Landscapes of Meaning.
South Asia-Australia connections: environment and people

An International Symposium exploring South Asia-Australia connections.


Date: Wednesday 18th October to Friday 20th October 2006
Venue: University of Technology, Sydney.
            Building CB06, Room 04.04

Download a Programme of Events here.

A selection of papers from this conference were published in the Transforming Cultures eJournal special edition. Click here for details.

"The whole of the NSW landscape ... is a mosaic of cultural meaning. People are as much a part of the landscape as the plants and the animals, and the attachment of people to land makes that land special."
( NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service)

It's not just cricket or Bollywood! The connections between South Asia and Australia are expanding through trade, music, film, dance, tourism and migration.

Australia and South Asia face the same urgent questions about how to understand changing environments and social relationships.

• How to meet the crises in environmental conditions while fulfilling the social justice agenda for Indigenous communities

• When highly mobile populations from both regions have had to remake their homes elsewhere, how do they negotiate their affective social and political loyalties?

Despite these common questions, South Asia and Australia have seldom been engaged in either comparison or challenge. Exploring the dynamics of complementary and opposing attachments-to and responsibility-for land feature at the heart of this three-day symposium. This workshop brings together researchers, environmental activists and grass-roots community campaigners from South Asia and Australia to challenge assumptions and find common ground, focusing on the themes of environmental justice and transnational migrancy.

Environmental Justice
In Australia and South Asia, Indigenous peoples are campaigning for recognition of their rights to their land and for their rights to be heard in the protection of fragile ecologies and wildlife. Conservationists and Indigenous owners both face environmental crises as transnational mining, global tourism and expanding industries threaten landscapes and biodiversity.

• Are conservation goals and Indigenous rights compatible?

• How can these groups best work together to meet the escalating threats to the environments they both value?

This session will compare recent developments in the dialogue between conservationists and Indigenous and local communities to identify the emerging initiatives towards achieving environmental justice.

Migrancy and Transnational Identities
Recent recognition of the continuation of active communication between places of 'origin' and places of 'settlement' has opened up the need to understand the dynamics of migrancy.

• How has communication flowed around and between diasporic communities?

• How is it changing in the rapidly evolving environment of global and digital communications?

This session will explore a range of migration experiences, both past and present, to ask how they might reinforce or undermine national borders.

The forum provides the unique opportunity for academics, activists and policy-makers from South Asia to bring their insights to an Australian audience, to identify new possibilities for comparative learning and to produce collaborative research networks for the future.

Speakers include
Anjali Roy (Cultural Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur)
Mahesh Rangarajan (Conservation advocate, editor and political commentator, Delhi)
Ranjan Chakrabarti (Environmental History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata)
Jacqui Katona (Advocate, Mirrar community, Kakadu)
Ien Ang (Centre for Cultural Studies, UWS)
Anthony Esposito (Wilderness Society)
Barbara Flick (Community advocate, Kamilaraay/Yuwalaraay people, NSW/Qld)
Haripriya Rangan (Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University)
Fiona Paisley (Historian, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University)
Lakshmi Subramaniam (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata)
Kalpana Ram (Anthropology, Macquarie University)
Anthony McAvoy (Indigenous Environmental advocate, Fredrick Jordan Chambers, Sydney)
Peter Thompson (Darling River Environment Group; Western Heritage Group, Coonabarabran)
Selvaraj Velayutham (Centre for Social Inclusion, Macquarie University)
Richard Grove (Senior Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, ANU)
Denis Byrne (Cultural Heritage Research Unit, Department of Environment and Conservation)

The sponsors of this event are the:
Cultural Research Network, the Asia Pacific Futures Network and the South Asia Node of Asia Pacific Network.

The Symposium is a free event.
However, registration is essential. 
For more information and to register your attendance, please contact:
Lindi Todd: Lindi.Todd@uts.edu.au