IAFOR > The International Conference on Japan & Japan Studies (IICJ) > IICJ2017

IICJ2017

The-International-Conference-on-Japan-&-Japan-Studies-2017

"Global Realities: Precarious Survival and Belonging"

June 1–4, 2017 | Art Center Kobe, Kobe, Japan

The theme for The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2014 in Osaka was “Borderlands of becoming, belonging and sharing”. In his presentation, Conference Co-Chair Professor Baden Offord wrote “Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of the borderland has become a critical conceptual rubric used by cultural researchers as a way of understanding, explaining and articulating the in-determined, vague, ambiguous nature of everyday life and the cultural politics of border-knowledge, border crossings, transgression, living in-between and multiple belongings. Borderlands is also about a social space where people of diverse backgrounds and identities meet and share a space in which the politics of co-presence and co-existence are experienced and enacted in mundane ways.”

Now we revisit that territory under the title “Global Realities: Precarious Survival and Belonging”. While retaining the ideas expressed by Professor Offord in 2014, this conference will turn its focus on to the precariousness of life across the world, life being understood in all its amplitude. Since 2014 we have witnessed the horror of the refugee crisis in Europe and how borders which should have been crossed have been blocked off by barbed wire fences. The whole context of borders, belonging and survival has shifted resulting in an increase in racism, radical nationalisms, terrorism, infringements of human rights, and rising poverty levels, to mention only a few of the globalised problems confronting our world. The result of such precarity, even of the planet itself, has led to a generalised sense of communal and individual vulnerability.

Raimond Gaita recently noted, “It is striking how often people now speak of ‘a common humanity’ in ethically inflected registers, or ethically resonant tones that express a fellowship of all the peoples of the earth, or sometimes the hope for such a fellowship.” Hopefully, this conference will discuss the ways and means by which a “common humanity” may be aspired to by future generations.

Abstracts (2017)
Download IICJ2017 Conference Programme

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Programme

  • Precarious Futures, Precarious Pasts: Migritude and Planetarity
    Precarious Futures, Precarious Pasts: Migritude and Planetarity
    Keynote Presentation: Professor Gaurav Desai
  • The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
    The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
    Featured Panel Presentation: Professor Donald E. Hall, Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn & Professor Yasue Arimitsu
  • Buddhist Terrorism?
    Buddhist Terrorism?
    Featured Presentation: Dr Brian Victoria
  • Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Studies in Today’s University Systems
    Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Studies in Today’s University Systems
    Featured Presentation: Professor Emeritus Yasue Arimitsu
  • “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
    “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
    Spotlight Presentation: Professor Sue Ballyn
  • Not Just Your Average Cartoon – “Mainzelmännchen” As Agents of Conservative TV Propaganda
    Not Just Your Average Cartoon – “Mainzelmännchen” As Agents of Conservative TV Propaganda
    Spotlight Presentation: Dr Holger Briel
  • Cross-Cultural Engagement and Media Integration in Japan and East Asia
    Cross-Cultural Engagement and Media Integration in Japan and East Asia
    Spotlight Presentation: Dr Seiko Yasumoto

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Speakers

  • Professor Gaurav Desai
    Professor Gaurav Desai
    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
  • Dr Brian Victoria
    Dr Brian Victoria
    Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, UK
  • Professor Emeritus Yasue Arimitsu
    Professor Emeritus Yasue Arimitsu
    Doshisha University, Japan
  • Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Barcelona University, Spain
  • Professor Donald E. Hall
    Professor Donald E. Hall
    Lehigh University, USA
  • Dr Seiko Yasumoto
    Dr Seiko Yasumoto
  • Professor Holger Briel
    Professor Holger Briel
    Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

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Organising Committee

The Organising Committee of The International Conference on Japan & Japan Studies (IICJ) is composed of distinguished academics who are experts in their fields. Organising Committee members may also be members of IAFOR's International Academic Advisory Board. The Organising Committee is responsible for nominating and vetting Keynote and Featured Speakers; developing the conference programme, including special workshops, panels, targeted sessions, and so forth; event outreach and promotion; recommending and attracting future Organising Committee members; working with IAFOR to select PhD students and early career academics for IAFOR-funded grants and scholarships; and overseeing the reviewing of abstracts submitted to the conference.

  • Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Barcelona University, Spain
  • Professor Donald E. Hall
    Professor Donald E. Hall
    Lehigh University, USA
  • Dr Seiko Yasumoto
    Dr Seiko Yasumoto
  • Professor Baden Offord
    Professor Baden Offord
    Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
  • Professor Holger Briel
    Professor Holger Briel
    Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China
  • Dr Joseph Haldane
    Dr Joseph Haldane
    The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan
  • Dr Richard Donovan
    Dr Richard Donovan
    Kansai University, Japan

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Review Committee

  • Dr Cecilia Fe Sta Maria-Abalos, University of the Philippines Baguio, The Philippines
  • Dr Eun Joo Kim, New York University-Shanghai, China
  • Dr Lourdes Nieva, Central Bicol State University of Agriculture-Sipocot, The Philippines
  • Dr Padmaja Kamat, Pes Shri Ravi Sitaram Naik College of Arts & Science, India
  • Dr Shulin Chiang, Chinese Culture University, Taiwan
  • Professor Teresa Chen, California State University-Long Beach, United States
  • Dr Elena Kolesova, Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand
  • Dr Felix Tan, Singapore Institute of Management, Global Education, Singapore
  • Dr Ma. Junithesmer Rosales, Polytechnic University of The Philippines, The Philippines

IAFOR's peer review process, which involves both reciprocal review and the use of Review Committees, is overseen by conference Organising Committee members under the guidance of the Academic Governing Board. Review Committee members are established academics who hold PhDs or other terminal degrees in their fields and who have previous peer review experience.

If you would like to apply to serve on the IICJ Review Committee, please visit our application page.

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Precarious Futures, Precarious Pasts: Migritude and Planetarity
Keynote Presentation: Professor Gaurav Desai

In this talk I will focus on the figure of the migrant in recent Anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. I am interested in the continuities and discontinuities in the experience of migration from the nineteenth century to the present, particularly, though not exclusively, for vulnerable populations. I then attempt to connect that experience to challenges posed to us by environmental changes and vulnerabilities in the same time frame. The aim is to think through the figure of the migrant not just as someone who moves from one sociopolitical context – village, town, city, nation – to another, but to think through migrant experiences as they relate to larger planetary concerns.

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Featured Panel Presentation: Professor Donald E. Hall, Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn & Professor Yasue Arimitsu

Featured Panel Presentation: Professor Donald E. Hall, Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn & Professor Yasue Arimitsu

Given the rise of anti-globalisation, nationalisms and cultural isolationism, 2017 and beyond will prove particularly challenging times for those of us working in cultural studies. Our four panellists will each speak for five minutes about emerging geo-political constraints on their work, as well as their respective national and institutional contexts. This will be followed by a general discussion with the audience about collective experiences and strategies for individual and collective response to the challenges that we face.

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

Buddhist Terrorism?
Featured Presentation: Dr Brian Victoria

Buddhism has long enjoyed a reputation in the West as a religion of peace. It is only in recent years that the long history of those calling themselves Buddhists who engaged in warfare has been introduced to Western readers (see, for example, Buddhist Warfare). In an era in which terrorist acts carried out by those who identify themselves as Muslims attract our attention, it is noteworthy that Buddhists, too, are not immune to this form of religious fanaticism. The historical truth is that in 1930s Japan at least three Buddhist-related acts of terrorism took place. While introducing these terrorist acts, this presentation focuses on the Buddhist doctrine and practice undergirding the so-called “Blood Oath Corps Incident” (J. Ketsumeidan Jiken) of early 1932.

Image: “Blood Oath Corps Incident” defendants awaiting trial

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Studies in Today’s University Systems
Featured Presentation: Professor Emeritus Yasue Arimitsu

In the last two decades, Japanese universities have been struggling to attract young students taking entrance examinations for universities, because 18-year-old students are drastically decreasing in number due to Japan’s falling birthrate. It is said that the number of 18-year-old students will be the lowest ever in 2018, and a great number of private universities will be forced to close. In order to survive, universities in Japan are now reorganising their academic systems, and sometimes replace unpopular departments with new and perhaps more attractive departments. The current situation for universities goes along with the globalising movement in the academic world, and some traditional disciplines such as English, French, German or Russian literature (so-called national literatures) are replaced by global/regional studies or communication studies. In these new departments, cultural studies are widely accepted since they are recognised as interdisciplinary studies. However, interdisciplinary studies are still difficult for some academics to accept, especially those with a strong base in traditional disciplinary studies. I would like to examine questions about cultural studies in this globalising age: how to combine disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies.

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

“(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Spotlight Presentation: Professor Sue Ballyn

Sailing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was indeed dangerous. Without the sophisticated equipment we have today and out of reach of rescue services, those sailing the high seas did well to commend their bodies and souls to God. The long trip from England to Australia was fraught with difficulties, from storms, doldrums and leaky hulls to serious illnesses on board. It was the surgeons on the convict transports who were often the unsung heroes of hazardous passages to the Antipodes. While their role has not been ignored, it is only through reading their journals that complete maritime narratives emerge. In this paper I want to discuss the work of surgeons on female transports, the importance of their power at sea and on land, their care of their charges and how medical improvisation very often saved a patient’s life. I have chosen female transports rather than male because of the added difficulties the women brought to the weeks at sea: pregnancy among others. The subject is very complex but I hope to be able to offer a general overview of the outstanding role played by these men in the project of expanding the British Empire into the Antipodes.

Image | The ship ‘Mountstuart Elphinstone’ offshore by William Adolphus Knell (1840)

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

Not Just Your Average Cartoon – “Mainzelmännchen” As Agents of Conservative TV Propaganda
Spotlight Presentation: Dr Holger Briel

While the West German TV broadcasting system had to a large part been modelled on Hugh Green's understanding of the BBC (who had been charged with creating a non-centralised German broadcasting system after WWII), it did, unlike the BBC, include moderate yet tightly controlled advertising time. Initially, advertising was only allowed between 17:00 and 20:00, excluding Sundays, and only in blocks of 5–10 minutes each. In order to break up the succession of adverts, stations used animations. First and foremost, these clips were meant to provide a light-hearted caesura or insert (Werbetrenner) between individual adverts. But ultimately, their remit went much further than that; on the one hand, these animations were intended to draw children into the advertising world and keep viewers on the station; on the other, they also provided a glimpse of social issues shaping the evolution of German society. The most famous ones were the “Mainzelmännchen”, a collection of funny gnomes created for the ZDF broadcasting station. In my presentation, I will analyse a number of these clips according to their relevance as markers of social changes through the last 50 years or so. It will become clear that they are far from lighthearted entertainment but have a neo-conservative agenda regarding nationalism, gender, education, consumption and social change. Furthermore, I will also discuss changes made to them due to digitalisation and how they and their creators’ agenda have become re-entrenched in new media in a changing and unequal world.

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

Cross-Cultural Engagement and Media Integration in Japan and East Asia
Spotlight Presentation: Dr Seiko Yasumoto

In East Asia a progressive multilateral process of cultural re-engagement and media integration is occurring. Japan has achieved the right and acceptance to trade media content in East Asia and beyond, particularly in the domain of popular culture for anime, manga and television drama (TV drama). Japan’s media trade in Korea, and particularly in mainland China, has in the past been inhibited by respective government controls and regulations. These controls have progressively been relaxed and benefits have multilaterally accrued to creators of content. An outstanding example of this is South Korea’s Korean Wave, which is directly attributable to the progressive dismantling of media controls in South Korea preventing Japanese content entering South Korea. This study examines the macro Japanese broadcasting content overseas exports from 2001 to 2014. Japanese content has been regionalised and disseminated beyond Japan, for example, with content adaptation, localised remaking and co-productions. This study further analyses the remaking of Japanese media products in South Korea and Taiwan, exploring three examples including the ground-breaking Japanese and Korean co-production of the TV drama Friends by Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Cooperation (MBC Korea), which was broadcast simultaneously in South Korea and Japan, the remake of the Japanese manga Hana Yori Dango and remade into the TV drama format Meteor Garden in Taiwan with subsequent extensive regional adaptation, remaking and format changes, and the remake of the manga Jin into the TV dramas Jin in Japan and Dr. Jin in Korea. The study confirms the value attributable to the relaxation of controls inhibiting or preventing the flow of media content and in turn contributing to cultural re-engagement.

Read presenter biographies on the Speakers page.

Professor Gaurav Desai
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Biography

Gaurav Desai is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-fashioning and the Colonial Library (Duke University Press, 2001) and editor of Teaching the African Novel (MLA, 2009), he has guest edited a volume of essays on “Culture and the Law” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.4, 2001), on “Actually Existing Colonialisms” (Journal of Contemporary Thought, 24, 2006), on “Asian African Literatures” (Research in African Literatures, 42.3, 2011), and co-edited a volume of essays on “Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Idea of Social Justice” (MELUS, 28.1, Spring 2003). Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers University Press, 2005) which he co-edited with Supriya Nair has become a standard reference and classroom text since its publication. Among Desai’s other publications are articles in edited collections and journals such as PMLA, Genders, Representations, Boundary2, Interventions, Research in African Literatures, African Studies Review and Cultural Critique. Recipient of a residential fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 2001, Desai has also been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation award for a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, a visiting fellowship at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for his research. In 2004, Desai was made a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. His latest book on narratives of Indian Ocean connections between Africa and India, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), received the 2014 Rene Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and was a finalist for the Bethwell Ogot Prize from the African Studies Association as well as the Asia-Africa Book Prize awarded by the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden.

Keynote Presentation: Precarious Futures, Precarious Pasts: Migritude and Planetarity

Dr Brian Victoria
Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, UK

Biography

Brian Victoria is a native of Omaha, Nebraska and a 1961 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. He holds a MA in Buddhist Studies from Sōtō Zen sect-affiliated Komazawa University in Tokyo, and a PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University.

In addition to a second, enlarged edition of Zen At War (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Brian's major writings include Zen War Stories (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); an autobiographical work in Japanese entitled Gaijin de ari, Zen bozu de ari (As a Foreigner, As a Zen Priest), published by San-ichi Shobo in 1971; Zen Master Dōgen, coauthored with Prof. Yokoi Yūhō of Aichi-gakuin University (Weatherhill, 1976); and a translation of The Zen Life by Sato Koji (Weatherhill, 1972). In addition, Brian has published numerous journal articles, focusing on the relationship of not only Buddhism but religion in general, to violence and warfare.

From 2005 to 2013 Brian was a Professor of Japanese Studies and director of the AEA “Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions Program” at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, OH, USA. From 2013-2015 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan where he is writing a book tentatively entitled: Zen Terror in 1930s Japan. Brian currently continues his research as a Fellow of the Oxford Center for Buddhist Studies and is a fully ordained Buddhist priest in the Sōtō Zen sect.

Featured Presentation | Buddhist Terrorism?
Professor Emeritus Yasue Arimitsu
Doshisha University, Japan

Biography

Yasue Arimitsu is Professor Emeritus of English and Australian Studies, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. She is the author of Finding a Place: Landscape and the Search for Identity in the Early Novels of Patrick White (1986) and Australian Identity: Struggle and Transformation in Australian Literature (2003). She co-authored An Introduction to Australian Studies, 2nd Edition (2007). She has also edited and contributed to translating Diamond Dog: An Anthology of Contemporary Australian Short Stories ― Reflections on Multicultural Society (2008). Her article “Nation and Literature: Literary Possibilities in a Multicultural Society” was published in Racism, Slavery, and Literature (2010), edited by Wolfgang Zach/Ulrich Pallua, and another article, “Nam Le’s The Boat: A Reflection of Multiple Selves”, was published in Literatures in English: New Ethical, Cultural, and Transnational Perspectives (2013), edited by Michael Kenneally, Rhona Richman Kenneally and Wolfgang Zach. She was the president of the Australian Studies Association of Japan (2010 to 2013), and is currently the president of the Australia New Zealand Literary Society of Japan (since 2014). She has recently edited and authored Contemporary Australian Studies: Literature, History, Film and Media Studies in a Globalizing Age (2016).

Featured Presentation: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Studies in Today’s University Systems

Featured Panel Presentation: The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today

Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
Barcelona University, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is Professor Emerita at Barcelona University from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official Barcelona University Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Prof. Lucy Frost. 2016 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn is part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2016 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as part of this project. These oral stories are the result of field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She is also involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF) This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. She currently holds the position of Profesor Emerita and Founder/Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre, at Barcelona University.

Spotlight Presentation | “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Professor Donald E. Hall
Lehigh University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Dr Seiko Yasumoto

Biography

Dr Seiko Yasumoto lectures and carries out research on Japanese and East Asian media and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. Her primary research, which she has published widely, includes Japanese government media policy and broadcasting media within the domain of popular culture. The scope includes transmission of content, textual analysis, copyright, media industries, adaptation theory, youth culture, audience analysis and trans-national media cultural flows in Japan and East Asia. She is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies, guest editor of the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia special edition on Global Media 2010 and co-editor of the scholarly journal Ilha Do Desterro a Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies: Expression, Identity and Society.Vol.2006. She was the Japan and North, East Asia regional representative of the Asian Studies of Association of Australia (2009-2012), is an editorial board member of the Oriental Society of Australia, the East Asian Popular Culture Association and Journalism and Mass communication USA. She holds a prestigious Teaching Excellence Award from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney, Australia.

Spotlight Presentation | Cross-Cultural Engagement and Media Integration
in Japan and East Asia
Professor Holger Briel
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Biography

Professor Holger Briel from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University is the editor of the IAFOR Journal on Cultural Studies. Professor Briel holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also holds a B.A. in English from Eberhardt- Karls-Uiversitat Tubingen, Germany. Professor Briel also completed a portion of his graduate studies at the Universite de Paris, Sorbonne. Professor Briel has taught at several universities in the past including: UGSM-Monarch Business School (Switzerland), the Department of Communications & Media Studies at the University of Nicosia (Cyprus), the University of Innsbruck, Austria, the New York University Skopje (Macedonia) where he held Vice-Rector and Deanship positions, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, and the University of Athens (Greece) and the University of Surrey (UK). Over the years he has been the recipient of many research grants and fellowships and is a well-published academic with many books, book chapters and peer reviewed articles on Cultural Studies. Professor Briel is also a member of the EU Council for Higher Education.

Spotlight Presentation | Not Just Your Average Cartoon – “Mainzelmännchen” As Agents of Conservative TV Propaganda
Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
Barcelona University, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is Professor Emerita at Barcelona University from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official Barcelona University Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Prof. Lucy Frost. 2016 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn is part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2016 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as part of this project. These oral stories are the result of field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She is also involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF) This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. She currently holds the position of Profesor Emerita and Founder/Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre, at Barcelona University.

Spotlight Presentation | “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Professor Donald E. Hall
Lehigh University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Dr Seiko Yasumoto

Biography

Dr Seiko Yasumoto lectures and carries out research on Japanese and East Asian media and cultural studies at the University of Sydney. Her primary research, which she has published widely, includes Japanese government media policy and broadcasting media within the domain of popular culture. The scope includes transmission of content, textual analysis, copyright, media industries, adaptation theory, youth culture, audience analysis and trans-national media cultural flows in Japan and East Asia. She is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Asian Studies, guest editor of the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia special edition on Global Media 2010 and co-editor of the scholarly journal Ilha Do Desterro a Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies: Expression, Identity and Society.Vol.2006. She was the Japan and North, East Asia regional representative of the Asian Studies of Association of Australia (2009-2012), is an editorial board member of the Oriental Society of Australia, the East Asian Popular Culture Association and Journalism and Mass communication USA. She holds a prestigious Teaching Excellence Award from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney, Australia.

Spotlight Presentation | Cross-Cultural Engagement and Media Integration
in Japan and East Asia
Professor Baden Offord
Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Biography

Baden Offord is an internationally recognized specialist in human rights, sexuality, education and culture. In 2012 he was a sponsored speaker to the 14th EU-NGO Human Rights Forum in Brussels where he spoke on ASEAN and sexual justice issues. In the same year he conducted a three-week lecture tour of Japan sponsored by the Australian Prime Minister’s Educational Assistance Funds post the Great Eastern Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.

Among his publications are the books Homosexual Rights as Human Rights: Activism in Indonesia, Singapore and Australia (2003), Activating Human Rights (co-edited with Elizabeth Porter, 2006), Activating Human Rights Education (co-edited with Christopher Newell, 2008), and Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices, Contexts (co-edited with Bee Chen Goh and Rob Garbutt, 2012). His most recent co-authored publication in the field of Australian Cultural Studies is titled Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values (with Kerruish, Garbutt, Wessell and Pavlovic, 2014), which is a collaborative work with the Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy. His latest chapter, ‘Queer activist intersections in Southeast Asia: human rights and cultural studies,’ appears in Ways of Knowing About Human Rights in Asia (ed. Vera Mackie, London, Routledge, 2015).

He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona, La Trobe University, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and Rajghat Education Centre, Varanasi. In 2010-2011 he held the Chair (Visiting Professor) in Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo. In Japan he has given lectures and research seminars at Chuo, Otemon Gakuin, Sophia, Tohoku and Keio Universities.

Prior to his appointment at Curtin University, he was Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University, where he was a faculty member from 1999-2014.

Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Professor Holger Briel
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Biography

Professor Holger Briel from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University is the editor of the IAFOR Journal on Cultural Studies. Professor Briel holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Theory from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also holds a B.A. in English from Eberhardt- Karls-Uiversitat Tubingen, Germany. Professor Briel also completed a portion of his graduate studies at the Universite de Paris, Sorbonne. Professor Briel has taught at several universities in the past including: UGSM-Monarch Business School (Switzerland), the Department of Communications & Media Studies at the University of Nicosia (Cyprus), the University of Innsbruck, Austria, the New York University Skopje (Macedonia) where he held Vice-Rector and Deanship positions, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, and the University of Athens (Greece) and the University of Surrey (UK). Over the years he has been the recipient of many research grants and fellowships and is a well-published academic with many books, book chapters and peer reviewed articles on Cultural Studies. Professor Briel is also a member of the EU Council for Higher Education.

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Dr Joseph Haldane
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

Biography

Joseph Haldane is the Chairman and CEO of IAFOR. He is responsible for devising strategy, setting policies, forging institutional partnerships, implementing projects, and overseeing the organisation’s business and academic operations, including research, publications and events.

Dr Haldane holds a PhD from the University of London in 19th-century French Studies, and has had full-time faculty positions at the University of Paris XII Paris-Est Créteil (France), Sciences Po Paris (France), and Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (Japan), as well as visiting positions at the French Press Institute in the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (France), The School of Journalism at Sciences Po Paris (France), and the School of Journalism at Moscow State University (Russia).

Dr Haldane’s current research concentrates on post-war and contemporary politics and international affairs, and since 2015 he has been a Guest Professor at The Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University, where he teaches on the postgraduate Global Governance Course, and a Co-Director of the OSIPP-IAFOR Research Centre, an interdisciplinary think tank situated within the university.

He is also a Member of the International Advisory Council of the Department of Educational Foundations at the College of Education of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

From 2012 to 2014, Dr Haldane served as Treasurer of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (Chubu Region) and he is currently a Trustee of the HOPE International Development Agency (Japan). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2012, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2015.

A black belt in judo, he is married with two children, and lives in Japan.

Dr Richard Donovan
Kansai University, Japan

Biography

Richard Donovan lectures in comparative literature and translation studies in the Faculty of Letters at Kansai University. He has also worked as a translator at the Kyoto City International Relations Office. He obtained a PhD in literary translation studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2012. The title of his thesis was Dances with Words: Issues in the Translation of Japanese Literature into English. His other areas of interest include Japanese media subculture and environmental technology.

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