New Professors in the Humanities and the Social Sciences

A Shelf of our own

Writers' Weeks draw record crowds and Creative Writing courses attract the best students, yet literary publishing is in decline and most Australian literature is out of print. What are the traditions and contexts for reading and writing today, here and in the University?

Characteristics of winning organisations in Australia: the winning wheel

Research covering a 20 year time period on 11 high performing Australian organisations concluded that there were nine common elements across these organisations that characterised these organisations and were responsible for their success. The research sought to be applicable to all types of organisations - public and private, profit and non-profit, small and large - rather than the usual focus on listed corporations.
In this presentation, Professor Hubbard, the leader of the research team, will outline the 'winning wheel' framework that evolved from this work. He will discuss the nine elements of the winning wheel. He will also explain how Australian organisations are different from the US role models on which much management theory and practice is based. The presentation will also cover a number of myths about current managerial practice which hold back organisational improvement.

Domestic mandala: houses and the cosmos in Nepal

What could be more ordinary than houses and the straight-forward mundane life that people live within them? Yet, the themes of the lecture are that underlying the ordinariness of Nepali houses are rich and complex ideas about the cosmos and that commonplace domestic activities are simultaneously cosmogenic acts of building the cosmos and revelatory acts of knowing its fundamental principles. I explore this theme through an ethnography of the houses of high caste Hindus of Nepal. Rather than just a backdrop to their everyday lives Nepali houses are materially built, ritually constructed and practically configured functional spaces for domestic life and as mandalas (mystic diagrams) that reiterate the nature of the cosmos. As mandalas, houses are a spatial medium for daily life as well as for embodied knowledge of the cosmos in which that life is given meaning and significance.