Abstracts and Biographies:
Keynote
Telling, Witnessing and Responsibility: Reconstituting
the Body Politic
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Kaye Schaffer, Adelaide University
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| The past decade has witnessed a plethora of truth commissions
around the world, designed to address human rights abuses through the testimonies of its
victims in order to heal deep divisions in a nation’s history. This paper will look
at the importance of storytelling in such contexts. Focussing on the HREOC Inquiry into
the Forced Removal of Indigenous Children from their Families in Australia, it considers
the importance of telling one’s story and having it acknowledged in a national forum,
the different aspects of speaking and listening, and the dynamics that attend a difficult
healing process for indigenous and non -indigenous Australians and for the larger
Australian nation as community. |
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| Kay Schaffer is a Professor in the Department of
Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide where she teaches in the areas of gender
studies, cultural studies and postcoloniality. She is the author of several books,
including Women and the Bush (Cambridge, 1988) and In the Wake of First Contact:
The Eliza Fraser Stories (1995). Her latest publications include the edited
anthologies: Indigenous Australian Voices: A Reader (Rutgers U.P., 1988), Constructions
of Colonialism (Cassell, 1998) and The Olympics at the Millennium
(Rutgers, 2000). |
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