Postgraduate and ECR Workshop with Professor David Eng
Melbourne , 11-12 December 2008
On 11-12 December 2008, the ECR/postgraduate node, with the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN), ran a postgraduate workshop at ANU House in Melbourne with Professor David Eng from the University of Pennsylvania.
The two-day event opened with a public lecture by Professor Eng on the topic of ‘Racial Reparation’. Professor Eng’s new work on political and psychic genealogies of reparation in the context of war, colonialism and violence in the trans-Pacific provided many thought-provoking ideas of relevance to the workshop participants, and in particular to the national and regional contexts of their own work.
The public lecture was followed by a workshop with nine postgraduate and ECR participants based on the theme of ‘Mourning and Trauma’. All of the papers were pre-circulated and Professor Eng also pre-circulated two articles, one by Lisa Lowe and the other by Leo Bersani, to provide some initial points of discussion. The workshop format was devised specifically to mentor postgraduates and ECRs and provide them with an opportunity to engage with an international expert in this timely and dynamic field.
The second day of the event consisted of 15 minute ‘one-on-one’ sessions with Professor Eng to provide further feedback on individual papers. Comments from students after the event suggested that this time dedicated to their individual projects and to a personalised discussion of professional development and career opportunities was extremely valuable.
An edited journal collection will be produced with selected papers from the workshop. This will be co-edited by myself and one or two postgraduate participants from the workshop thereby increasing mentoring and professional development opportunities for the student(s). We will approach Professor Eng to write a foreword for the collection.
The workshop was a great success due in large part to Professor Eng’s generosity with his time, feedback and advice, and his highly approachable nature.
ECR/Postgraduate participants at the workshop included: Aren Z. Aizura, Dion David Kagan, Sophie Sunderland, Rebecca Suter, Alan Han, Dominic Golding, Marilyne Brun, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and Indigo Willing.
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