Exchanging with international peers
CCS maintains an ongoing and active program of engagement with international peers both through the attendance of CCS members at international forums such as conferences and by hosting visiting scholars to the Centre at the UTS City Campus.
Visiting scholars to CCS in 2010 included Jeffrey Reitz, Professor of Ethnic Immigration and Pluralism Studies at University of Toronto, and Professor Debal SinghaRoy, Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. Professor SinghaRoy is an Endeavour Fellow undertaking research on Environmental Movements and the Indigenous People in Australia: Dynamics of Participation and Integration that would examine, based on case studies, the extent to which the issues, concerns and cultural perspectives of indigenous peoples are becoming inter-linked with the perspectives of environmental movements in Australia. In August 2010, CCS also hosted Assoc Professor Ran Zhang from Shanghai Open University who worked on research development within the Strengthening Civil Societies node.
In 2009 CCS hosted a number of visiting scholars including Professor Ludger Pries, Professor, Chair of Sociology/Organisation, Migration, Participation at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Germany & CoDirector INCCAS: Intercultural Consultancy and Studies, and Professor Marco Martinello, Director of the Centre d’Etude de l’Ethnicité et des Migrations (Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies) at the University of Liège, Belgium. Professor Pries presented a colloquium on the Transnationalisation of identity discussing these two related specific aspects of identity: the process of transnationalisation of identities and the relation of identities to the frame of reference of humanism. He argued (1) that transnational identities always existed as marginal phenomena but have become a general feature, and (2) that this leads neither to a segmented ethnicizing nor to a generalized simple humanism as cosmopolitism. These main arguments were developed proposing different types of humanisms and the notion of divergent convergence and convergent divergence using the example of citizenship. Professor Martinello spoke on Popular Arts and Diversity in Post Migration Settings, in which he observed the role that popular arts plays in the theoretical and policy debates about diversity in post-migration urban settings and extrapolated that popular arts could therefore be a useful tool in local integration and social cohesion policies.
Professor Gulkhumor Tuychieva was a visiting scholar with the Centre in 2009 with the generous support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which allowed her to develop her research on a comparative study of women’s leadership in Australia and Uzbekistan. Professor Tuychieva is a leading scholar in oriental studies and gender development in Central Asia. and in particular a specialist on the women’s movement, education and civil society in Uzbekistan where she holds the post of Professor of Persian Studies at the Tashkent State Institute of Oriental Studies and lectures in philology, Persian literature and literary theory.
Professor Helmut Anheir, Professor of Sociology at Heidelberg University and the academic director of the Heidelberg Centre for Social Investment, also visited the Centre in 2009 in association with QUT’s Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies and Philanthropy Australia, to participate in informal discussions with CCS academics engaged in research on civil society, the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, organizational studies, and related government policy.
In 2008 CCS hosted a number of visiting scholars who have presented papers at the CCS 2008 Public Lecture series. The first of these was Jeffrey Reitz, Professor of Ethnic Immigration and Pluralism Studies at University of Toronto and an eminent scholar in the field of Migration and Diversity Studies. Professor Reitz's lecture addressed research on religion, religiosity and the social integration of immigrants.
Professor Patrick Bond, the Director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durbin, South Africa, was another international scholar who presented a public lecture in the 2008 series. His lecture, 'Learning and action in water resource development - the role of civil society', addressed the engagement of progressive civil society in the management of water resources in the face of current challenges.
In October 2007 CCS convened a major international conference. The event was timed to bring a range of international participants to Sydney for a series of discussions with CCS members. The purpose was to create an informal process of peer exposure and review, and to create new international linkages for the emergent CCS research group.
The conference was a significant success, bringing together discrete fields of international scholarship, across the four programs of research, in order to consolidate the inter-disciplinary ambit of the Centre. Through 2008 the conference papers were prepared for publication in the CCS electronic journal 'Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal'. Relationships established at the 2007 conference have led to new scholarly exchanges, with CCS public lectures delivered by leading researchers in CCS-linked centres around the world.
