2024 ACAT Seminars
What does inclusion do?
Presented by Kuansong Victor, Zhuang
Friday 22 November 2024
Disability inclusion is among the pressing issues of our time. While much has been discussed about other marginalized groups and categories, such as race, gender, ethnicity, and also class, disability has only recently emerged as a worthy area of study in the past three decades. Crucially, both in Singapore and globally, disability inclusion is gaining pace and attention – this extends across physical and digital worlds.
“What does inclusion do?” is a provocation to think more critically about the condition and contemporary ideology of inclusion in Singapore. In recent years, disability inclusion has been a mainstay of contemporary Singapore society. A whole corpus of state-led initiatives has sought to fold the disabled into public life, ranging from carnivals, inclusive community spaces, politicians pledging their support and extensive media campaigns. Disabled people, historically excluded as the other in Singapore and globally, are now actively embraced by a state that has seen as its mission an embrace of an ideology of inclusion. Yet inclusion while desirable and seemingly benevolent, also creates effects of control and containment.
In this talk, Victor will draw upon research that he is doing on inclusion in Singapore and globally, as well as insights from the production of Not Without Us: Perspectives on Disability and Inclusion, Singapore’s first disability studies anthology. In particular, through the following questions: How is inclusion as an ideology created, circulated, communicated, and consumed in society? How are disabled people included? What does being included mean? Who is the target of inclusion? And ultimately, what implications does this have for us as critical disability studies scholars?
Kuansong Victor, Zhuang is Assistant Professor in Disability Communication at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. Prior to joining academia, Victor worked at SG Enable, the national agency for disability for over 7 years. He was a UK Chevening scholar in 2013/14, a 2022/23 Princeton University Fung Global Fellow and a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney in 2023/24.
His research lies at the intersections of communications, media, and cultural studies, and disability studies, especially as it pertains to inclusion and the workings of technology. He hopes to use his research to contribute to current debates about how inclusion happens both in Singapore and around the world.
Find out more about his work at www.ksvictorzhuang.com
Higher Degree by Research student (re)presentations
Presented by MCASI HDR students
Thursday 30 May 2024
In this exciting multi-paper session, four Curtin HDR students will (re)present papers from interstate or overseas conferences for the benefit of our local research community. With presenters from MCASI and the Centre for Aboriginal Studies, these four engaging presentations span an array of topics, disciplines, and methodologies. Although prepared and presented at vastly different conferences, the papers are united by shared themes of representation, disability, popular culture, connection, and empowerment.
We welcome you to join us in supporting the research of these HDR students, and their contributions to their respective fields.
Featuring presentations by:
Michelle Camille Correa (PhD student, MCASI)
Achala K. Dissanayake (PhD student, MCASI)
Kelly Moes (PhD student, MCASI)
Mary Blight (MPhil student, Centre for Aboriginal Studies)
Due to a technical issue these presentations were not recorded.
The Australian League of Rights: Foundations and transformations of the illiberal imagination
Presented by Brett Nicholls
Thursday 28 March 2024
The Australian League of Rights has been a strident and polarising organisation since its inception in the 1940s. This seminar will explore the League’s foundation and evolution by examining three key signifiers: heritage, the communist menace, and the Christian nation. Drawing on the League’s prodigious production of newsletters, pamphlets, recordings, catalogues, and books over some seventy years, the seminar shows how these signifiers form a reactionary and racist vision for Australian society rooted in a traditional illiberal imagination that, through refinement, becomes normalised over time. The seminar concludes by considering how the League’s far-right material helps us draw contrasts with and understand better the new right today.
Brett Nicholls is a member of the Department of Media, Film, and Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research focuses on media politics, critical theory and discourse analysis. He recently published a co-edited volume with Springer titled Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality (2019). He is also an editor of Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Law and Earth and the new journal Baudrillard Now.