Last year, we used the affordances of Zoom to cast our net wide. This semester, we are staying local

Teaching and Embodying ‘Diversity’ in the Australian University

Combined presentation:

Dr Jane Chi Hyun Park | GCS

Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon | University of Wollongong

Dr Shawna Ser Wei Tang | GCS

In this presentation, we discuss our personal and professional experiences as Asian migrant academics who embody and teach ‘diversity’ in the Australian university. Our racial and cultural differences are assumed to make us ‘culturally competent’ experts on ‘diversity’ even as we are challenged by everyday and structural forms of racism. Centering on the affective relations that constitute our ‘difference’, we re-visit particular scenes of racist encounters in and around the workplace and reflect on the pedagogic work we do in addressing institutional racisms that undergird the curriculum and the culture of the university. Although the repeated returning to these sites can be burdensome and traumatic, they are also grounds from which we might imagine and cultivate spaces of learning and resistance.

Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon (she/her) is a fire dragon feminist. Ee Ling is on a mission to fill up her fire dragon feminist arsenal with superpowers, and summon her superpowers to expose inequalities, blow flames at injustices, rebuild communities for a more just and equal world. She has very little patience for white male mediocrity, misogyny, patriarchy, racism and queerphobia. Ee Ling is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and School Education Leader, University of Wollongong (UOW). Her research and teaching areas include genders, sexualities, families, migration, race, inequalities, intersectionality, feminisms and social policy. She is the author of Transnational Divorce: Understanding Intimacies and Inequalities from Singapore (Routledge 2020) and Perspectives on Marital Dissolution: Divorce Biographies in Singapore (Springer 2015). Ee Ling is the recipient of UOW Vice-Chancellor’s Rosemary Cooper Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Award in 2020. Passionate about social justice work, she serves as the Chair of UOW Ally Network, Principal Investigator of Jindaola project to decolonise curriculum, and a committee member of UOW Forging United Safe Environments Network (anti-racism).

Dr Jane Chi Hyun Park is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research explores the impact of popular culture on changing notions of race and gender, with a focus on media representations of East Asian and Asian diasporic identities and cultures.  Jane has published work in a wide range of journals including Cultural Studies, World Literature Today, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Educational Philosophy and Theory as well as anthologies on film, media, and popular culture. Her monograph, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), examined the growing popularity of East Asian bodies and styles in American films from the 1980s to the early 2000s.  Jane also freelances as a cultural and creative consultant working with various organizations, including Proctor & Gamble, CISCO Technologies, Space Doctors, BrisAsia, and Goalpost Pictures.

Dr Shawna Ser Wei Tang is Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She researches sexuality, gender and race, with a focus on Asia and Australia. Shawna is the author of Postcolonial Lesbian Identities in Singapore (Routledge, 2016). Her projects include sexuality studies in Asia, non-normative women and same-sex intimacies in Singapore, LGBT politics in Singapore and Indonesia, older lesbian sexualities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, and the politics of the intimate in neoliberal university settings. Other in-progress research includes older transmasculinities in Asia, affirmative feminist studies of transmasculine boyhoods, queer Asian migration, and pedagogies of difference and inclusion in Australia as part of Asia. Shawna teaches and coordinates two diversity units: GCST1604 Introduction to Diversity and GCST3637 Cultural Politics of Difference.

When | 14 May  / 2:30pm – 4:00pm

Where | Hybrid event – in person and zoom

Location | Social Sciences Building (A02) – Room 650

• TO ATTEND IN PERSON: Register here (Eventbrite)
• TO ATTEND VIA ZOOM: Make sure you’re on the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Seminar list to receive the Zoom invitation.