IHSS researchers host seminars each year at ACU's Rome campus.

The seminars bring together scholars from around the world for face-to-face discussion and knowledge exchange.

For enquiries, contact: IHSS@acu.edu.au

2024 Program

To be announced.

Digital and diasporic movements in food, migration, and climate change

5–8 December 2022

Contact: Dr Anh Nguyen Austen

This international workshop is for a future Routledge book publication in the new Digital Diaspora Series and includes local engagement with the newly opened Garum food library and museum, and informal tours of migrant food neighbourhoods in Rome.

We welcome interdisciplinary researchers including artists, activists, museum professionals, digital humanities and public health researchers in the migration and hospitality sector to discuss their use of digital technology and research engagement with refugees, asylum seekers and migrant communities about food, migration, and climate change. 

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Managing the impacts of economic change in cities and regions

14 November 2022

Organiser: Dr Tom Barnes

This workshop assembles leading scholars of regional studies and political economy from Europe and Australia to consider ways in which actors in cities and regions—government entities, businesses and civic organisations—can respond to the challenges of labour market shocks. These challenges are brought about by internal processes such as national economic downturns and the technological disruptions of Industry 4.0 (3D printing, Artificial Intelligence and robots), as well as by external processes such as decisions by overseas parent companies to close or relocate plants or the reverberating impacts of transformative global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the crisis in Ukraine. Other examples include the decision by overseas firms to close Australia’s automotive manufacturing sector or the impacts of Britain’s ‘Brexit’ withdrawal from the European Union on prospects for British manufacturing. 

Participants include:

  • Prof Patrizio Bianchi, UNESCO Chair of Education, Growth and Equality, University of Ferrara, outgoing Italian Minister for Education
  • Prof Lisa De Propris, Professor of Regional Economic Development, University of Birmingham (UK)
  • Prof David Bailey, Professor of Business Economics, University of Birmingham (UK)
  • Prof Andrew Beer, Executive Dean, UniSA Business, University of South Australia
  • A/Prof Sally Weller, Associate Research Professor in Economic Restructuring, University of South Australia
  • A/Prof Sandrine Labory, Associate Professor of Applied Economics, University of Ferrara
  • Prof Marco Bellandi, Professor of Applied Economics, University of Florence

For background information, visit Future Work, Future Communities.


Queenship and natural resource management, 1400-1800

24–25 October 2022

Co-organisers: Professor Susan Broomhall | Dr Clare Davidson

This seminar focusses upon the particular role of premodern queens in the management of non-human natural resources. It will explore theoretical and legal models for queenly control over resource management as well as their activities and practices, including, for instance, hunting, fishing, farming, mining, forestry, and the use of materials brought into their remit by colonial endeavours in the wider world.

Participants will examine a wide range of non-human natural resources that queens had power to direct and dispose of, to utilise, enjoy and commercialise, to visualise and commemorate, even to destroy, including on their lands, in forests, waterways, oceans and the forms of life within them. 

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Humanities at the seabed: Cultures of the ocean floor

19–21 September 2022

Organiser: Dr Killian Quigley

Humanities at the Seabed gathers a tricontinental cast of researchers in ecocritical ocean studies and affiliated fields to describe the seabed’s distinctive challenges for conventional humanistic inquiry. What, we ask, might humanities methods contribute to knowledge of submerged places that are simultaneously subject to human operations and construed, by certain traditions at least, as fundamentally ‘alien’ to human cultures? What might we make of spaces like ‘The Area,’ that enormous region of the seabed that lies beyond national jurisdictions–and that has, in being imagined as a global commons, furnished spaces for experimenting with novel forms in global cooperation and environmental stewardship? We intend to demonstrate the pivotal importance of humanistic approaches to spaces that lie both within and without territorial waters and contiguous zones, some of which the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has called the ‘common heritage of mankind.’ Across cultural traditions, geographic regions, and historical periods, the meeting will generate an unprecedented account of, and agenda for, a critical seabed humanities.

Participants: 
- Killian Quigley, IHSS, ACU
- Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria
- Laurence Publicover, University of Bristol
- Pandora Syperek, Loughborough University London
- Jol Thoms, Goldsmiths, University of London
- Giulia Champion, University of Warwick
- Fiona Middleton, University of Southampton
- Rachael Squire, Royal Holloway, University of London


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