The University of Western Sydney has long been a leader in the field, but it is hard to say which of their offerings (some now sadly deleted but still available through web archiving) was the best. New Humanities Transdisciplinary Research at Richmond, with their work on `The space of the urinal' ? Perhaps postgraduate research on The phantasmatic dimension of embodiment among German cross-dressers in "Critical Psychology" at Parramatta?Despite UWS's best efforts, they are unable to keep up with the demand for the product in the Greater Sydney area. The University of Wollongong's Identity and Cultural Transformations group and Hegemony research group have made a big play to soak up the rest of the market. Newcastle is a smaller player, but making an effort, with its Gender, Sexuality and Leisure subject.
The older universities tend to lag in this area, but UNSW can provide supervision on such hot topics as `Cyberspace and embodiment' and, with the self-referentiality on which postmodernism prides itself, `Well-being through movement: Exploring the PhD degree'. Macquarie University has drawn even with recent research showing that "Tattooing is just a literalist process of marking and being marked, which is really what life is.". Macquarie has blitzed all comers with its `Bodily modifications' conference: see the conference abstracts, such as `What an arse can do: affect, time, and intercorporeal transformation'.) (and now, the second conference on the same theme; report. And
Macquarie's latest research shows that Schapelle Corby "is essential to the patterns of self-definition of Australian-ness." Says researcher Anthony Lambert, "I also wouldn't be surprised if there was a more explicit connection between the Schapelle Corby case and the Cronulla riots."The 2005 conference season will have some classic offerings. Sydney U's Physiognomy of Origins asks "What are the historical and (bio)political conditions of the transformation of origin? What are the sites of precariousness and potentiality to which this progression gives rise?". Keynote speaker was to be unrepentant terrorist Antonio Negri (Who he?) (Miranda Devine's column).
Marion Pastor Roces' Power Lecture on 'Biennales and Biology', 17 Aug 2005 promised "By considering the politics of biennales and bio-engineering in general ... I discover that the complex object of my critique is God".
UQ's Dec 2005 conference on Whiteness and the Horizons of Race starts from the belief that 'we Australians are witnessing what is perhaps the most successful project of white Restoration ever witnessed in the West'.
The Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics held a symposium based around Heidegger's remark that "Dwelling is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist". (You don't quite get what that means?: "Dwelling means building historical action, and conscious presencing.")
A 2005 conference at Macquarie on Derridean futures challenged the "recent denigrations of Derrida in the press" with offerings on "imploding multiplicities" and "necrological whiteness".
Thanks to Roger Sandall in June 2005 Quadrant for notification of the UQ seminar on Freud and the excretory ... more on the author's oeuvre
The Melbourne area is keeping up, though. Deakin offered Original Feminist Research Methodologies .
Professor Elizabeth Grosz has always held a special place at the wacky end of the Australian academic spectrum. She doesn't offer a web site, but an American admirer has helpfully provided her bibliography . It has some choice items.
For quantity if not quality of performance, Central Queensland U is a leader, with campuses in Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Mackay, the Gold Coast, Emerald, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Fiji and "International Operations" in , Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Dubai. A good choice might be units of the Graduate Certificate in Management at their Emerald campus, with its "comprehensive library collection"?
And how are the youth of Australia responding? Are they resisting these hegemonic discourses, or being sucked right in? Have a look in Colloquy , the electronic journal of "interdisciplinary" work by Australian postgraduates, and Parrhesia