[Anthropgrad] 2 CAEPR Seminars: K Ferro: 5/11/2008 On Noel Pearson, K Sullivan: 13/11/2008 Indigenous relations with the Justice System

[Katarina Ferro]

Please check out both dates:

CAEPR Seminar: Wednesday 5 November 2008; 12.30-2pm; AD Hope Bdg, 
Humanities Conference Room

On Noel Pearson

Katarina Ferro; CAEPR PhD Scholar

There can be no doubt that Noel Pearson is not only a national leader in 
policy development, he is also a controversial figure who manages to 
split the interested public, academia, journalists and politicians into 
candid supporters or staunch critics. To research such a polarising 
personality’s work and personal background is particularly challenging.

On the first glance Noel Pearson seems to have very a clear vision, aims 
and his one big project – the welfare reform project in the Cape York 
Peninsular. But Pearson’s range of addressed topics, his ‘ideology’ and 
especially his relationship to the major political parties in Australia 
are a lot more complex than superficially apparent. I argue that Noel 
Pearson has not completely given up on the indigenous rights agenda and 
that ‘his language of rights’ is merely differently prioritised and 
defined than in conventional discourse of the political left or right 
factions. I also want to argue that his success with the last and 
current government, among other reasons, lies less with his positioning 
in the “radical centre” than with political pragmatism or even 
opportunism on both sides – Pearson’s as well as on the governments side.

As part of my PhD thesis on the ‘Language of Rights’, this paper 
investigates these issues on the bases of some of Pearson’s 
publications, speeches, reports and media appearances from 1993 till 
2007 and presents work in progress.


CAEPR Seminar: Thursday 13 November 2008, 12.30-2pm Hanna Neumann Bdg 
21, CAEPR Seminar Room

Indigenous relations with the Justice System in NSW

Pre-field Seminar by Kate Sullivan, PhD Scholar, CAEPR

Aboriginal people are imprisoned at 15 times the rate of non-Indigenous 
people. A great deal the over-representation of Indigenous people in 
prison is a result of re-offence. Much of the literature has focused on 
the why this over representation occurs most often relying on broad 
statistical analysis. Some post colonial analysis has placed emphasis on 
resistance theories. There has been little or no attempt to understand 
Aboriginal pathways into and out of the criminal justice system from the 
perspective of Aboriginal offenders themselves. Despite the high levels 
of offence and re-offence most people cease offending by the time they 
reach 40 years of age. The aim of the project is to understand the 
circumstances and motivations of serial offenders' desistance from 
crime. This seminar will briefly review the literature about desistance 
from crime drawing out some themes for exploration in the field and 
explore how an anthropological methodology including recording the life 
histories of ex-offenders (located in a regional centre of NSW) might 
inform policy development and the largely structuralist approaches of 
criminology. This ethnographic approach is designed to record the lived 
experience of offenders and their families, to reveal the nature of 
their sociality and to add richness to criminological explanations.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: katarina_ferro.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 348 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/anthropgrad/attachments/20081031/7f9cf686/attachment.vcf