Fay Gale Lectures

The intention of this paper is to theorise social change. This is undertaken initially by employing the feminist critique of the major theories of social relations in modernity – a critique which gives significance to care. The feminist critique is then itself reconsidered. By this means, some uncertainties are raised about exactly what is vital […]

Compared to any other region in the world, South East Asia has the largest volume of irregular border crossings, what many refer to as ‘illegal’ migration. Border crossings have become far more hazardous and lethal than in the past, and the female share of those crossing borders has grown dramatically. Yet the circumstances driving women’s crossing, the risks […]

What are the consequences of the most significant change in the Australian labour market in the past three decades?– the growth in women’s participation. What has this change – alongside the decline in men’s participation – meant for society, the economy, households and gender equality? Why are jobs still made largely in men’s image, while responsibility for the household and care remains largely with women? We have witnessed an incomplete revolution in our lifetimes, where the public world has simultaneously hungered for women’s time, while resisting renovation of the institutions that meet them at work and at home. What needs to be done for future fairness, especially in the context of an ageing population? Having lived through this incomplete revolution herself, and participated in many of the major policy debates of the past three decades, in this lecture Barbara Pocock reflects on where we are at, what working men and women need now, and how we might get there. 

International relations scholars as well as psychologists have recently claimed that violence – defined largely as homicide and casualties from war – is in steep decline. On these accounts, human beings are becoming more civilized. However, research dedicated to making the case for decline with reference to historical and quantitative data has almost completely neglected evidence of gendered violence. Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) has been largely invisible, silent and unreported yet prevalence surveys reveal that the majority of women and girls in every country, that is, a large proportion of the total world population, have experienced this form of violence. According to the cross-national International Violence against Women survey (IVAWS) the number of women who have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since age sixteen is between 20 and 60 per cent with an average victimization rate of over 35 per cent. Moreover, declinist perspectives on violence and war seem to go against contemporary reporting of widespread and systematic SGBV especially targeting civilians in genocide, conflict and mass atrocity situations. Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been the subject of nearly four decades of feminist scholarship, activism and policy interventions. Analysing global violence from a feminist perspective on VAWG radically challenges declinist views and our understanding of the causes, justifications, and consequences of violence.

In the last decade liberal arts colleges have sprung up across Asia. What accounts for this sudden interest in the liberal arts? What aspirations do they serve? What models are being drawn upon? And what do these new initiatives say about the nature of higher education in Asia and the future of the liberal arts […]

The 2011 Fay Gale Lecture was presented by Associate Professor Denise Doiron on the theme ‘Trends and recent developments in income inequality in Australia’. The lecture was presented first at Associate Professor Doiron’s home university, the University of New South Wales, on 20 September 2011, and then at the University of Western Australia on 26 October 2011. The final lecture was at the University of Tasmania in Hobart on 23 November 2011. The lecture was jointly sponsored by ASSA, the Economics Society of Australia (Tasmanian Branch) and the University of Tasmania.

In 1972, the late Fay Gale (AO) published a characteristically self-styled book titled Urban Aborigines. It launched a richly diverse career that delivered an exceptional legacy to the academic discipline of geography, Aboriginal justice, university administration, and women’s professional advancement.

This lecture honours Fay’s intellectual contribution to one of these fields. It pursues her critical interest in the clash of indigenous/settler cultures in Australia through a fresh account of the notorious head-measuring practices of 19th century racial craniometry.

Probing the Western premise that ‘mind’ is the assured marker of human distinction from nature, the lecture asks: are there fresh prospects for reconciling settler and indigenous values on this continent if the conceit of this distinction can be overcome? This fundamental question for the Anthropocene is provoked from a ‘southern’ perspective in the sprit of the insistently geographic project that was Urban Aborigines.