Indigenous Peoples, Hydro Schemes and Mining in the Brazilian Amazon

Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series
School of Humanities and Social Science
The University of Newcastle
2010, Semester 1

Thursday,  27th May
3.00pm – 4.30pm

Held in the
Cultural Collections
Level 2, Auchmuty Library, Callaghan Campus

Indigenous Peoples, Hydro Schemes and Mining in the Brazilian Amazon: The Waimiri-Atroari, Pitinga Mine, Balbina and other hydroelectric dams.

Dr Stephen G. Baines

Professor Stephen G. Baines

(Associate Professor, Dept of Anthropology, Universidade de Brasília; researcher at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq);
Visiting Fellow, School of Archaeology & Anthropology, ANU, with post-doctorate research grant from the CAPES, Brazilian Ministry of Education.

Presentation

The seminar will discuss the impact of hydroelectric schemes and mining on Indigenous groups in Brazil.

After Gaza: Ethnic cleansing in the name of the Holocaust?

Roger Markwick

Paper for presentation to
Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series
University of Newcastle
13th May 2010

Held in the Cultural Collections (near the Information Common)
Level 2, Auchmuty Library, Callaghan Campus
3pm – 4.30pm

Entry is Free – All Welcome

There is a cruel historical irony in Israel’s ferocious 2008-09 attack on the besieged Palestinians in Gaza: the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis in 1943 was one of the most tragic episodes in the genocide perpetrated against European Jewry in the Second World War. Yet the Jewish state invokes the Holocaust, the most morally powerful trope of modern times, to legitimate its formation and thereby its violent dispossession of the Palestinian people, which the revisionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has deemed ‘ethnic cleansing’. Characterising Israel as a European colonial settler state, this paper traces Israel’s invocation of the Holocaust as state legitimation and considers the ways in which this impedes criticism of Israel’s relentless dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of historical Palestine.

New midwifery and professionalization: prospects for change in Australia.

Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series

Thursday, 29th, April, Cultural Collections Reading Room, Auchmuty Library, 3:00-4:30pm

New midwifery and professionalization: prospects for change in Australia.

Dr Ann Taylor, BA (Hons.) PhD Sociology
School of Humanities and Social Science.

Dr Ann Taylor

The issue of the professional identity and power of midwifery is of interest, not only because it is topical in Australia at a time of health reform under the Rudd Labour government, but because it addresses a central concern of the sociology of health and illness, which is the extent to which the dominance of the medical profession is being diminished by challenges from governmental regulation, the professionalising projects of other health occupations or by consumer demand for choice. Apart from its intrinsic interest and importance to childbearing women and to those who work in it, midwifery provides a series of interesting case studies for examining changes in professional power both because of its relationship to medicine and because it is highly gendered. The variety of legislative arrangements and levels of professional status of midwives across national boundaries provides a series of ‘natural experiments’ for the discussion of issues of professional power and social change. This presentation will outline the extent to which midwifery has been dominated, limited or excluded by legislation which grants monopoly power to medicine in various countries. It will examine changes in childbirth practice which are bringing about a discourse of ‘new midwifery’ and the tensions which arise in response to this.  It will then focus on developments in Australia based on an analysis of the submissions to the 2009 Commonwealth Review of Maternity Services. The theoretical basis of the sociological literature on professions is broadly Weberian in that it defines professions as ‘monopolistic bodies seeking to regulate market conditions in their favour in face of competition from outsiders’(Saks, 1994). While this approach has been productive, it has been suggested that there is scope to examine the ways in which the identity and practice of midwifery is constructed in discourse. A debate about whether ‘profession’ is the relevant model for the highly gendered challenge from midwifery has been more recently altered to a discussion of the extent to which ‘profession’ itself is a multiple and shifting concept.

Disputed fields: Undertaking Collaborative Research in an Industrial Relations Environment

Sociology & Anthropology Seminar

 School of Humanities & Social Science,
University of Newcastle

presents

with Debbie Long,

 (Sociology and Anthropology, University of Newcastle)

This paper reflects on the challenges presented in undertaking collaborative research involving stakeholders from a health service organisation, a management consultancy firm, a commercial service delivery company, a union, clinical health staff and clinical management staff. Five social science researchers were involved in the project team, which numbered nearly 20 in total. The initial context was fraught with a history of antagonism and dispute. The report from the project was praised by the Industrial Relations Commission as being a model for collaborative dispute resolution. This paper discusses strategies adopted in attempting to move from dispute to collaboration. It argues that an ethnographic approach is particularly well suited to dispute resolution.

To be held in the Cultural Collections (near the Information Common)
Level 2, Auchmuty Library, Callaghan Campus

Thursday 15 April 2010, 3pm – 4.30pm

Staff, students and interested friends welcome.

Please contact Barry.Morris@newcastle.edu.au with any queries.

 

The Cultural Consecration of Australian Wines

Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series

School of Humanities and Social Science,
The University of Newcastle

2010, Semester 1

Held in the Cultural Collections (near the Information Common)
Level 2, Auchmuty Library, Callaghan Campus

Thursday, 25 March 2010
3pm – 4.30pm followed by afternoon tea

Professor Michael P. Allen

Michael P. Allen

Washington State University

Research Interests:

Sociology of Culture, Political Sociology, Organizational Sociology.

Selected Publications:

• Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of American Films. Social Forces (2004). With Anne E. Lincoln.
• Double Jeopardy in Hollywood: Gender and Age Effects on the Careers of Film Actors. Sociological Forum (2004). With Anne E. Lincoln.
• The Institutionalization of Fame: Achievement, Recognition, and Consecration in Baseball. American Sociological Review (2006). With Nicholas A. Parsons

Judging Taste and Creating Value: The Cultural Consecration of Australian Wines

Michael Allen
John Germov

Abstract:

This research examines the procedural and substantive legitimacy of the Australian capital city wine show system as a cultural consecration project. The analysis is based on the ratings of 5,654 wines by judges at four capital city wine shows in 2007. Large wineries are more likely to enter wines into these competitions than small wineries. In general, there is a moderate degree of agreement between judges in terms of the medals awarded to wines entered into multiple competitions. Disagreement among the judges was most pronounced in the distinctions between different medal classes and much less pronounced between wines that received medals and those that did not. The analysis confirms that wines that won medals, especially gold and silver, commanded higher release prices than other wines. The results generally confirm the legitimacy of the capital city wine show system as a means of assigning symbolic as well as economic value to premium wines. Future research will examine the relationship of this domestic consecration project to foreign consecration projects within the global wine industry.

Sociology and Anthropology Seminar Series

School of Humanities and Social Science,
The University of Newcastle

2010, Semester 1

Held in the Cultural Collections (near the Information Common)
Level 2, Auchmuty Library, Callaghan Campus
3pm – 4.30pm followed by afternoon tea

25th March

Michael J. Allen, Sociology, Washington State University

Judging Taste and Creating Value: The Cultural Consecration of Australian Wines

15th April

Debbie Long, Sociology and Anthropology, University of Newcastle

Disputed Fields: Undertaking Collaborative Research in an Industrial Relations Environment.

29th April

Ann Taylor, Sociology and Anthropology, University of Newcastle

New midwifery in Australia: what kind of professionalization is likely to emerge from a process of change?

13th May

Roger Markwick, History, University of Newcastle

After Gaza: Ethnic Cleansing in the name of the Holocaust?

27th May 

Steven Baines, Anthropology, University of Brazil

Indigenous Peoples, Hydro Schemes and Mining in the Brazilian Amazon: The Waimiri-Atroari, Pitinga Mine, Balbina and other hydroelectric dams