We imagine having film/tv students talking with designers and ethnographers – historians with social workers and poets – painters with geographers and architects – education students with Indigenous researchers with photographers – cultural studies and electronic arts and politics, architects and internet theorists and creative writers....

We imagine thinking about the verbal and the visual, the senses and the images, how they are enmeshed/separated/contested, how their interactions might be decoded, how diverging approaches can open up our thinking and our responses. At the end of the day we will have a plenary session in which all the groups will present their day's thinking and activities. We imagine that a group might wish to do a filmed ethnography of the day, or to construct a visual plan for reclaiming some of the physical or intellectual spaces of the university, perhaps to write some haiku about memories and silences, or to map the gendered vulnerabilities of HIV/AIDS. The possibilities, we hope, are limitless.

The frame of “a day of provocation” is taken from “les évènements de mai", the events of May 1968 in France, when students and workers rebelled against the establishment and spent days and nights in intense, provocative, boundary-shaking discussion in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne, of Nanterre, and in the Théâtre de L'Odéon. But we imagine too that other significant historical frames might be that this day is the 87th anniversary of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the moment when the guns fell silent, when “the war to end all wars” ground to a halt - and that this day too is the 30th anniversary of the Dismissal, a seminal moment in Australian cultural history, impacting on all of us in the university community still, as we struggle with the meanings of economic rationalism and its consequences for the intellectual life.

After the workshop we will use the website to open up a participants' blog: we imagine crossing publication boundaries, beginning with blogging and moving into hardcopy with a fully refereed publication, authored by groups and individuals, edited by students, in the tradition of the annual conference volume from the Curtin Humanities Postgraduate Conference of which this workshop is the 2005 manifestation.

Come and join us for the day - 11 November 2005 - in the Division of Humanities at Curtin University. Students from other tertiary institutions are very welcome. When you send us your registration (see our website at http://www.provocation.curtin.edu.au) we will ask you to tell us which three topic areas from the list on the website (in descending order of preference) you would like to think of workshopping. And if you are not a “creative” but have a preference about the types of creative production you might want to work with, let us know that too. We will put you into groups as early as we can, and put you in touch with each other by email so that you can discuss in advance the frames you will use to position your group and its work. Each group will work on its chosen topic throughout the day.

The cost of $25 for students and $30 for academics (earlybird registration prior to 30 September) includes materials (lots of large sheets of paper, pens, crayons, digital cameras and videos where possible, etc.), morning and afternoon tea, lunch, and drinks afterwards.

For further information and registration details please visit our web site at:
http://www.provocation.curtin.edu.au or contact the Humanities Graduate Studies Office via e-mail at:
humanities.postgrad@curtin.edu.au

Date: 11 November 2005
Venue: Bentley Campus of Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia