Keynote Speakers
Brian Martin
Professor Brian Martin is associate professor in the School of Social Sciences,
Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the
author of 200 major papers in a range of areas including scientific
controversies, war and peace, information issues, suppression of dissent,
democracy and strategies for social movements. His writings concerning education
include studies of plagiarism, dissent in academia, and academic-activist links.
He is also the author of 12 books, most recently Nonviolence Speaks:
Communicating against Repression (co-author: Wendy Varney; Hampton Press, 2003)
and Justice Ignited: The Dynamics of Backfire (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, in
press). His writings have been translated into 18 languages.
He has advised hundreds of whistleblowers and dissidents, including many academics and students. He maintains a large website on suppression of dissent and is international director of Whistleblowers Australia. In his teaching, he has used a wide of innovative techniques to foster student initiative, as well as unusual assignments that reduce plagiarism and make marking interesting. For further details and a full list of publications, see http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/.
Cathy Small
Cathy Small, Ph.D. is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona
University, in Flagstaff, Arizona where she has taught for 17 years. Her primary
research and writing (including her book Voyages: From Tongan Villages to
American Suburbs) focuses on immigration and transnational issues, and her
special expertise is in Tongan culture. In 2002, she took a detour from her
primary research to try to better understand her students, and enrolled in her
own university as a college freshman. Small moved out of her house and into the
dorms, took a full load of courses, joined student activities, and ate in the
student dining hall. What she found on her year-long journey as a student
profoundly changed her and will be the basis for her talk: What a Professor
Learned by Becoming a Student.
Dr. Small is the recipient of numerous local awards, including her university’s Teacher of the Year and the Faculty Mentor Awards, and has served as a Faculty Fellow and a member of the PEW Higher Education Roundtable. Nationally, she is the recipient of the Praxis Award for Excellence in Applied Anthropology and the national Points of Light award for co-founding the Pipeline mentoring and college scholarship program for low-income youth. Her program received the Governor's Special Recognition award as well as first prize for Best Educational Practices in Post-Secondary Education in the state of Arizona.
Invited Speakers
Bob Birrell
Bob
Birrell is the Director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research (CPUR)
and Reader in Sociology at Monash University. He is also joint editor, with
Katharine Betts, of the quarterly demographic journal People and Place,
published by CPUR.
Bob has a degree in economics from Melbourne University, in history from London University (first class honours) and a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. Most of his academic work has been at Monash University and since 1991 this work has focussed on running the CPUR. He has acted as an advisor on immigration issues to both Labor and Coalition governments and was a member of the Commonwealth Government’s National Population Council from 1987–1993. Recently he was a member of the independent Review of the General Skilled Migration Program which reported in May 2006.
His recent work has been critical of the Australian government’s higher education policy and his recent review (with Virginia Rapson) of Australia’s higher education training record—Clearing the myths away: higher education output and workforce demand (Dusseldorp Skills Forum)—summarises this work. The paper ‘Implications of low English standards among overseas students at Australian universities’ (People and Place, December 2006) explored the impact of overseas student enrolments on the quality of university training in Australia.
Robert Crotty
Emeritus Professor Robert Crotty has spent over forty years in the university and higher
education sector. His academic fields are history and social sciences, including
religion studies, education and ethics. He holds Masters degrees in History,
Theology and Biblical Studies and a doctorate in Education.
Professor Crotty has been Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Jewish/Christian Relations at Cambridge University, Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University and Visiting Scholar the British School of Archaeology in Athens. In 2006 he was appointed Director of the Ethics Centre of South Australia. Professor Crotty has authored six research books and authored or co-authored over twenty other academic books and over fifty journal articles.