Australian Studies in the 21st Century: Human and More-Than-Human Worlds Interactions, Perspectives, Futures
Where: Macquarie University Wallumattagal Campus, Sydney, Australia
When: 5–7 February 2025
Australian Studies has long been concerned with histories and stories about human experiences focusing on issues of settler colonisation, conflict, violence, resistance, resilience, agency, and justice. The 2025 InASA conference continues to focus on these vital issues but turns also to consider Australians’ formation by, and engagement with, the more-than-human world. Australian Studies is experiencing rapid transformation in the 21st century as new biopolitical challenges emerge with climate change and concomitant environmental and ecological concerns, and as artificial intelligence impacts and transforms social, cultural, economic, and political life. New understandings, inspirations, and challenges emerge not only about the peoples across Australia, but also the continent’s more-than-human entities, including animals, plants, landscapes, ecologies, and technologies, among others.
The 2025 InASA conference aims to foster interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues on Critical Indigenous Studies, history, literature, culture, creative arts, politics, media, sociology, anthropology, geography, ecology, and other disciplines that engage with human experiences and/or more-than-human worlds. We welcome proposals for individual papers, 3 member panels, or 4-5 member roundtables for plenary sessions, that engage with the conference theme from diverse disciplines, perspectives, and methodologies. We particularly encourage submissions that prioritise Indigenous voices. We invite contributions from established and emerging scholars that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Indigenous knowledges and perspectives
- Indigenous histories and geographies
- Indigenous relationalities
- Australian histories, biographies, and fiction
- Australian cultures
- Geographies of Australia
- Settler colonialism
- Colonial commemorations
- Justice, agency, and resistance
- Gender and sexuality
- Cross-cultural encounters
- Migration, refugees, and diaspora
- Class, poverty, inequality, and the asset economy
- Screen and media production and representation
- Social and digital media
- Creative writing and multimodal creative research
- Ecocriticism and environmental humanities
- Technology and future studies
- Changing meanings of more-than-human
- Politics of the more-than-human
Please submit an abstract (approx. 250 words) and a bio note (no more than 100 words) to the 2025 InASA Conference. For panels or roundtable proposals, please include a brief description of the proposed session (approx. 200 words), along with abstracts for each individual paper and bio notes. The conference is primarily face-to-face but online access may be possible.
The submission deadline is Monday, 30 September 2024. Please send your submissions or general inquiries sent to Dr Daozhi Xu (daozhi.xu@mq.edu.au).
A conference website with further details will open soon.