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REGIONAL</title></head><body>
<div><b>Transformations</b> presents a mini-conference to be held at
the Bundaberg campus of Central Queensland University on Friday 5th
November.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Keynote Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Darren Tofts, Chair, Media &
Communications, Swinburne University of Technology.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>For further details please contact Warwick Mules by replying to
this email.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="-1"
color="#000000"><u><b>TRANSFORMATIONS SEMINAR SERIES</b></u><b>:<u>
IMAGINING CHANGE: TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION OF REGIONAL COMMUNITIES<br>
<br>
</u></b></font><font face="Times New Roman" size="-1"
color="#000000">Transformations, in partnership with the Bundaberg
Media Research Group, announces a series of seminars
(mini-conferences) to be held over a period of time in 2004-2006. The
theme of the series<i> Imaging Change: technological mediation of
regional communities</i>, is designed to promote awareness of the
potential for change within regional communities, and provide
opportunities for people working within and across regional domains to
think about and take action to instigate change where possible. In
particular, the seminars will examine the potential for<i>
culture</i>-the representational aspects of human life-to
contribute to, and instigate change. But culture is itself a mode of
production-representations are produced by various practices and
technologies that collectively have the effect of binding people
together in communities with common identities. Change thus needs to
be thought in terms of the broader issues of what we are calling
'technological mediation', or the consistent reproduction of
representations through 'technological apparatus' (all manner of
organised mediated process, such as media, art, literature, education,
museums, business and community promotion, and the
self-representations that people consistently produce in their daily
dialogue with one another) that produce the sense and meaning that
people identify with as part of their way of life. The potential to
change means unsettling these residues and practices, not taking them
for granted, and opening the way for a fresh imagination to emerge. In
particular we are concerned with exploring the potential for new media
technologies to produce different kinds of relation between people in
regional communities, and with those well beyond. We are concerned to
ensure that regional communities do not close themselves off from the
potential to change, but remain open to new prospects.<br>
<br>
<b>First Seminar topic:<br>
<u>Concepts for Change: representation, community and the
transformative power of technology.<br>
</u></b></font><font face="Times New Roman" size="-1"
color="#000000">There is an impasse in the way we think about
non-metropolitan areas in Australia, and their relation with the
forces that are currently reshaping the world. The impasse involves a
stubborn refusal to think beyond the centre/periphery model that
places the metropolis as the source, and the periphery as the
beneficiary of change. The effect of this type of thinking is to lock
regional domains into a passive, recipient mode of existence, or
alternatively as the space of a recalcitrant 'other', a place of
difference that exists only as a means of identifying the 'normal'
self of the centred metropole.<br>
This seminar is designed to draw out the kind of conceptual tools
needed to submit such centre/periphery models to critique, thereby
opening up the potential in regional domains for change, but change
based on an interlinking with the forces of change that operate on a
global scale.<br>
These concepts may be focussed around ideas of the virtual, the
network, the image, issues of representation, aesthetics and arts
practice, narrative interventions, media constructions of community
and regionality, questions of history and the institutionalisation of
memory, global-local interconnections.<br>
Drawn from a range of disciplines and areas of research and other
experiences, these concepts will need the critical and analytical
power to submit values and received ideas to scrutiny, and to generate
new arrangements and assemblages of ideas and various mediated
experiences. The seminar will focus on (i) submitting the existing
idea of the 'bush' as the historically established motif of
regionality to critical scrutiny, and (ii) to exploring new and
imaginative ways of redefining regionality through the employment of
technologies in media and art.</font></div>
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<div><font
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>____________________________________________________________________<span
></span>_______________________</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-1" color="#007700"><b>Dr. Warwick
Mules<x-tab>
</x-tab></b><x-tab>
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</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>Editor Transformations<br>
Cultural Studies,<x-tab>
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</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>http://www.cqu.edu.au/transformations<br>
Humanities, Central Queensland University<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-1" color="#007700">Bundaberg
Campus,<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
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</x-tab>email: w.mules@cqu.edu.au<br>
Locked Bag 3333 DC<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>phone: 0741 507142<br>
Bundaberg, Queensland,<x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>mobile: 04122 92541</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="-1" color="#007700">Australia
4670<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab><x-tab>
</x-tab>fax: 0741 507080</font></div>
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