Heading to Canberra tomorrow for the Cruising Country conference. It is being organised by Lisa Stefanoff and Ursula Frederick. Ursula was on the panel I organised for the CSAA conference. It should be good to catch up. I am also going to hopefully hook up with Ben while in town for a beer!
The program looks exciting and, to tell you the truth, I am really looking forward to this conference. It will be the first time I have gone to a conference organised purely around something that is closely related to my PhD research. Here are the abstracts. A few of the papers I don’t want to miss include:
1) Ros Bandt on the auditory aspects of ‘road culture’. She mentions ‘ute culture’ so I look forward to hearing what she has to say.
2) Kiera Lindsey seeks to think the road “as a spatial narrative that consists of multiple acts of traversing, we can trace the parallel process through which established trajectories and inscriptions have been reiterated or rewritten and codes of meaning constructed and consumed.”
3) Susan Luckman is going to discuss the road movie and one of her examples is Mad Max. Should be interesting.
4) Hamish Morgan gets his Deleuze and Derrida freak on to explore the possibilities of becoming between image, memory and event, between present, past and future and between perception, thought and sense, all this, while driving my car on the way to Ululla (a remote Aboriginal community).
5) Katharine Willis argues that “contemporary car travel creates ‘non-places’, a term coined by anthroplogist Mark Auge to describe transient spaces for traffic, communication and consumption, from inside a car on the highway to the transit zones of an airport.” This one should be interesting! Maybe I should send through my non-places paper…
6) Bronwyn Wright’s work on The Swamp: “It is based on intimacy with the site, daily visits, observations of seasonal variations and an anonymous interaction or dialogue with a young predominantly male ‘hoon culture’.”
Here is the program. I am on the last day, first session.