Material, Understand How it Deteriorates: The Wiang Ta Murals
The Wiang Ta murals have seen a lot of different weather conditions. Made in Phrae, in northern Thailand, southwest of Chiang Mai, in the nineteenth century, the Wiang Ta murals originally adorned Wat Wiang Ta Mon monastery. In 1988, the murals were moved to Mae Fuh Luang Art and Culture Park in Chiang Rai. Some areas of the murals are missing colour and water damaged, having been exposed to rain at various points.
For Nat, the Wiang Ta murals were of special scientific and cultural significance, partly because they had not been restored before. As a result, they contain valuable information on the original Thai pigments used in the nineteenth century, pigments for which limited documentation and scientific studies currently exist.
The Wiang Ta Project brought together numerous professions, a testament to the highly collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of conservation. Traditional Thai artists were consulted for oral histories and insights into painting techniques. Structural architects, wood conservators, and art historians were also consulted over the course of the project.
The goals of the project were to understand the painting’s characteristics, history, condition, and degradation processes and to determine what pigments were used in the painting. Ultimately, the Wiang Ta Project wanted to show cultural materials as more than how they appear: they are a combination of local and imported materials, such as pigments. Technological analysis can tell us how different materials were used, what their social importance was, and how to preserve them for the future.
The mural itself consists of four wooden panels and represents the Lanna school of painting associated with northern Thailand. Each panel comprises three layers: the wood substrate, the ground layer, and the paint layer. Microsamples were taken from the paint layer and analysed under scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), a form of scientific examination that magnifies surfaces and detects chemical elemental presences. SEM-EDS is commonly used in the conservation research world for this purpose due to its unique ability to pinpoint and visualise the location of certain elements and their relationship to one another.
The analysis found that the pigments used in the construction of the mural included lead white, bone black, cinnabar, vermillion, synthetic emerald green, synthetic ultramarine and gold leaf. The ground layer was made from aluminium silicate clay.
The results indicated that a large number of the pigments were likely traded and imported from China, while others were locally sourced. In particular, the clay-based pigments and ground layer may reflect local material due to the high clay content found in Thai soil.
The most interesting findings, however, related to the green pigments vermillion and emerald green. These had suffered the most damage compared to the other pigments, possibly due to fluctuations in relative humidity and temperature across the year and the presence of water soluble binders.
Moisture be Gone: The Phra Maha Dhatu Stupas
The Phra Maha Dhatu stupas are complex built features. There are two stupas onsite: Phra Maha Dhatu Nabhamethanidol (the King stupa) and Phra Maha Dhatu Nabhapolbhumisiri (the Queen stupa). The King and Queen stupas were built in the Doi Inthanon National Park, southwest of Chiang Mai, in 1987 and 1992 respectively. At sixty metres high, they are under the care of the Thai Air Force. There are no conservation or cleaning problems associated with these stupas that are located on the highest land in Thailand, in conditions of high relative humidity, and whose exteriors feature intricate mosaics of varying material complexity.
Just kidding!
The price of this visually stunning, structurally brilliant built heritage is all else that follows: the high cost associated with maintaining it; the logistical issues that come with said maintenance; and the lack of preventative measures that might enable breaking the Sisyphus-and-the boulder circuit of continuous, rigorous, and exhaustive management and conservation for recurring issues. The hill never ends. The boulder never reaches the top. And you can’t landscape the hill away with a bulldozer.
The bulldozer might sound dramatic, but in a sense this is what conservators try to do when they manage objects that are housed inside buildings. The ‘hill’ that is conservation problems caused by the environment – pests, rust, mould, warping, fading – can be ‘bulldozed’ through the implementation of measures that control the environment – air conditioning, humidity control, ventilation, UV-sensitive glass. You still have to push the boulder by monitoring the condition of cultural objects often and ensuring that the preventive measures remain in place, but the path is easier because it is flat.
Measures of this kind are not an option, however, when it comes to objects that are exposed to the elements – at least, this has been the usual thinking. But this is where Nan’s research comes into play. Nan’s work is aimed at mitigating the fungal and algae staining occurring on the stupa mosaics as well as the erosion of the mosaic fillers from rain that causes some of the mosaics to periodically come loose. Nan developed an innovative plan for addressing these issues: to formulate a hydrophobic surface spray for the mosaics, an idea which resulted in a unique collaboration with Silpakorn University and the Thai Air Force.
The hydrophobic surface spray was rigorously tested: it needed to dry clear so as to not detract from the mosaic feature; it needed to be acid, UV and water resistant; it needed to be temperature resilient; and it needed to prevent the growth of fungi and moss.
Nan found that the best hydrophobic coating was a polyurethane resin with silicon dioxide nanoparticles which fit all of the above criteria. Currently, a small area of each stupa is being used to test the coating. If successful, after a year the hydrophobic surface spray will be applied to the entire built surface.
Only the Beginning
The research undertaken by Nat and Nan represents two important stages in the conservation of cultural heritage. The first stage, demonstrated through Nat’s work on the Wiang Ta murals, shows how before any remediation work is used on an object or surface, the nature of the materials must first be understood in the context of where they are from. The second stage, demonstrated through Nan’s formulation of the hydrophobic surface coating, shows the creative process of planning conservation remediation that meets the environment the material exists in on its own terms.
We look forward to hearing about more materials studies and conservation treatments that occur in tropical environments from the wonderful academics at Silpakorn University.
Thank you to Assistant Professor Sutinee Girdthep (Nan) and Dr. Nattawan Worawannotai (Nat) for sharing with us their research and for their continued collaboration and commitment to conservation science. As part of each presentation, the following groups were acknowledged for their contributions to the projects:
Mae Fuh Luang Foundation
Faculty of Science, Silpakorn University
Teerpat Khanjao
Royal Thai Air Force
Royal Thai Air Force Academy
I would like to also acknowledge and thank Associate Professor Nicole Tse for hosting the presentations and for providing information on the history of the University of Melbourne’s relationship with Silpakorn University.
Following on from a visit in March 2023, Assistant Professor Dr Sutinee Girdthep and Titichaya Limpathompipop joined the Grimwade Centre to continue our research collaborationand enrol in select subjects in the Masters program. The visit is supported by a grant awarded to Silpakorn University, Science-based Conservation of Artworks (2022) and Science Learning Activities through Workshops on Art Conservation and Collection of Documentary Knowledge on Conservation of Thai Art to Promote the Creation of Science Courses for Conservation Work (2023), funded by the National Research Council of Thailand, Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, and an Memorandum of Understanding between the Faculty of Science, Silpakorn University, and Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne (2023–2028).
Together we have been investigating The Study of Characteristics and Polymer Properties of Materials used as Binders in Traditional Thai Painting with Tempera Technique by Scientific Process, with the sampling, ageing and PyGCMS analysis with Alex Duan, Traces in the School of Chemistry. Assistant Professor Dr Sutinee Girdthep and Titichaya Limpathompipop have also joined Nicole Tse in SHAPS to do some pXRF analysis of Traditional Chinese Medicines at the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo as part of a current Masters student’s minor thesis project, Qiyin Zhuang, and also micro fading tests of paint samples aged in the Philippines and Australia.
Feminist critics of sex difference research are often accused of claiming there are no sex differences, or that sex hormones have no influence on human behaviour. In this episode of the HPS Podcast, Professor Cordelia Fine joins Samara Greenwood to talk us through why this is a false characterisation. Instead, feminist researchers are digging into the ways in which the developmental outcomes of genes and hormones on behaviour can vary radically depending on environmental conditions.
Do feminist critics of sex difference research really claim there are no biological sex differences?
The short sweet answer is no. Instead, feminist researchers call on all scientists to take more seriously the question of how radically interactive biology and environment may be, especially when it comes to human behaviour. Today's guest on the HPS podcast is Professor Cordelia Fine, who will be talking about the concept of 'norms of reaction' in reference to sex differences in our brains and our behaviour.
Cordelia is professor of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, and I first met Cordelia when I took her wonderful class, which at the time had the fantastic title Sex in Science. I love telling people how much I enjoyed sex in science. I'm very excited to have her as a special guest on our podcast today.
Hi Cordelia. Thanks for joining me today. It is a delight to have you on the podcast.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
Before we discuss the main topic, I wanted to ask you first how you came to be involved in history and philosophy of science, especially as I know yours was not a typical pathway.
No, it certainly wasn't a very direct route. So, I began my studies in experimental psychology. I took a brief detour into a Masters in criminology, and then I came back to psychology for my PhD. Then, after my PhD, I came to Australia and I was involved in a number of research projects with philosophers. Then I moved on to work on a project on Neuroethics. At that time, there was this rise in popularity of functional neuroimaging technologies and structural neuroimaging technologies and, of course, they've only gained in prevalence within neuroscience. And I was involved in a project on Neuroethics, which was looking at how are these new technologies changing our conception of ourselves. And at the time, my children were quite young – I had two preschoolers – so I was also reading a lot of parenting books. I noticed that a few of them were starting to draw on findings of sex differences in the brain, using these new technologies and saying – finally we can look into the men and women's brains, and boys' and girls' brains, and see the actual differences. And suddenly we can understand all the differences between us.
I was really interested in this, particularly when they started to mention parts of the brain that I'd studied quite intensely in my PhD. And I thought, no one was talking about sex differences then. That was a nice thing about working at a university. I could look up the research studies that were being cited as evidence and I began to be more and more shocked at the disconnection between what the popular books were writing and what was actually in the scientific literature.
That was the point at which I made the decision to write my second book Delusions of Gender. The intention of the book was to write about how the science was being misrepresented by the popularisers, but in the end it actually became a much more complex and controversial book in the sense that it was criticising the science itself.
And that's what brought me into the area of what we can call feminist critique of science. I actually – subsequently to writing Delusions of Gender – moved to the Melbourne Business School, as part of my strange career path. And there, suddenly I was surrounded by different kinds of people, quite different to philosophers in many ways. All wonderful people though, of course. And then I began to be more exposed to the ideas in economics, which was interested in risk taking and competition.
Those are very key concepts in economics. But the economists were becoming interested in testosterone and risk taking and competition and making claims about sex differences due to testosterone in those kinds of behaviours. At the same time, you're interacting a lot more with business communities and hearing some of the popular ideas about why don't women advance in their careers. Is it because they don't have the same drive to succeed or compete? So that was where I came to decide to write Testosterone Rex, which is looking at these arguments about evolution, testosterone, risk taking, competition, and so on. Now it was funny at the time because people would come to the printer and they'd pull out some article that'd just been published that was like, "the effects of castration on rats". And they'd be like, "I think this might be yours, Cordelia". So, when I moved to the History & Philosophy of Science Program in the Faculty of Arts here in 2017, it felt like, yes, this is a more natural home for me, though I really enjoyed my time at the business school. It was a really fantastic experience.
Oh, fabulous. And then what would you say are your key interest areas in science studies?
I'm interested in the science of sex differences, particularly in brain and behaviour.
I've always been especially interested in the kinds of characteristics and traits that are drawn on to explain why we have inequalities of power and status.
There's lots of really interesting work on sexuality, physical aggression, et cetera. But, in post-industrial societies, why do we still have so much in the way of inequality? Why do we still have so much segregation in the workplace? So that's often been my interest – interest in the effects of gendered assumptions and stereotypes on theories, methods, hypotheses, interpretations, conclusions, and so on.
I think when you work in this area, you kind of inevitably and quite quickly brush up against these debates about politicisation of science as well. People who do feminist critiques of science are often accused of blurring politics and science or politicising science. And, I think this is a really interesting and important topic. I think these accusations are often, completely misplaced and incorrect. But there is a serious issue here. In my research and in engagement and in teaching I've been thinking about how we can draw on conceptual tools from philosophy of science, thinking about appropriate and inappropriate roles for values in science, to think about where these boundaries are, when are our political values inappropriately intruding in science? I actually talk about that in the subject that you took, which is now called Sex and Gender in the Sciences [HPSC20023]. A bit less exciting title. One of the things that we do is we look at some controversial cases and we do it through the angle of articles that evoked controversy and there have been movements, either successful or otherwise, to have the articles corrected or retracted. And the students use what we've learned in the subject to think through and assess what they think the editor should have done, whether they made the right decision or should have done something else.
So, part of that is applying what can be quite abstract ideas from philosophy of science to the very real situation of having to make decisions as someone in a decision-making role in a scientific journal.
I often leave the last week of the subject clear because, so often, a case will come up during the course of the semester, and then we can analyse it almost in real time. How do they make sure that they're listening to other people's points of view, considering things from all sides, not being dogmatic and disagreeing well? Those are the sorts of sets of skills that I try and integrate into the teaching as well. We are always going to come across ideas that we disagree with, sometimes passionately. How do we deal with those disagreements in a constructive way and in a way that can lead to good decisions?
Yes, I certainly found that – having taken that class – that there's a real skill to it. That diverse thinking is absolutely essential.
Now to turn to the central question of today, which is: could you tell us about a concept in science studies that is perhaps not widely known, but you believe would be of interest to a broader audience?
So, the concept that I wanted to talk about I think is helpful for thinking through another accusation which is sometimes thrown at feminist critics, which is the idea that they're blank slaters. They just think that we all come into the world with empty heads and then we just have gender stereotypes poured into us by outside cultural forces.
Again, this is a false caricature, but I think part of the problem here is that there are more and less complicated and nuanced ways of thinking about the role of biology in brain and behaviour. I think the 'norm of reaction' when we apply it to thinking about gender or sex differences is quite a helpful concept.
So in a nutshell, the 'norm of reaction' is a very uncontroversial concept in biology, and it refers to the fact that organisms with the same genotype will develop different phenotypes – that is traits and attributes, whether it's height or cognition or number of feathers or whatever it might be. So it will develop these different phenotypes depending on the environment in which it develops. You can think of the 'norm of reaction' as kind of like a map that shows the relationship between the genotype and phenotype across different environments.
One helpful way of making it a bit more concrete is to use an example from the zoologist who actually coined the term – he was interested in water fleas. And he observed that they can develop this protective armour from predators, but they only develop that phenotype if they actually develop in an environment in which predators are present. It's gene-environment interaction, nature and nurture interact, right? So, whether you're talking about water fleas, rats, humans – it doesn't matter. No-one thinks that the organism's phenotype is completely determined by their genes. The concept of the norm of reaction and how these maps might look a bit different depending on what trait or environment you're talking about can open up some more nuanced ways of thinking about these gene-environment interactions.
Right. And then, so more specifically in relation to gender and sex differences, how would that work?
There's some nice terminology and work from the philosopher of biology, Gillian Barker, in a book called Beyond BioFatalism. She draws on this concept of the 'norm of reaction' to talk about three different kinds of genotype-environment interactions that can pull us away from this thinking that "it's just interaction, right?" Well, what kind of interaction?
She says there are three. One is what she calls 'conservative interaction'. Here they interact, but it is a way in which the internal causes tend to keep the phenotype very close to a specific developmental outcome, which is kind of evolutionary intended, if you want to think of it in that way. You need very strong or atypical external influences in order to modify that phenotype. Only at the extremes will you not get the phenotype that's intended. So, we might think about that from a sex differences point of view. This is captured in expressions like 'boys will be boys', you can try to make them more like girls, but their 'true natures' will kind of will out.
In fact, there's one researcher in the area who talked about sex differences in the brain as being a bit like being left-handed. You can kind of force somebody to use their right hand, but it's difficult for them, you know, you should just let them use their left hand.
Then the second type of interaction is probably more how we tend to think about behavioural characteristics in boys and girls and men and women. This is the idea of 'additive interaction'. Here you allow a bit more influence of environmental factors on how the phenotype develops, but they influence male genotypes and female genotypes to the same degree.
So, you say, how much nutrition there is in the environment? It's going to influence how tall boys and girls grow on average as a population, but the boys are always going to be taller than the girls and to the same degree. So you have these parallel lines between the male and female phenotypes. Often people are thinking in terms like that kind of additive interaction when they're thinking about sex differences.
But then Barker talks about something which she calls 'radical interaction', which is a nice name. This is where external environmental causes have radically different effects or effects of quite different magnitudes depending on the individual genotypes. So, that would mean that, depending on the environment, the size of the sex difference could be quite different or it might disappear or potentially it could even reverse.
One interesting example of this, which when I saw it I was actually quite surprised, was a cross-cultural survey drawing on lower-middle income countries looking at sex differences in adolescence of physical aggression. As you might expect, the overall frequency within these countries varied quite a lot. There are some countries where rates of physical aggression in this group are very high and other countries where it's much lower. But what was also interesting was that the size of the difference was not uniform. It varied from extremely large sex differences in physical aggression to being almost no sex difference at all. That's an interesting example of a kind of radical interaction at the behavioural level.
Another example – going a bit more fine grained – is the work of Daphna Joel, a neuroscientist who put forward this idea of 'gender mosaicism'. She was looking at the literature on genetic and hormonal influences on sex differences in the brain, and noting that the sex differences that you observe, and this is an animal research, can be different or opposite depending on the environmental conditions. She argues that because animals naturally live in all kinds of quite varied environments, the result of this is a mosaicism of more male typical, more female typical characteristics in the brain. This gives rise to what she calls these mosaic brains in a kind of multi-dimensional space that can't be reduced either to distinct male or female brains, which is what you'd expect from conservative interaction or a kind of male-female continuum, which is what you'd expect from additive interaction.
So, it really does support this idea of this radical interaction, the mosaic concept of brain development. Excellent.
I was interested in how this idea relates to that idea that supposedly differing levels of testosterone before you're born hard wire us into different ways of thinking.
Yeah, I think it certainly complicates it. So, traditional accounts of sex differences in the brain used the effects of hormones on the genitalia as a kind of model for thinking about sex differences in the brain. Now it has become sort of more complex and nuanced, and I don't think many researchers now would think it very useful to talk in terms of hardwiring. But there's still this kind of legacy of thinking about these effects of early testosterone on the brain.
As Rebecca Jordan-Young has pointed out. She did this incredible synthesis of this literature in her book Brain Storm.
Back in the '60s or '70s, there was already evidence that what were being thought of as permanent effects on the brain could actually be undone through quite simple experiences or manipulation. They weren't actually permanent at all.
But one thing she talks about is the scientific models moved onto a softer version, which she describes as a developmental cascade. So, this is the idea is that there's a kind of tilt in a particular direction drawing us to particular kinds of experiences. Nature recruiting nurture.
Certainly something like this could be going on. But Jordan-Young points out that sometimes that might actually be the developmental story, but the other side of it is that there might be an early push from hormones that's either enhanced or it's actually eliminated, and then development proceeds as if that early push had never actually happened. It's a bit more of an open-ended developmental pathway.
The title of Rebecca Jordan-Young's chapter I really enjoyed, in which she discusses this concept was called "Trading Essence for Potential." Could you tell us a little bit more about what she means by that?
She's challenging this standard story that I've described. Like, either these kinds of permanent effects or these developmental cascades, and pointing out that development is a lot more open-ended than this.
At each stage of development the organism, the individual, is at a particular state, then there's this interaction, and then on to the next state and so on. One way to think about it is to draw on the work of another neuroscientist who comes from a feminist perspective, Lise Eliot. She was talking about this in relation to physical aggression. So there are clear sex differences in physical aggression, and particularly at the most serious forms of physical aggression. Notwithstanding that I've mentioned that the size of that difference can be surprisingly variable.
And she talks about this idea that it does seem very plausible that there's some kind of early biological tilt, whether it's prenatal testosterone or something else, it's not completely clear, but let's say for the sake of argument it is prenatal testosterone. But, then, if you think about this in terms of this initial state it's clear that what you see is most children starting at a sort of relatively high rate of physical aggression when they're very young, then this reducing. Then there's a small number of boys and even smaller number of girls who kind of maintain those higher levels. You can think of that in terms of this early biological tilt that can make you more likely to develop along a particular kind of developmental trajectory, being someone who does not control impulses to behave in physically aggressive ways. But, for the majority, that's not happening. In that sense, most boys end up quote unquote "like girls" in being low in physical aggression. That would be an example of a different way of thinking about it.
So, rather than there's a kind of 'seed of physical aggression' in every man that has to be suppressed throughout their lifetimes, there are a few for whom that will be their developmental trajectory, but for others – there's not something that has to be continually suppressed by culture.
Yes. Why do you feel the concept of 'norms of reaction' is important more broadly?
It helps us get away from the idea that people who are criticising the standard or popular story are saying either that sex differences don't really exist, or that hormones don't really have an effect. Hopefully it's clear now that's not really what the story is.
Of course hormones are having an effect, but the question is, where does that effect fit into a whole developmental picture? And yes, sex differences exist, but what would they be in different circumstances with a different developmental history and in a different environment? Those are the different scientific questions that we can be asking.
What sends people on the kind of developmental journey towards traits that we actually want to encourage? And which ones send them on a journey towards traits we don't want to encourage? I think that's one reason why it's important.
And, it really opens our minds to thinking about what we see now, in our current particular context, is in a particular moment of time.
That's one of the points that Jordan-Young makes really nicely in her book. She goes from like the nitty gritty of rat sex right through to educational achievement in the US. We've seen reversals over the past, 40 or 50 years, where we used to have men getting the majority of degrees. And now in the US and Australia, we actually have women outnumbering men in the number of university or college degrees. The point being that, when you change the environment, you can see quite striking changes in patterns of behaviour and achievement.
And so to just be a little bit more open-minded in terms of what we might see in the future and what aspects of the environment make a difference and to be scientifically open-minded as well.
I think one thing that Jordan-Young says really nicely, is the way she describes the point of her book. It's not to answer questions, but to question answers. Which I think is a really nice way of putting it.
Yes, absolutely. So I would like to thank you, Cordelia, for joining us on our first season of the podcast. It has been fantastic to talk with you today.
Thanks for having me, and I look forward to hearing the other episodes.
Thanks.
Thank you for listening to the first season of the HPS podcast, where we discuss all things history, philosophy, and social studies of science. We want to thank the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for their support. To learn more, check out our website. There you can also find links to our blog, X (Twitter), Facebook, and Insta, as well as show notes for today's episode. I'm Indigo Keel and my co-producer and guest is Samara Greenwood. We look forward to having you back again next time.
The Georgian-Australian Investigations in Archaeology (GAIA) project is a research collaboration between the Georgian National Museum and the University of Melbourne. GAIA was established by the late Emeritus Professor Antonio Sagona and Dr Claudia Sagona. SHAPS’s Andrew Jamieson reports here on the 2023 season of the GAIA dig at Rabati, with contributions from Brian Armstrong, Giorgi Bedianashvili, Catherine Longford, Abby Robinson, Claudia Sagona and Martin Tomko.
This year we arrived in Georgia on Thursday 15 June. The next day in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, we met with Professor Dr David Lordkipanidze, Director of the Georgian National Museum and colleagues from the museum’s Centre for Archaeology. The 2023 season was eight weeks in duration: six weeks of excavation (19 June to 30 July) and two weeks of post-excavation analysis and collections management (31 July to 12 August).
Ancient Rabati is located on the northern side of the modern village of Zveli, which is situated between the larger towns of Akhaltsikhe and Aspindza in southwest Georgia. The upper Kura (Mtkvari) River basin largely defines this area, flowing towards the northeast through the deep, narrow gorge between the Javakheti Plateau and the Erusheti volcanic mountains. Zveli sits on a flat highland plain at the edge of these mountains, at an altitude of approximately 1480 metres above sea level and bordered by forest that leads up to highland pastures. From the summit of the site there are uninterrupted views east and west along the valley.
Excavations
The archaeological excavations at Rabati settlement in 2023 brought to light several significant findings that contribute to our understanding of the Caucasus region and its adjacent areas.
The most remarkable of these is the massive stone structures, dating to the Early Bronze Age (c3000–2500 BCE) specifically attributed to the Kura-Araxes culture (c2500–2000 BCE), and featuring walls that extend over 20 metres in length. This finding suggests complex and advanced architectural development during that time.
The Kura-Araxes structures were subsequently superimposed by deposits from the Early Kurgan period. Rabati stands out as a one-off site where this period is represented by two distinct phases, clearly visible in the stratigraphy. This provides a unique opportunity to study the evolution of cultural practices and architectural techniques during this period.
Unlike other settlements in the South Caucasus, where the post-Early Kura-Araxes culture is mostly associated with barrows (burial mounds), Rabati has provided evidence of the Bedeni (c2500–2000 BCE) and later Trialeti (c2000–1600 BCE) cultures in a settlement context. This attests to the diverse ways in which these Early Kurgan cultures manifested across different types of sites.
The continuous occupation of Rabati settlement over millennia very well reflects the cultural dynamics and interactions during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages in the Caucasus region.
In addition to the findings from earlier periods, the archaeological excavations also uncovered structures from the medieval period; notably, one-metre-wide walls dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries CE, which are believed to be part of the fortification system of Rabati. This suggests the site’s strategic importance and its role in defence during this era.
Providing Students with Archaeological Training Opportunities
This season University of Melbourne undergraduates Edan MacCartney, Elizabeth Tetaz, Hannah Lewis, Mark Krezner, Miette Welsh, Nadino Kivarkis, Orla Christie, Peggy Lucas, Raff Netley, Sarah Johnston, Yilin Chen and Zeejay Tan participated in the fieldwork at Rabati.
Processing Finds at the Dig House
Thanks to the great efforts of team members who assisted with the processing of finds from Rabati, substantial progress was made on all fronts. Overall, 486 bags of pottery, including last year’s finds, were sorted into ware types, weighed and counted, and targeted loci recovered from the site this season. This greatly added to the tally which has been accumulating since work began at Rabati in 2016.
Every step along the way, from the careful excavation and the processing of finds in the workroom, including inking, drawing and photography of the diagnostic pottery and other artefacts, has contributed in a significant way to the overall success of the season and the value of these various aspects should not be underestimated.
It was a delight that so many helped with the illustration of objects: from the enigmatic pottery discs fashioned from pottery fragments to the quantities of bone and lithic tools to the numerous significant ceramic examples designated RSPF (Rabati Special Pottery Finds). Others managed the flow of finds including bone, obsidian, artefacts, grinding stones, 14C samples and so on, which accumulated at the end of every day. The steady cleaning, organisation and management of these finds are vital.
Most importantly, these efforts have helped in the process of building the narrative of how people lived in Rabati through many centuries of occupation. Not least of all, we now have significant data clarifying the nature of the long Bedeni cultural sequence in a settlement context, from its fledgling days to its final stages. Similarly, we have made some inroads into defining the Trialeti culture which followed at Rabati.
Selected Key Artefacts
During the 2023 season large quantities of artefacts were found, made from pottery, obsidian and bone. These included obsidian arrow heads, flint sickle blades, bone needles and points, and wooden combs and ceramic spindle whorls. Circular discs in different sizes made from modified pottery sherds appeared in large numbers. The frequency and regularity of these items suggest a special function – possibly they were used as weights or counters. Other finds included Ottoman ceramic pipe fragments and a fragment of zoomorphic vessel made of fine orange burnished ware.
Survey Team
The survey team, consisting of Brian Armstrong and Martin Tomko from the University of Melbourne’s Infrastructure Engineering department, had a busy season at Rabati! Initial works included the rectification of the archaeological site grid, quality control checks and the emplacement of permanent concrete surveying markers for accurate layouts for the coming seasons.
In addition, various surveys were conducted of the site and surrounding valley using a drone, with several different outputs produced, including 3D models and digital elevation models, highly useful for ongoing planning and archaeological landscape analysis. The drone was also used for video documentation of the site and its surrounds, as well as for producing educational and instructional content for students to train in the use of surveying total stations.
Survey works were also conducted at the new dig house, with internal and external spaces mapped for the project by architect Jana Tomko. Initial design plans for the house have been completed by Jana, with the broader team excited about the prospects for working and staying at Rabati well into the future! The survey team loved their time in Georgia and look forward to an ongoing partnership with the project. There are incredible prospects for future work, with plans being made for laser scanning of some subsurface tunnels and continued mapping of the wider landscape. Next season can’t come soon enough!
Archaeobotanical Analysis
Archaeobotany, the analysis of plant remains from archaeological sites, can provide insights into ancient diets, agriculture, fuel use, vegetation history and past climates. As part of the archaeological investigations at Rabati, we continued our archaeobotanical research. Soil samples were collected from all trenches and were processed by flotation at the dig house in Zveli. This year we processed over 40 samples, totalling close to 1,000 litres of soil. The charred plant remains will be studied by Dr Catherine Longford at the University of Sheffield, UK, whose grant from the British Institute at Ankara funded the archaeobotanical fieldwork.
While at Rabati, Catherine and palynologist Dr Inga Martkoplishvili, from the Georgian National Museum, visited the Elkana Seed Ark farm near Akhaltsikhe, where endemic Georgian crops are preserved and cultivated for reintroduction across the country. Elkana is a Georgian bioorganic farming collective, which aims to promote traditional Georgian crops, farming methods and agrotourism. Catherine and Inga were delighted to meet the consultants at Elkana, who showed them test fields of five endemic Georgian wheats and also gave them grain samples of the rare Georgian crops to help with their research. The visit was very stimulating and could potentially lead to fruitful collaborations with Elkana to both investigate ancient agriculture and promote sustainable farming in the Caucasus using our archaeological data from Rabati.
PhD Research
Cassandra Kiely, a SHAPS Classics and Archaeology PhD candidate, is investigating Rabati’s medieval remains (i.e., architecture, ceramics, etc.) and related comparative data from the Meskhet-Javakheti region of southwest Georgia for her doctorate. Cass is the 2023 Antonio Sagona Scholarship recipient; the grant supports costs associated with overseas travel for a graduate research student focusing on Near Eastern archaeology. Joining Cass this season at Rabati were daughter, Violet, and partner, Lee.
Backfill
At the end of every season, the site is protected from the elements during our absence. Tarpaulins and sugar bags filled with earth are used to cover and reinforce the trenches.
Artefact Repository
All the artefacts from Rabati are stored in a repository in Tbilisi. At the end of this season, we were able to organise and curate the material, improving access to the collection. Post extraction, the GAIA project recognises the importance of archaeological collections management practices.
Ambassadorial Visit and Support
During the 2023 season the new Georgian Ambassador to Australia, Beka Dvali, visited Rabati (12 July). It was a great opportunity to show him the excavations and some of the recent finds. Accompanying Beka was his wife, Nino Lezhava Dvali, Vakhtang Makaridze also from the Embassy, and Mikheil Makaridze local representative.
To further and foster the Georgian-Australian cooperation, discussions are underway about a possible exhibition in Australia that will feature aspects of Georgian history and culture, including the origins of winemaking in Georgia.
Other initiatives have also been proposed, involving support for Georgian students to undertake postgraduate research at the University of Melbourne.
The GAIA project is also pleased to report enthusiastic support from the Australian Ambassador to Georgia (based in Ankara), Miles Armitage. The DFAT web page for Georgia has been updated and now mentions the GAIA project:
One of the strongest cultural links is the Georgian-Australian Investigations in Archaeology project, a collaboration between the University of Melbourne and the Georgian National Museum, running since 2008.
Cameron House
The GAIA project was very fortunate to receive a major donation to secure a base for our operations at Rabati/Zveli. Significant progress was made on the new dig house, named Cameron House.
The old asbestos roof was replaced with a new galvanized tin roof. A large, paved terrace and stone wall were constructed using locally sourced basalt. Stairs were added to the front of the property. The basement was fitted with two steel doors. Windows were repaired. Electrical wiring was replaced. Water was connected to the property. A gate was installed at the perimeter and the local council graded the road, improving vehicular access.
Architect Jana Tomkova created a master plan to help guide the development of the new dig house. The plan includes a design for an extensive new dormitory to accommodate students and project members.
Rabati 2023 team members (listed alphabetically by participant surname)
Mohamed Alsamsam, cultural attaché
Dr Brian Armstrong, Infrastructure Engineering University of Melbourne
Dr Giorgi Bedianashvili, co-director, Georgian National Museum
Dr Claudia Sagona, co-director, University of Melbourne
Amy Sandkuhl, archaeologist, trench supervisor
Richard Serle, Pitt Bequest Officer, Baillieu Library University of Melbourne
Mirian Tabukashvili, photographer
Zeejay Tan, student, University of Melbourne
Elizabeth Tetaz, student, University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Martin Tomko, Infrastructure Engineering, University of Melbourne (+ mother, Jana Tomkova, and son, Oliver Smith-Tomko)
Miette Welsh, student, University of Melbourne
Acknowledgements
GAIA would like to acknowledge with gratitude the following: Professor Dr David Lordkipanidze, Director of the Georgian National Museum, and Professor Margaret Cameron, Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at The University of Melbourne, for their encouragement and support of this collaborative project; we are very grateful for funding from the Shota Rustaveli National Scientific Foundation of Georgia, and the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), as well as contributions from the Antonio Sagona research fund and from private sources in Melbourne.
The outstanding generosity of Wallace Cameron and Dr Kim Wright is also greatly appreciated.
As we enter the next exciting phases of the project at Rabati, we look forward to forging new creative and financial partnerships and to welcoming many new students, researchers and visitors, from Georgia, Australia and beyond, to the site.
For more: University of Melbourne students @Nadino.kv, and @Y.I.L.I.N.C showed us what a day looks like doing archaeological fieldwork at Rabati on Instagram.
Feature image: University of Melbourne students excavating at Rabati, 2023. Photographer: Andrew Jamieson
Purushottama Bilomoria (Principal Fellow, Philosophy), along with David Woodruff (UC Irvine), wrote a piece in memorium of JN (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023) in the American Philosophical Association's online Memorial Minutes 2023. Mohanty had a strong connection with philosophers in SHAPS and he visited Melbourne for conferences several times. His work is also used in a number of SHAPS philosophy courses.
Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History, and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Arts) discussed the latest developments in Ukraine on ABC RN's Saturday Extra.
Antonia Finnane (Professorial Fellow, History) discussed the upcoming Taiwan elections and their ramifications for the region, on the ANU's National Security Podcast.
Grimwade Conservation Services' partnership with Ballaarat Mechanics Institute (BMI) on the conservation of the BMI's collection of rare Australian plant specimens was featured on the University's research website. This work was funded by a Victorian Living Heritage Program grant and supported by student volunteers from the Master of Cultural Materials Conservation program.
Madaline Harris-Schober (PhD in Classics & Archaeology, 2023) was featured on the Faculty of Arts website. Madaline has been awarded the international Palestine Exploration Fund-Albright Institute Fellowship by the W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (AIAR) Jerusalem.
Max Kaiser, Jewish Anti-Fascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), was reviewed in the journal Settler Colonial Studies. The reviewer found that the book offered a 'useful and innovative approach to the study of settler colonial societies ... by focusing on a non-founding migrant-settler group and how its identity is shaped by its status as a marginalised cultural minority in relation to the dominant settler colonists, and the Indigenous in Australian society'. Max Kaiser completed his PhD in History in 2019.
Iain McIntyre (PhD in History, 2018) discussed his new co-edited volume, Knocking the Top Off: A People's History of Alcohol in Australia, on 3RRR Breakfast and Junkyard 3PBS. The book is co-edited with Alex Ettling; contributors include Wendy Bacon, Maggie Brady, Rowan Cahill, Bruce Carter, Carol Corless, Daniel A. Elias, Alex Ettling, Gary Foley, Alison Holland, Terry Irving, Phoebe Kelloway, Diane Kirkby, Tanja Luckins, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Chris McConville, Iain McIntyre, Lisa Milner, David Nichols, Michael Quinlan, Nick Southall, Jeff Sparrow, Janey Stone and Graham Willett.
Andonis Piperoglou (Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas, History) contributed to the writer's desk segment of the online magazine KalliopeX.
The third volume of Scroll, a journal by Student Conservators at Melbourne (SC@M) has now been published. It includes a foreword by Bella Lipson and Belle Williams (Co-Convenors, AICCM Emerging Conservators SIG), and features 13 informative and thought-provoking submissions:
Vicki Car, ‘Welcome to the Lucky Country: Navigating the Complex Cultural Histories of Immigrant, Diasporic, and Refugee Communities’.
Rachel Davis, ‘Single Objects, Many Stories: Sharing History as Conservation’.
Sejal Goel, ‘All that Glitters is a Nightmare: Conserving Pride at the Missouri History Museum’.
Emma Dacey, ‘Herbarium of Australian Flora: Cyanotypes Inspired by the History of Photographic and Botanic Science’.
Fergus Patterson, ‘Old Problems, New Solutions: Conservation in Rural Australia’.
Emma Ward, ‘Long Live the Dragons of Big Gold Mountain: Negotiating Reflexive Care of Chinese Living Heritage in Bendigo’
Madeline Davies, ‘80 People, 7 Sites, 3 Days: Reflecting on APTCCARN 6 with the Minds Behind the Ambitious Program’.
Isabella Wessel, ‘On Exhibitionary Silences: Museums and Conserving Sexual Heritage’.
Kirralee Robinson, ‘What Does an Ecofeminist Mount Look Like? Implications of Ecofeminism in Contemporary Collection Management’.
Melanie Melnychuk, ‘Golden Fields and Azure Skies: Dedications to a Faraway Homeland’.
Anthi Soulioti, ‘Treating Artworks by Living Artists: The Precariousness of Co-creating Legacies’.
Yuhong Zhang, ‘Five Methods for Matting Works on Paper: A Brief Introduction’.
Fen Reyes, ‘Secrets of the Mountains: Reflections on Family Heritage, Personal Identity, Project Management and Mummies’.
The editors of this volume were: Joshua Loke, Emily May, Jonathan van Toor, Lauren Wolfram, Misty Wade and Holly Brown.
Academic Publications
Purushottama Bilimoria, with Andrew Irvine, 'Postcolonialism and the Question of Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion', in Nathan R B Loewen and Agnieszka Rostalska (eds), Diversifying Philosophy of Religion: Critiques, Methods and Case Studies. Expanding Philosophy of Religion Series (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023)
Postcolonialism refuses any proposal for a full-fledged philosophy of religion becoming the basis of 'global' comprehension. Instead, it names efforts to open up philosophy and culture to criticism and, more importantly, to transformation through communication with previously reduced and excluded others. Postcolonial and decolonial thinkers are engaged in a vital philosophical experiment of 'epistemic disobedience' to the norms of modern philosophy of religion, attending to and being altered by the reality of other worlds – worlds overlooked in the past, that perhaps present themselves to be recognised here and now, or that lure us as apprehensions of a future that could be – for the sake of creating a 'pluriversal' community of life marked by dialogical inclusion and appreciation. That pluriversality would include in a serious way Indigenous philosophical and spiritual traditions as well. Note that the ideal of pluriversality is not a rejection of universality as such, but a way of resituating it, away from a single, Eurocentric centre to an interrelated many.
For us (again, influenced by pragmatist thought), systematic theorising is fulfilled not in occupying a privileged and exclusive vantage-point from which to secure a vision of totality, but by repeated movement to think things through, from and with the insights of as many others as possible, because whatever – and whomever – has not been recognised by the community of inquirers before may hold possibilities for enlarging the community and enhancing its life. So, postcolonialism is not possessed by any compulsion to condemn outright the purported universality of ideals like liberty, equality, and fraternity. It commends them to be rethought and, most importantly, re-activated, to disrupt coloniality in a genuinely mutual pursuit of liberation, equity, and empathy for all. It is in this sense that postcolonialism is fundamentally philosophical, fundamentally, that is, a loving pursuit of wisdom.
Purushottama Bilimoria & Agnieszka Rostalska, 'Diversity in Philosophy', in Sarah Flavel and Chiara Robbiano (eds), Key Concepts in World Philosophies: A Toolkit for Philosophers (Bloomsbury Academic 2023)
There are three ways of looking at the strategy for “diversity” in philosophy in a higher institutional setting. The first one entails changing the colour and genderof the faculty by appointing scholars of colour and ethnically-divergent background, but – and here is the rub – expect, indeed demand, of them that they continue to be compliant with the status quo, and therefore in heavily analytic departments do just that and not stray outside of the Anglophone perimeters or be lured into divergencies..
The second approach takes as its objective to diversify in the curriculum content so that there is increasingly a recognition of the diversity of the contemporary world we live in, and this moves away from what in politics might be called 'partisan lines'. Here, the philosophical academy recognises that systems of thinking and reasoning, in short, philosophising, is not the one confined to the alleged roots of Greece and developed in Europe and the West.
The third, more critical, position diversifies in terms of both colour, ethnicity, gender as well as the subject matter (drawn from across several globally representative traditions). This is how the journal Sophia has diversified. And to consider as a possible response in the face of various threats from without that face the discipline of philosophy in these lean times in the academy when questions of application as well as well global relevance are asked for.
Nicole Davis (PhD in History, 2023/Forum), with Julie McLeod, Kevin Kevin Myers & Helen Proctor, 'Mapping connections across fields of knowledge and international networks in the history of education: Australasia, Northern Europe and the United Kingdom', in Andrés Payà Rico & José Luis Hernández Huerta (eds.), Conectando la historia de la educación Tendencias internacionales en la investigación y difusión del conocimiento (Octaedro, 2023) (Available open access)
This chapter takes up the invitation to map the development of the history of education as a disciplinary field, traced through the activities of discipline associations and journals in two contrasting regions, Australasia and Northern Europe.
Defining and putting parameters around these regions is of course a problematic endeavour, replete with longer geopolitical and imperial histories, including the positioning of some regions, such as Australasia, as somewhat peripheral or marginal to developments in northern metropolitan centres.
While a full consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of the chapter, we note them at the start in order to signal the larger contexts both framing and unsettling these mapping exercises. There is also considerable heterogeneity within these broadly defined regions.
Even so, looking at them side by side has revealed some common concerns and also some important differences in how the journals conceived of their mission in relation to issues of national histories and international outlooks.
This article explores the role of conservators and focusses on their creative agency in the preservation of cultural heritage. It argues that conservators constitute a ‘recursive public’ who collectively make the field both highly collaborative and highly modifiable. The author then sets out how conservators engage in a form of ‘ontological constructivism’ where they use their creative agencies in adversarial, anexact, and generative processes and act as ‘art-developers’ to commit to the next version of a work.
Drawing parallels with software development, the author proposes that conservation should be seen as a form of version control that creates time-stamped ‘versions of record’ that persist until the next cycle of care. To emphasise the lack of finality in any artwork the author produces a series of ‘endgames’ to illustrate the ontologically open-ended nature of cultural heritage.
The article suggests that in exploring the distributed nature of creative agency through the lens of version control, conservation can provide greater understanding into the real conditions of art and cultural production and how they continue to evolve over time. This then helps disrupt conventional notions of authorship and allows conservation to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of art and culture in our institutions.
Gijs Tol (Classics & Archaeology) with Tymon de Haas, 'The Analytical Potential of Intensive Field Survey Data. Developments in the Collection, Analysis and Interpretation of Surface Ceramics within the Pontine Region Project', in Anna Meens et al.(eds), Fields, Sherds and Scholars: Recording and Interpreting Survey Ceramics (Sidestone Press, 2023) (Available open access)
Landscape archaeology has heavily relied on pedestrian survey as a field method for more than half a century. In most field projects, archaeological ceramics constitute the lion’s share among the finds and the amount of collected sherds is overwhelming.
Survey ceramics provide the basis for understanding human activity in a landscape, and sherds serve as convenient chronological markers for the archaeological sites discovered in field projects. However, how this pottery is collected and studied determines the possibilities for using the sherds as a source material. Not only the collection practices, but also the process and practicalities of ceramic analysis are rarely made explicit, even though the archaeological interpretations of human activity in the landscape strongly rely on it.
In this text, the authors highlight the evolution of survey and sampling strategies of the Pontine Region Project and reflect on the trade-off between analytical potential and research intensity.
The latest issue of the journal Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions is a special issue, 'Steps to a Global Thought: Thinking from Elsewhere'. It features a tribute to the late Patrick Hutchings (26 October 1929–1 September 2023) (Honorary Research Associate, Philosophy, and long-time Editor-in-Chief of Sophia) by Anna Hennessey, with input from Sophia's Editor-in-Chief, Purushottama Bilimoria (Professorial Fellow, Philosophy) (Available open access).
Awards & Appointments
The Faculty of Arts conferred three Honorary Doctorates within SHAPS. The awardees were: Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick, a distinguished Soviet Union historian of more than 50 years; Mr Djambawa Marawili, a highly respected Indigenous artist and community leader; and Professor Alexandra Walsham, a professor of religious and cultural history of early modern Britain.
Purushottama Bilimoria has been elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Kate McGregor (History) has been appointed Associate Dean (International) of the Faculty of Arts.
Molly Mckew (PhD in History, 2019) has been appointed Publicity Officer for the History Council of Victoria.
And, finally, warmest congratulations to all our students who graduated this December!
SHAPS staff, fellows, students, alumni: if you have news items for the monthly SHAPS digest, email us the details.
Feature image: The Venice Overseas Intensive has been inaugurated for the first time since COVID interruptions to student travel. Andrea Rizzi (SOLL) and Catherine Kovesi (SHAPS) are pictured here atop Saint Mark's Basilica with the 2023 cohort
As the year draws to a close, we look back on the achievements of our students, awarded prizes in 2021 for their outstanding work in History and Ancient World studies.
Winner of the 2021 Gyles Turner Prize, Maya Del Rio Reddan
The Gyles Turner Prize is awarded annually for an undergraduate essay in Australian history.
Maya's prize-winning essay, written for the subject City Visions: Melbourne Intensive (HIST20087), investigated the 1950s camp scene that flourished at Val’s Coffee Lounge on 123 Swanston St, Melbourne CBD. At 22-years-old, Val Eastwood opened one of the only publicly accessible spaces in Melbourne for same-sex desiring people.
At a time of the Menzies government’s hostility towards queerness and heavy ideological investment in middle-class heteronormativity, Val’s Coffee Lounge became a crucial space for same-sex desiring people to connect with one another and safely express themselves. Not only did this give many same-sex desiring people of the period a critical lifeline, but it also nurtured Melbourne’s emerging queer cultures that can now flourish today.
Maya writes,
I feel immensely honoured to have received the Gyles Turner Award for an essay exploring the hidden queer histories of Melbourne’s CBD. I’ve lived in Melbourne most of my life and used to frequent what used to be Val’s Coffee Lounge when it was a cheap buffet restaurant called Crossways. I had no idea of the significance of that space to queer history and the impact it has had on Melbourne’s contemporary queer cultures.
History is made to matter through what gets recorded, kept and remembered. Given this, I’d like to give my deep gratitude and a special acknowledgement to the Australian Queer Archives, without which, this history would be lost.
Winner of the 2021 Brian Fitzpatrick Prize for Best Honours Thesis in Australian History, Paul Fearon
The title of Paul’s thesis was The Outer Circle Railway: Boroondara’s Aspiration for a Much-derided Nineteenth-century Railway. The ten-mile cross-radial Outer Circle Railway from the early 1870s has been described by most historians as strange, notorious and a ‘white elephant’.
The thesis corrects this largely negative characterisation, arguing that local communities consistently supported and promoted the railway. An almost two-decade delay in its realisation was ultimately fatal to its viability with the onset of the catastrophic 1890s depression.
Winning the Brian Fitzpatrick prize is a great honour, particularly as his contribution to the historiography of Australia's economic history is relevant to my current PhD research on state enterprise and statutory authorities. I am very fortunate to have the ongoing support and guidance of my GDipArts(Adv) supervisors, Professors Sean Scalmer and David Goodman. My prize will be donated to the University’s food bank and assisting the Royal Historical Society of Victoria conserve William Barak's painting Ceremony.
Winner of the 2021 Wyselaskie Scholarship for History, Thea Gardiner
The Wyselaskie Scholarship for History is awarded annually to the highest achieving first-year PhD student in History.
Thea Gardiner researches and writes on the place of women in Australian historical memory. Her PhD research presents the first biographical study of the Australian artist and activist Portia Geach (1873–1959). The study brings together the fields of art history, family history and gender history, crossing methodological boundaries and shedding new light on a significant yet relatively unknown Australian figure.
Thea writes,
I am deeply honoured to receive the Wyselaskie scholarship for History. Receiving this scholarship not only alleviates a significant financial burden but also serves as a powerful recognition of my dedication and passion for writing and thinking about the past. The recognition and support provided by the Wyselaskie scholarship reaffirm my commitment to this discipline. It bolsters my confidence in my abilities and motivates me to strive for excellence in my studies and future career. I am determined to make the most of this incredible opportunity and contribute meaningfully to the advancement of historical knowledge.
I would like to express my gratitude to the generous donors who have made this scholarship possible. Your philanthropic spirit and commitment to education are truly commendable.
Co-winner of the 2021 Lloyd Robson Memorial Award, Catherine Gay
This award supports graduate research students of Australian history who are undertaking research interstate.
Cat writes,
The Lloyd Robson Memorial Prize funded vital research for my PhD thesis. The prize allowed me to visit interstate collections in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Hobart to gather essential and rare primary sources.
As a historian of children and childhood, my source base is rich and diverse but often sparse and scattered and I have needed access to multiple collections to gather material.
The opportunity to look beyond Victorian institutions for sources and meet with a wide array of curators and collection managers has immeasurably enriched my thesis and PhD experience.
Winner of a 2021 Norman Macgeorge Scholarship,Madaline Harris-Schober
Maddi said of her award:
To receive the Norman Macgeorge Scholarship is a great honour. This scholarship will allow me to further my research in Eastern Mediterranean archaeology in Cyprus and Israel-Palestine by extending my stay at prestigious institutions and visiting important archaeological sites. This opportunity gives my PhD thesis an international advantage in a competitive field.
Winner of the 2021 Dr Rodney Lloyd Benjamin OAM History prize, James Hogg
The Dr Rodney Lloyd Benjamin OAM History Prize is an annual award for an essay, written by graduate research and coursework students in the Faculty of Arts, focusing on Australian history.
James Hogg is researching the emergence and evolution of Australian anti-fascism from the 1920s into the postwar period. Focusing on the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), his PhD research sits at the intersection of political, intellectual, and transnational history.
It is an absolute honour to receive the Dr Rodney Lloyd Benjamin OAM History Prize. This scholarship represents not only invaluable financial support but a vote of confidence in my pursuit of knowledge of the past.
I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to both the University and the generosity of the donors who’ve made this profound opportunity possible, and for reaffirming my dedication and passion to the study of Australia’s past and its vital consequences in the present.
Winner of the 2021 Margaret Kiddle Prize, Rebi Houlihan
The Margaret Kiddle Prize is awarded annually for the highest ranked honours thesis in History.
Rebi writes,
My thesis investigated the impact of the Internet and gender on the Emo subculture in the 2000s. I explored many of the different ways Emo was viewed by people within and outside the subculture – particularly the negative reactions of outsiders, and the side-lining of women within the subculture. This thesis served as a launching point for my current research which explores the wider context of the Internet in Australia.
This prize has provided me with the confidence to move forward into a new chapter of my research.
Winner of the 2021 Rosemary Merlo Prize for Second Year History, Emerson Hurley
This prize is awarded annually for the best essay submitted as part of the prescribed work for a second-year history subject.
Emerson writes,
I am pleased to be the recipient of this award. Dr Millar's class on the history of the European witch-hunts [Witch-Hunting in European Societies (HIST20080)], for which I wrote this paper, provided a brilliant introduction to many of the key skills for writing early modern history – especially that of entering into the mentalities of past societies, even when they are foreign to our own.
I wrote my paper on the decline of institutional witch-hunting and informal witch beliefs. This topic sits at the intersection of fields – the history of law, the history of popular belief, the history of emotion – in which I intend to continue working through grad school and beyond.
Winner of the 2021 Felix Raab Prize, Ines Jahudka
The Felix Raab Prize is awarded to the highest achieving student for an essay on early modern European history.
Ines writes,
I am so excited and proud to have been selected as the recipient of the Felix Raab prize for my undergrad history essay. It is very gratifying to have even be considered, and I wish to pass on my thanks to Professor Catherine Kovesi and Associate Professor Jenny Spinks, who nominated me for the award.
I had a great deal of fun writing the essay in question, and I’m so pleased that others enjoyed reading it!
My essay combined two of my favourite things: history and music. I examined how European tuning systems were exported around the world as part of the imperial process, eventually either overriding existing tunings, or creating a binary between what sounded ‘normal’ and what was ‘exotic’.
Musical instruments contributed to this process: the piano, of course, in music halls and drawing rooms, but also the humble (and very loud) accordion, which insinuated itself into much of the folk and indigenous music of almost every continent.
The technologies of the mid-nineteenth century (the development of recorded music, the gramophone, and radio) then cemented these European tonal structures and essentially recalibrated the global soundscape.
Yet, from the late twentieth century, these ‘exotic’ tonal structures have been incorporated into European musical forms and sold back to the world under the banners of either ‘world music’ or ‘global chill’.
Exoticism in musical tone is now a genre (and a highly profitable one), rather than a feature which defines the Other. It’s a really fascinating process and one which I hope to explore further at some stage.
Winner of the 2021 Dwight Prize for History, Arthur Knight
The Dwight Prize for History is awarded for the highest ranked honours student in History.
Arthur’s honours thesis examined visual artistic representations of national identity in the Philippines during the martial law period under Ferdinand E. Marcos (1972–1986). Arthur explored state-sponsored art and architectural projects, socialist revolutionary art critical of Marcos, as well as more ambivalent works at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines which challenged conventional binary depictions of art during the dictatorship.
Arthur is now continuing this research as a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. His new research investigates Philippine memory of and nostalgia for martial law in visual art.
Arthur writes,
Receiving the Dwight Prize in History is a tremendous honour. Its purpose to further the pursuit of new historical knowledge is one I'm greatly appreciative of and share as an urgent and necessary goal. This award will contribute towards my professional development as a historian, and I am especially grateful for the recognition and support of my work this prize represents.
Winner of the 2021 Marion Boothby Exhibition, Mariana Leite
Winner of the 2021 Donald Mackay British History Prize, Hector Macgillivray
Winner of the 2021 Mary O'Donoghue Prize, Max McKendry
The Mary O'Donoghue Prize is awarded annually for the best undergraduate essay in Irish Studies.
Max writes,
I was so surprised to receive the Mary O’Donoghue Prize but am extremely grateful! I will always treasure my time at Melbourne University, and I truly felt as if I put my heart and soul into my studies during the lockdowns of 2021. To have been recognised for my work during this time means a great deal.
I really enjoyed focusing on my Irish heritage in the History capstone project. Investigating and presenting the migration of my great-grandparents from Northern Ireland to Australia in the 1930s was so eye-opening, especially for understanding the factors and greater historical context that led to my family residing in Australia today.
Winner of the 2021 Dennis-Wettenhall Prize and the 2021 SHAPS Fellows Group History Essay Prize, Jessie Matheson
The Dennis-Wettenhall Prize is awarded annually for a MA or PhD thesis on Australian history.
Jessie was awarded the prize for her PhD thesis titled ‘Countryminded Conforming Femininity: A Cultural History of Rural Womanhood in Australia, 1920–1997′.
Jessie was awarded the SHAPS Fellows' Group History Essay prize for her essay '"Laugh and Grow Fat": Resistance, complicity, fat bodies, and community amongst rural women in interwar Western Australia, 1934–1939', which was published in Lilith: A Feminist History Journal in October 2020.
I wish to sincerely thank the SHAPS Fellows' Group for acknowledging my work with this award. This research was incredibly meaningful to me, and it is really gratifying to see it honoured in this way. As a final year doctoral candidate, having my research read and enjoyed is a real gift. Further, to share stories of the lives and experiences of West Australian rural women, many of whom in their own lives were overlooked and marginalised, is such a privilege. Working within such a strong and supportive community of researchers has been a daily pleasure of my work with SHAPS, and the Fellows do such important work in fostering this environment. Thank you again, I look forward to presenting my essay to the SHAPS Fellows' & Associates Group. – Jessie Matheson.
Winner of the 2021 Chris Manousopoulos Prize in Ancient History, Adam Moore
As the inaugural recipient of the Chris Manousopoulos Prize in Ancient History, I extend my deepest thanks to the generous donors, Gary and Margaret Israel, and the friends and alumni of the Faculty of Arts. The success which I enjoyed in my 2021 subjects represented the culmination of an Ancient World Studies major, made possible only by the superb academic staff at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.
With my Honours year now completed, I proceed to an MPhil at the University of Cambridge, where my research in the field of papyrology and manuscript studies shall be bolstered by the understanding of ancient history which I acquired at the University of Melbourne.
Winner of the 2021 Donald Mackay History Prize, William Mott
This prize is awarded annually to the student with the highest mark in any History subject (other than British History) in the second year of a Bachelor of Arts. William won the prize for his performance in the subject American History: 1945 to Now (HIST20071) (since re-named Protest and Politics: US History, 1945-now.
I was pleasantly surprised and humbled to have been nominated for the 2021 Donald MacKay History Prize. Studying history at the University of Melbourne has given me the opportunities and scope to really indulge my interest in the subject, and has allowed me to understand why it is valuable and important to our culture to know about our past.
To have my enthusiasm for history recognised with this award has put a spring in my step and renewed energy in my pen to furrow a way forward through my degree and beyond.
Co-winner of the 2021 Lloyd Robson Memorial Award, Beth Muldoon
This award supported Beth's research partnership with eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who were centrally involved in the 1970s Redfern Black Movement, which founded the first Aboriginal community-controlled services and 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy.
Winner of the 2021 Rosemary Merlo Prize for 1st Year, Arkie Nelson
This prize is awarded annually for the best essay in a first-year History subject.
In my history studies, I focus predominantly on social and political movements in the twentieth century and how the intersections of race, gender and class, and other marginalised identities, affect how people have experienced historical events.
After completing my undergraduate and honours degree, I hope to undertake postgraduate studies, potentially in the curation and critique of museums and galleries. I hope that through my undergraduate and postgraduate studies and my future work, I can help to bring marginalised voices in history to the fore and help us to understand how the past interacts with what we are experiencing in the present.
Winner of the inaugural Panagacos Family Prize in Ancient Languages in 2021, Leo Palmer
I am grateful and honoured to have been awarded the inaugural Panagacos Family Prize in Ancient Languages in 2021. The second year of the pandemic and lockdowns was challenging for all of us, and for myself personally a year of loss, change, and uncertainty. Any classicist will tell you that the study of ancient texts offers a comforting place of refuge and solace, and I regard this activity as an immense privilege.
My third year at the University of Melbourne was especially formative and benefitted from the guidance of many incredible teachers. Since then, I have gone on to complete the Classics Honours program, and I am currently working on a Masters thesis which investigates the origins and inner workings of Athenian democracy in the fifth century. I would love to pursue further graduate research in the future, which this generous prize will undoubtedly help to make possible.
Winner of the 2021 Alma Hansen Scholarship, 2021 Norman Macgeorge Travelling Scholarship, and the 2021 Jessie Webb Scholarship, Laura Pisanu (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology)
Laura told us a little about her research and plans for the awards:
My research project is focused on the Nuragic communities that lived at the northern Campidano and southern Montiferru regions in Sardinia (Italy) between the seventeenth and tenth century BCE. The study, which combines data from fieldwork activities and the GIS analyses, may better highlight the Nuragic control over resources, interaction with other fortified sites, and overseas connections.
I am honoured and delighted to have been awarded these scholarship.
The Alma Hansen scholarship provides a unique occasion to extend my research, analyse fieldwork data and to visit Bronze Age sites in Italy. In this way I can access overseas collections and share my research with international scholars.
The Macgeorge scholarship will allow me to spend a research period at the Italian Institute of Prehistoric and Protohistoric studies, while the Jessie Webb scholarship will give me the possibility to carry out my research at the British School of Athens and at the Knossos Research Centre in Heraklion (Greece).
This will assist me to better compare data collected during the fieldwork activities, and better understand Nuragic network within a wider Mediterranean scenario. I am extremely grateful for been chosen as recipient of these awards because they will significantly contribute to the development of my PhD research project and, moreover to increase international academic and public knowledge of Nuragic civilisation.
Winner of the 2021 Gilbert Postdoctoral Career Development Award, Susan Reidy
Susan Reidy (PhD in History, 2021) was delightfully surprised to receive this award. She is appreciative of the award every time she uses her new, large computer, on which she is developing her thesis, 'Glorious Gardens and Exuberant Grounds, the History of Urban Public Parks in Australia', into a book. Susan’s PhD is a national study of the social, cultural and landscape history of Australia’s public parks, botanic gardens and sports grounds from colonial settlement to the recent pandemic.
Like parks themselves, Susan’s topic encompasses many aspects of Australian history, from garden and landscape design, to botanical science, the environment, planning and modern urbanism, social customs, recreation and sport, commemoration, heritage, and urban nature. She hopes this big, rich and complex story about public parks, which are essential places in our cities and towns, will interest a wide audience beyond and within the academy.
Winner of a 2021 Norman Macgeorge Travelling Scholarship, Emily Simons
Emily told us what the award means to her:
Receiving the Norman Macgeorge Scholarship will be incredibly helpful in completing my fieldwork in eastern Mediterranean archaeology. The scholarship provides a great opportunity to extend my research, access international collections, and be part of the wider research community.
Winner of the 2021 Laurie R Gardiner Prize and the 2021 Bowen Prize, Keith Hung Tran
The Laurie R Gardiner Prize is awarded annually for the highest ranked essay on early modern British History (1400–1700) by an undergraduate student.
The Bowen Prize is awarded to the student who submits the best essay on a subject in the field of British History or British literature. This prize alternates each year between the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and the School of Culture and Communication.
Keith Hung Tran writes,
Reliable sources tell me that Professor Gardiner was a giant of the History department, and I'm honoured to receive an award named in his memory.
My essay explores the fascinating life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. In her private letters, written between 1716–1718, Lady Montagu attempts to debunk Western myths about the East, but I suspect she made some of them worse.
The essay fuses art history, postcolonial theory, feminist literary theory – sexy, cumbersome ideas that I had a lot of fun with during the lockdown.
I am currently enrolled in the Master of Teaching (Secondary) program at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, specialising in English and History teaching. Outside that, I work at a Jewish school in Melbourne, where I get to play some role in encouraging historical consciousness and historical empathy among young learners.
Apps, wearables and ingestibles that support digital mental health have lowered barriers to access but have profound social, ethical, and legal implications. In this extract from her new book, The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health, and republished here from Pursuit, Dr Jacinthe Flore (HPS) new digital mental health technologies and their impact.
In April 2022, The Guardianpublished an article on the "rise of mental health chatbots" in the United States.
Placing the increased usage of chatbot apps such as Woebot in the context of enduring problems in the mental health system that were worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, the article explains that young people are seeking artificial intelligence chatbots to support their mental health challenges.
Part of the reason for this is the perceived absence of judgment and the objectivity afforded by the robot. The article cites a user who comments, “It’s a robot … It’s objective. It can’t judge me.”
An empathic computer that receives and recognises feelings without judgement and a computer that feels – such is the broad ambition of digital mental health products.
Apps, Wearables and Ingestibles
In my new book, The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health, I look at three types of products that purport to support positive mental health: pocket-size infrastructures powered by artificial intelligence and other advanced algorithms (apps); body-focused devices that ‘read’ one’s vital signs (wearables); and sensors that are swallowed (ingestibles) as well as the convergence of the app, wearable, and sensor.
Apps like Wysa and Woebot apply artificial intelligence in their design to power and automate robots that can chat with users. Known as chatbots, these apps form part of a shift in app design where the therapeutic relation is enfolded and encoded into artificial intelligence-powered algorithms.
Smart wearables that are networked to smartphones, embedded sensors and advanced data processing functions, like automated decision-making and artificial intelligence, became a genre-defining technology at the intersection of the health and fitness industry with the unveiling of the first Fitbit in 2009.
Wearables have also operationalised the language of ‘wellbeing’, and companies have been able to position their devices as having a range of benefits, including improving mental health.
Ingestible sensors are much less common but are growing in popularity. Abilify MyCite is a psychotropic medication (aripiprazole) embedded with a sensor and in 2017 became the first drug with a digital ingestion tracking system approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The Abilify MyCite system includes a sensor that is ingested with the drug, a patch worn on the ribcage to which data is transmitted, a smartphone app that records data such as digestion, moods, and activity levels, and an online portal shared with the prescribing physician.
Digital Mental Health and the 'Shadow Pandemic'
The deployment of such technologies in mental health predates the COVID-19 pandemic, but the events of 2020 and 2021 have been a springboard for fast-paced, technology-driven changes in mental health.
At times labelled the ‘shadow pandemic’, the mental health impacts of the pandemic were a frequent topic of discussion in the media and in scholarly research, which, more broadly, also highlighted the need for reform in the mental health system.
It became stark to me that during the pandemic, elements of techno-solutionist imaginaries – that is, ideas that technology will offer relatively straightforward solutions to complex social, economic, and political issues – emerged to address loneliness, isolation and mental ill health.
Digital mental health is not limited to clinical practice. It is increasingly mundane, circulating in everyday life beyond the confines of the clinic, through technologies that are tethered to the self.
It's All in the Data
A key dimension holding together these digital artefacts is a focus on reading, tracking and interpreting the body’s vital signs as a way to translate mental health.
Where past discussions of mental health may have focused exclusively on the mind or the brain, or the body but not the digital, these technologies wholly rely on the body, its vital signs, its inflections and its movements, while claiming to access (and act upon) the brain and the mind through the materiality of the body.
Mental health data are typically viewed as uniquely sensitive in medicine and law. Consequently, corporations that design and manufacture apps, wearables and ingestible sensors are particularly enthusiastic to stress the (positive) clinical research into their products on their websites and sometimes on social media.
Data Doesn't Judge?
In many digital mental health products, body data hold apparent impartiality that words, narratives and stories of emotional distress cannot or do not offer with sufficient precision.
Intensely embodied sensations and responses such as shivering, sweating, increased heart rate, deep or shallow breathing and sleep (and embodied actions during sleep including snoring or tossing and turning), once rendered into data, are – often in combination – supposedly closer-to-accurate indications of mental health and ill health.
Central to how the benefits of wearables for mental health are framed is the purported ability of physiological data to resolve the ‘problem’ of subjectivity in self-reports of mental ill health.
In other words, where spoken narratives of struggle and distress are viewed as time-consuming and coloured by subjectivity, physiological data is near-incontrovertible, if not neutral.
Blurring the Boundary between Physical and Mental Health
Despite the sensitivity associated with mental health data, digital mental health continues to expand, often beyond the purview of regulatory systems. The datafication of mental health is not only far-reaching but also, its expansion is amplifying the blurring of boundaries between ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ health.
While, on the one hand, the blurring of physical and mental health can signal a more holistic and complex understanding of mental health beyond ‘symptoms’, it also signals data capaciousness; that is, the collecting, processing, and analysing of multiple body data are presented as essential and unavoidable.
We are delighted to welcome Dr Pete Millwood, who recently joined SHAPS as our newly appointed Lecturer in East Asian History. Dr Millwood is a historian of the Chinese world’s international and transnational relations, especially with the United States. He obtained his doctorate in History at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 2018, and has held fellowships at Tsinghua and Oxford Universities, the London School of Economics, and the University of Hong Kong.
Pete Millwood’s first book, Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022, explores the thawing of this crucial Cold War relationship in the early 1970s from a transnational perspective. The book emphasises how travel and cross-cultural exchange between Chinese and American citizens – for example, scientists and ping-pong teams – played a crucial role in the rapprochement between the two nations. Particularly unique to his work is how Pete Millwood explores these dynamics ‘from below’, analysing the relationship between China and the world at the level of civil society.
Pete Millwood sat down with History PhD candidate and SHAPS Graduate Research Teaching Fellow James Hogg to discuss Chinese-world relations, both past and present; what he’s excited for this year at SHAPS; and the complexities of historical research.
Could you tell us what drove you to the study of history and particularly the study of China’s relationship to the world?
I came to studying history the same way that so many of us do: by reading. I found reading history books to be endlessly rewarding, constantly revealing new facets of the origins of the world around us. I also liked how history was in a way multidisciplinary, including every aspect of society — only, in the past.
My interest in China began as an undergraduate. In the second year of my undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics I was fortunate to be taught by one of the pioneers of Chinese international history, Arne Westad. Arne was a wonderful seminar teacher. His deep learning and his continuing fascination with the subject really came through in our class discussions. He also offered to supervise my final-year undergraduate dissertation — but he added the condition that I should only begin researching Chinese history if I was prepared to start learning Chinese straight away, which I did. I really enjoyed writing that dissertation, which looked at the impact of Mao’s death on China’s relations with the United States (and which, many years later, become some of the basis for my first journal article).
I then went to China for the first time the following summer and began intensive study of Chinese. That was also at a time when China was very open to the world and when the country was prioritising its international and global connections. I wasn’t explicitly thinking about that larger context as I planned my research projects, but probably there was some connection between wanting to understand the China of a decade or so ago and my choice to research the history of the country’s relations with the outside.
How are you hoping to further your research at the University of Melbourne? What research projects are you currently working on, and what would you like to undertake in the future?
I’m currently working on a short project, a journal article, that examines how Maoists in English-speaking countries – the US, UK, Australia – reacted when China stopped being Maoist. How did leftists who had been inspired by Mao’s China react when Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues jettisoned much of Mao’s most radical policies so soon after his death in 1976?
My tentative answer is that some very quickly broke with China, even calling for the death of Deng, who they denounced as a counter revolutionary (a charge that Deng was pretty used to hearing by that point). But others did not, instead staying loyal to China and continuing to explain China’s political changes of the late 1970s and 1980s as a continuation of the policies that had first drawn them to the PRC as an example of revolutionary praxis. I think that this provides an interesting case study for thinking about transnational political loyalty: what’s more important, loyalty to ideas or to a party or state? And what role do transnational adherents to a political ideology get to play in its continuation or termination?
Another, larger project looks at a different part of the Sinophone world – Taiwan – but continues my thematic interest in transnational connections. For this second project I’m trying to think about Taiwan’s democratic transition in transnational context: how many of the key actors – both Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese – often exercised their influence on political reform from beyond Taiwan, and how the Kuomintang regime, too, attempted to counter demands for political reform not just through authoritarianism at home but also through what today we call transnational repression.
Many Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese scholars have deeply researched Taiwan’s democratisation, especially in the domestic space; what I am hoping to be able to do is connect those existing histories with new scholarship on global political change in the 1970s through 1990s by using a global source body to trace Taiwan’s democratisation movement. I just got back from Taiwan, where I found a real wealth of sources on this topic that I’m excited to be working with.
Your book deals with a crucial moment in US-China relations, that is, the period leading to ‘normalisation’ between the two countries in 1979. What lessons from that period do you think are most pertinent today?
Sadly, I think that today Sino-American relations are more like they were in the early 1970s than they have been for a very long time. My book’s narrative begins in a period of mutual isolation between China and the United States: for two decades after the founding of Communist China in 1949, only a very small number of citizens from each side had travelled to the other country, numbering in the hundreds or fewer – miniscule numbers by today’s standards. We’re not there yet, but the years of strict Covid border controls were the closest either side has come to that level of isolation since that period; as recently as a few months ago, the US Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, said that by the State Department’s count there were only 350 American students studying in China, down from more than 11,000 before the pandemic. So, the first lesson of the 1970s is a positive one: that we can reverse the trend we’ve seen since 2020 and resume the active societal connections with China that existed before Covid.
The breakthroughs in Sino-American relations took a lot of work by people on both sides, so it won’t necessarily be easy to re-build societal contacts – but it is possible. Indeed, in the past, say, six months I think we’ve started to see this happen: many in China, in the US, and in Australia, too, have argued that, even if we are in a new era of competition, there is still value in maintaining ties between China and the Western world. A lot divides democratic societies and China, but that was true in the 1970s, too, when Mao’s regime was highly authoritarian. Nonetheless, I think contacts then, as they are now, are a net benefit to both sides.
The other lesson from the 1970s, though, is perhaps less encouraging: my book shows that more transnational contacts between China and the United States did not automatically generate more accurate understanding, or even necessarily goodwill. Most Chinese and Americans that visited the other country or met visitors from the other country were glad to have done so, but direct experience of the other country sometimes also increased confidence in mis-readings of the other society, or led to political squabbles. I really believe that there is value in China reconnecting with the outside world after Covid and in us re-establishing many of the links that frayed during those years. But doing so won’t automatically arrest some of the mutual suspicion and hostility that has grown in the past years, or by itself guarantee that we can avoid conflict.
One thing I think is particularly interesting about your work is how it recaptures a sense of agency and contingency in the historical process, by emphasising how smaller, civil actors shaped monumental diplomatic outcomes. Could you touch on some ways that actors on the ground, or in civil society more broadly, influenced the relationship between what are now the world’s two greatest superpowers?
Thanks, I’m glad to hear you say that as that’s really at the heart of my approach.
One of the episodes in my book that is probably familiar to many is the first leg of ping-pong diplomacy, when the US table tennis team travelled to China in April 1971 in a major breakthrough in relations, before Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or any other official had visited China. But what I found when I began my research on US-China relations in the 1970s more broadly was that this was by no means the final time that civil society actors had a significant impact on the relationship. It wasn’t even the last time that ping-pong players did: there was also a second ping-pong visit in the other direction a year later, the first official delegation from the People’s Republic of China to the US since the former’s founding in 1949.
But there were also dozens of other important visits. The Philadelphia Orchestra visited China in 1973, in a visit that many of the orchestra, including its director Eugene Ormandy, called the most important and exciting visit of their whole lives. That visit helped revive interest in classical Western music in China in the twilight of the Cultural Revolution and was also the basis for American musicians becoming interested in Chinese musical traditions.
Scientists were another important set of visitors, whether left-leaning American scientists interested in Chinese revolutionary science such as new applications for acupuncture – which became a bit of a craze in 1970s America – or Chinese scientists who had earlier studied in the US and embraced the chance to rebuild intellectual links with scientists they knew in that country.
Together, these many different types of visits had a cumulative effect of rebuilding deep, diverse connections between the two societies, and also helped encourage the further development of the diplomatic relationship between the two governments. For example, the book tries to show how Chinese interest in access to US science was a key motivation for the final agreement for mutual diplomatic recognition that was reached in 1978 – not coincidentally, just as China started sending large numbers of scholars and students for long-term stays in the United States.
For these initial travellers, expectations and pre-conceptions of their destinations were of course moulded by the regimes of their respective countries – so that in a recent talk I think you mentioned the Chinese government was trepidatious about sending their ping-pong team to a previously hostile and certainly anti-communist country. To what extent did the experience of travel challenge these preconceptions, both for the actors themselves and the diplomats they represented?
The experience of travel certainly did a lot to change preconceived ideas of the other country. Right up until the first American delegations were sent to China in 1971 and vice versa in 1972 each government had demonised the other and this earlier message still lingered for early visitors. So, as you say, China’s table tennis team was very concerned about the reaction they’d get when they went to the US in April 1972, and whether they’d be safe. And they did face protests: anti-communists and supporters of the rival, Republic of China government on Taiwan organised hundreds of people to protest these representatives of Mao’s China, and to encourage them to defect.
But what I think struck the Chinese visitors more was how many more Americans – tens of thousands – warmly welcomed them, asking them about Communist China, in a respectful and open way. Likewise, many of the first American visitors to China were bowled over by the friendliness of their hosts, the curiosity of ordinary Chinese towards foreign visitors, and the safety they enjoyed wherever they went in China.
Both sets of visitors were also surprised at how successful and dynamic they found the other society. Chinese visitors had been told of a predatory, ineffective capitalist American society, where the majority suffered so a few could get rich. Internal Chinese documents include candid reflections that you couldn’t build cities like New York or have such high levels of car ownership if only a small minority were rich, even if they also noted homeless beggars and crime.
Americans, too, often concluded that Communist China was a far more effective society than they had been led to believe before the 1970s. Many even offered adulatory praise for Mao’s China that went far beyond the reality. This was in part because their visits were closely controlled by their hosts. But it was also, I think, because experiencing the reality of China jarred with two decades of propaganda in which they’d been told that Chinese Communism was on the brink of collapse.
Great! And would you like to run us through the subjects you were hoping to teach next year, and perhaps what you’d like to bring to them?
Next year I’ll continue to teach China in Global History since 1945(HIST20086) and Cold War Cultures in Asia(HIST30066).
I’ve just finished my first semester of teaching China in Global History and I really enjoyed discussing the content with my students. The subject examines many of the best-known events of China’s post-war history and does so in a way that emphasises the connections between domestic history and relations with the outside world. So, we look at, say, the Cultural Revolution, but focus more on how that political movement influenced China’s foreign relations in the 1960s and 1970s, and how Mao’s ideas were an inspiration to many people around the world, from Cambodian Communists to Black Panthers in California.
I’m excited to teach Cold War Cultures in Asia in semester 1. The subject will take a broad definition of 'culture'. In some weeks, we’ll examine cultural production, from books through films to dance. But the subject will also consider cultures of protest, of consumption, and military cultures. In all cases, the subject will take a comparative perspective, trying to unpick the similarities and differences in how the global Cold War was experienced in diverse societies across Asia. I’m already enjoying preparing the subject!
More information about Pete Millwood's research and teaching can be found here.
James Hogg is a PhD candidate and commencing Graduate Research Teaching Fellow. His research focuses on Australian anti-fascism in the 20th Century, with an emphasis on the role of migrants and the Communist Party of Australia. In 2024, he will be a member of the teaching teams for The French Revolution (HIST20068) and Dictators and Democrats: The Modern World (HIST10015).
Feature image: Pete Millwood, 2023. Photographer: Nicole Davis.
That was the point at which I made the decision to write my second book 
Maya's prize-winning essay, written for the subject City Visions: Melbourne Intensive (
The thesis corrects this largely negative characterisation, arguing that local communities consistently supported and promoted the railway. An almost two-decade delay in its realisation was ultimately fatal to its viability with the onset of the catastrophic 1890s depression.
Thea Gardiner researches and writes on the place of women in Australian historical memory. Her PhD research presents the first biographical study of the Australian artist and activist Portia Geach (1873–1959). The study brings together the fields of art history, family history and gender history, crossing methodological boundaries and shedding new light on a significant yet relatively unknown Australian figure.
The Lloyd Robson Memorial Prize funded vital research for my PhD thesis. The prize allowed me to visit interstate collections in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Hobart to gather essential and rare primary sources. 
Maddi said of her award:
James Hogg is researching the emergence and evolution of Australian anti-fascism from the 1920s into the postwar period. Focusing on the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), his PhD research sits at the intersection of political, intellectual, and transnational history.
My thesis investigated the impact of the Internet and gender on the Emo subculture in the 2000s. I explored many of the different ways Emo was viewed by people within and outside the subculture – particularly the negative reactions of outsiders, and the side-lining of women within the subculture. This thesis served as a launching point for my current research which explores the wider context of the Internet in Australia.
Emerson writes,
Ines writes,
Arthur’s honours thesis examined visual artistic representations of national identity in the Philippines during the martial law period under Ferdinand E. Marcos (1972–1986). Arthur explored state-sponsored art and architectural projects, socialist revolutionary art critical of Marcos, as well as more ambivalent works at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines which challenged conventional binary depictions of art during the dictatorship.
I was so surprised to receive the Mary O’Donoghue Prize but am extremely grateful! I will always treasure my time at Melbourne University, and I truly felt as if I put my heart and soul into my studies during the lockdowns of 2021. To have been recognised for my work during this time means a great deal.
Jessie was awarded the prize for her PhD thesis titled ‘Countryminded Conforming Femininity: A Cultural History of Rural Womanhood in Australia, 1920–1997′.
As the inaugural recipient of the Chris Manousopoulos Prize in Ancient History, I extend my deepest thanks to the generous donors, Gary and Margaret Israel, and the friends and alumni of the Faculty of Arts. The success which I enjoyed in my 2021 subjects represented the culmination of an Ancient World Studies major, made possible only by the superb academic staff at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.
I was pleasantly surprised and humbled to have been nominated for the 2021 Donald MacKay History Prize. Studying history at the University of Melbourne has given me the opportunities and scope to really indulge my interest in the subject, and has allowed me to understand why it is valuable and important to our culture to know about our past. 
After completing my undergraduate and honours degree, I hope to undertake postgraduate studies, potentially in the curation and critique of museums and galleries. I hope that through my undergraduate and postgraduate studies and my future work, I can help to bring marginalised voices in history to the fore and help us to understand how the past interacts with what we are experiencing in the present.
I am grateful and honoured to have been awarded the inaugural Panagacos Family Prize in Ancient Languages in 2021. The second year of the pandemic and lockdowns was challenging for all of us, and for myself personally a year of loss, change, and uncertainty. Any classicist will tell you that the study of ancient texts offers a comforting place of refuge and solace, and I regard this activity as an immense privilege.
I am honoured and delighted to have been awarded these scholarship. 
Emily told us what the award means to her:
Keith Hung Tran writes,
One of the episodes in my book that is probably familiar to many is the first leg of ping-pong diplomacy, when the US table tennis team travelled to China in April 1971 in a major breakthrough in relations, before Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or any other official had visited China. But what I found when I began my research on US-China relations in the 1970s more broadly was that this was by no means the final time that civil society actors had a significant impact on the relationship. It wasn’t even the last time that ping-pong players did: there was also a second ping-pong visit in the other direction a year later, the first official delegation from the People’s Republic of China to the US since the former’s founding in 1949.