Hawke InConversation Series

China, the passion of the political and the everyday

To be delivered by Michael Dutton

Research Professor of Political Cultures at the Griffith Asia Institute and Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London

Friday 13 March 2009

Audio transcript available here 

Beginning with a short series of videos that lead from a registry office in a suburban police station in Beijing to an inner-city neighbourhood community, this tour of the city's backstreets leads from questions of government registration into the heart of political emotion. In a series of empirically based exemplifications this forum will show the way that politics is often grounded on affective relations, on emotion, and, at times on passion. It will also point to the way in which the study of politics in the West has too often forgotten this.

Chair: Professor Pal Ahluwalia, Pro Vice Chancellor of the Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, UniSA and Director of the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies

Michael Dutton is the Research Professor of Political Cultures at the Griffith Asia Institute and Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and has written extensively in journals such as Public Culture, Social Text and positions. His books include Policing and Punishment in China (CUP 1992), Streetlife China (CUP 1999), and Policing Chinese Politics: A History (Duke 2005). The last of these books won the American Asian Studies Association Levenson Prize for the best book on contemporary China 2007. His most recent book is co-authored. Called Beijing Time it was published by Harvard UP in 2008.

The Hawke Centre and Hawke Research Institute are pleased to present a series of Conversations with visiting scholars and experts.  This series commenced in 2009 and enables us to extend our thinking about topics that emanate from a more globalised world view. Among the topics in the spotlight are: Race, Diaspora and Postcolonial Studies; the Arts; New Media and Technologies; and, Globalization Studies and Education.  

While the views presented by speakers within the Hawke Centre public program are their own and are not necessarily those of either the University of South Australia or The Hawke Centre, they are presented in the interest of open debate and discussion in the community and reflect our themes of: strengthening our democracy - valuing our cultural diversity - and building our future.