Upcoming events
Public Lectures
Kaleidoscope of Care
A Public Lecture on Kindness, Empathy & Compassion
Speaker: Professor Gabrielle Brand, Registered Nurse and Professor at Monash Nursing and Midwifery (MNM), Monash UniversityThis public lecture explores how kindness, empathy, and compassion are felt, embodied experiences shaped by our unique life histories—like shifting patterns in a kaleidoscope. Through personal stories, research insights, and reflections on presence, Professor Brand will illuminate how small acts of care create connection, shared humanity, and transformative spaces in healthcare and everyday life.
Professor Brand is recognised as an international health professions education leader in the co-design of education with healthcare consumers and is the co-founder of the ‘Depth of Field’ narrative portraiture methodology, which is used to teach health professionals to move beyond ‘diagnosis’ to more humanistic models of care. She is an IAS Visiting Fellow, working with Dr Bríd Phillips and Professor Tanya Dalziell at UWA.
Monday, 13 July 2025, 6pm-7pm
Webb Lecture Theatre, UWA (Geography Building)
Dear AI Reader:
Nonhuman Perspective and Evolutionary Thinking in the Human-Machine Relation
Speaker: Chris Danta, Professor of Literature, School of Cybernetics, Australian National University.
Many writers figure machines in evolutionary terms, as living and evolving organisms. The American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick observed in his 1972 speech “The Android and the Human” that in the last decade “our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all this is in fact beginning more and more to possess . . . animation.” Already in the late nineteenth century, English authors Samuel Butler and George Eliot were thinking of machines as living and evolving organisms.
In this talk, Professor Danta will examine how such writers as Dick, Butler, and Eliot rethink what it means to be human by attributing life to their technological environment. He will discuss various speculative rhetorical techniques that writers use to look at the human from the perspective not just of another living organism but also of the surroundings of the human themselves. He will show how writers biologize machines by figuring them as cryptic nonhuman organisms that can merge with and act on behalf of their physical environments. He argues that underlying the techno-anthropologies of writers like Dick, Butler, and Eliot is an environmental understanding of life as the dyadic relation between the organism and its surroundings.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026, 6pm-7pm
Webb Lecture Theatre, UWA (Geography Building)
Workshops, Symposia, Seminars and Roundtables
25 June 2026
Extractive Industries and the Protection and Preservation of Indigenous Heritage. Exploring Collaborative and Comparative Perspectives and Strategies.
The preservation of Indigenous heritage remains a significant challenge within a period increasingly characterised by national and international fragmentation, economic insecurities, and irreversible environmental degradation. The work to protect Indigenous heritage is also made more difficult by legislative and political environments that continue to favour economic development and extractive resource exploitation. In this respect, events, approaches, and engagements in Australia are reflections of wider and interrelated structures and processes that continue in myriad ways across the Global South and beyond. This one-day symposium will bring together national and international experts and practitioners and Aboriginal Traditional Owners to exchange their views and experiences, to discuss case studies, and strategies for reconciliation and remediation, and how positive outcomes can be achieved for all involved parties in a rapidly changing world. For this occasion, we have the privilege to be able to engage with Mélanie Duval and Marie Forget from Savoie Mont Blanc University, France, who are visiting UWA and who have extensive experience in working on the above issues in Europe, Africa and South America.
25 June 2026, 8.30am-5pm, Woolnough Lecture Theatre, Geology, UWA
PROGRAM: Symposium Extractive industries and the protection and preservation of Indigenous heritage
Postgraduate Masterclasses
Mobile Ethnography - A Masterclass With Professor Rob Cover
Tuesday 16 June 2026, 1:30-3:00pm, The Circle, Reid Library, UWA
Understanding people-centric experiences is at the core of all humanities and social sciences research, including particularly cultural, media and audience research, and as a mechanism to generate research impact pathways. However, it has often required laborious effort in interviews, participatory observation and focus groups to gain enough data to produce genuine insights on how people think about and practice social, cultural and mediated engagement. This masterclass will discuss an emergent research method for collecting substantial, rich and relevant data from everyday participants without the burdens and costs associated with traditional data collection, and without the need for sophisticated technological know-how: building an app to conduct mobile ethnography. We will walk through how to build a simple mobile ethnography to collect close-to-real-time people-centric data from everyday participants. Providing the convenience of an app’s look-and-feel and the ease of using a simple survey tool to collect offered data from signed-up participants over a longer period can build a rich data resource for analysis. During this 1.5-hour masterclass, we will discuss the benefits of mobile ethnography apps used at the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre, how to build a very simple interface that mimics an ‘app’, and we will work together to quickly develop and test a mobile ethnography app in real time.
Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication and Director of the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre. He leads a number of major funded research projects on digital harms, young people and wellbeing, and gender/sexuality diversity in screen contexts. He is the author of twelve books, including Identity and Digital Communication: Concepts, Theories, Practices (2023), Identity in the COVID-19 Years: Communication, Crisis, and Ethics (2024) and Australian Queer Screens (2025).
This Masterclass is hosted by the UWA School of Social Sciences, Institute of Advanced Studies and The Frontier Technology and Society Research Lab.
Past lectures
Many of our events are recorded. See our Past lectures page for more information and links to these recordings.