Conference website:

Minding the Present: Bodies, Places, Matter in and between Australia and Europe

Padua, 17-19 September 2025

Call for papers

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the conference Minding the Present: Bodies, Places, Matter in and between Australia and Europe, to be held on 17-19 September 2025, at the University of Padova (Italy). In this conference we aim to explore the demands of the present, the actions and interactions we are all bound to set into motion in order to engage in political and art-activistic practices to start caring for and curing our vulnerable planet and our insecure standing on and with it.

Central to our exploration is the ontology of the present—the hic et nunc (here and now)—together with the concepts of present orientation and the re-figurations of time/s. We will focus on how, through discourse, art, literature and geopolitical praxis, we can understand, experience, and potentially reshape both our perception of time, particularly in relation to the present moment. We are especially interested in investigating the present as a dynamic space situated between archives of the past (Hall, 2001) and what P. Saint-Amour has defined as traumatic anticipations of the future (Saint-Amour, 2015), taking into account nonlinear, non-Western and Indigenous cosmologies and heterotopias. In this way, we assert that, as Hodgson suggests, “the present moment is not… a static fixed coalescence but a super complexity, the dynamism of which determines its ability for anticipation” (2013, p. 31).

We seek to examine the shaping experiences, identities, and perceptions of the present as a catalyst to urgent action both in Australia—with a special alertness to the very rooted cultures of Indigenous Australia—and in the complex relations between Europe and Australia. The conference particularly welcomes contributions from literature, linguistics, the performing arts, anthropology, cultural geography, memory studies, political and legal studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.

Among the questions that contributions may address, we would be interested in the following ones:

  1. How are traditional notions of past, present, and future being reshaped in contemporary contexts? How do these reconfigurations manifest in cultural, social, and political spheres?
  2. How do ‘we’ negotiate between historical archives and future anticipations? How is this tension made readable and visible in/via art?
  3. Relationality: how do Indigenous epistemologies challenge and expand Western notions of the time, especially the concept of the present?
  4. Rootedness and ‘inauguration’ (see M. Augé, “Starting again is living through a new beginning, a birth” The Future, 2014): How do individuals and communities maintain a sense of rootedness in the face of global changes? How does rootedness interact with our orientation in the present?
  5. Caring/Curing: How do practices of care and healing manifest in the present moment? How do they shape our understanding and orientation of bodies, places, and matter?
  6. The ontology of the present: How do we understand and conceptualize the nature of our current reality, especially in its entanglement with the vulnerable, powerful, meaningful places, matter and shapes of more-than-human and human life that inhabit Australia and Europe and the spaces in-between them?
  7. How can our understanding of the present moment inform and inspire concrete actions and interventions? Is there hope in the present tense, and how might melancholic epistemologies be transformed by, for example, Indigenous cosmologies?
  8. How does the anticipation of future events, changes, or challenges shape our present experiences and actions in the connections between Australia and Europe?
  9. How do historical traumas continue to influence the literary and cultural relations between Australia and Europe?

We invite contributions that address the following topics (but are not limited to them):

  • The role of cultural, literary, artistic archives in shaping present understandings and future projections
  • Temporal re-configurations in literature, performing arts, anthropology and politics
  • Anticipatory practices and their impact on literature and art
  • Nonlinear and alternative conceptions of time in artistic, cultural and literary practices
  • Present-oriented practices in various disciplines and contexts
  • Performing arts as a medium for exploring and transforming the present
  • Corporeality and embodiment in relation to time and cultural contexts
  • Geographies of the present: making and claiming places and spaces in and between Australia and Europe
  • Migrations and diasporas: bodies in motion through time and space
  • Resurgence of Indigenous knowledge systems and practices, including temporal philosophies, relational cosmologies, and storytelling
  • Regeneration initiatives: rethinking time in ecological contexts and texts
  • Relationality: how do Indigenous epistemologies challenge and expand Western notions of the time, especially the concept of the present?
  • Ecologies and environment: comparing Australian and European perspectives on orientation, the immediate present, care, and rootedness
  • Environmental resurgence and regeneration initiatives as forms of immediate care and reorientation
  • Cultural and literary approaches to the ontology of the present
  • Activist strategies and calls for action in contemporary Australia and in Australia-Europe relations
  • Collective memory and forgetting and their role in shaping present anxieties and actions

We particularly encourage papers that explore the interplay between archives of the past, the present moment, and anticipations of the future, examining how these temporal dimensions interact in the Australian and Australia-Europe contexts, especially those that draw from literature, the performing arts, anthropology, postcolonial studies, gender studies, trauma and disability studies, politics and legal studies.

References:

Augé, M., The Future, London, Verso, 2014

Hall, S., “Constituting an Archive”, Third Text, 15(54), 2001, pp. 89–92

Hodgson, A., “Towards an Ontology of the Present Moment”, On the Horizon, 21(1), pp. 24-38

Jameson, J., A Singular Modernity. Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London, Verso, 2002

Saint-Amour, P., Tense Future. Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015

Deadlines

Abstract (300-400 words) and a short bionote (200 words)

8 June 2025

Notification of acceptance

20 June 2025

(open from 2 July – please note that panelists must be or become regular EASA members)

Early bird  –  2-25 July 2025

200 euros

25 August-14 September 2025

280 euros

PhD students

100 euros

Students and PhD students of the University of Padova

no fees

Fees include coffee and lunch breaks, plus a conference set.
The conference dinner will take place on 18 September (more info on costs and the location will be offered at a later stage on the dedicated website).

Programme

General Programme

Parallel Panels

FRAUGHT ENCOUNTERS

14.30-16.15 – Room 4
Chair:
Iva Polak

Jan Lencznarowicz (Krakow), The Present as an Inspiration and Transitional Stage towards Future  Australia in Early Australian Nationalist Voices in the Colonial Period 

Chen Hong (Shanghai East China Normal University), Chinese ANZACs in Europe: A Study of Chinese  Australians’ Participation in the First World War 

Daozhi Xu (Sydney), Negotiating Race, Intimacy, and Law: Chinese-Indigenous Relations in Settler Colonial Australia, 1890s–1930s

ENTANGLEMENTS

14.30-16.15 – Room 5
Chair: Eleonora Federici
 

Paul Gillen (Sydney-Canberra), When Is Communism? – Jack Lindsay’s Temporalities

Tihana Klepac (Zagreb), Archival Interventions and Memory Work: Rosa Praed, Marcus Clarke, and the Literary Afterlife of Colonial Trauma

Meg Brayshaw (Sydney), Dymphna Cusack and the Politics of the Realist Novel, then and now

David Carter (Queensland), Minding the Past: The Significance of Cultural Magazines, Regional Print and Modernity in Australia

SHIMMERS

16.45-18.30 – Room 4
Chair: Astrid Schwegler-Castañer

Theodora Patrona (Thessaloniki), “The Tragedy of Success”: Greek Australian Women’s Subjectivity in Vasso Kalamaras’s Short Story “Kyra Kalli’s Daughter” (2006)

Cecilia Gall (Budapest), Ange and the Boss: Centre, Displacement, and the Margins of the Beautiful Game

Bárbara Arizti (Zaragoza), Transmodern Metaphorising in Sofie Laguna’s Infinite Splendours

Samantha Lenglos (Arras), “That is the way to all time…”: re-thinking the notion of archive through the Indigenous concept of Deep Time in The Yield by Tara June Winch

GRIEVING (IN) THE PRESENT

16.45-18.30 – Room 5
Chair:
Claudia Davidson-Novosivschei

Marilena Parlati (Padova), Stuck at the Edge of Time: Nuclearity On The Beach

Brigid Rooney (Sydney), The Ancient Present: Time and the Self in Writing by David Malouf

Irma Krcan (Zagreb), Grief, Nostalgia and Solastalgia in All Times: Pluralising the Temporality of the Anthropocene in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

Dany Adone (Köln), Geoff Rodoreda (Stuttgart), Arteries of ‘Country’: Re-thinking Rivers

AFTERMATHS

11.15-13.00 – Room 4
Chair:
Maria Renata Dolce

Dolores Herrero (Zaragoza), Environmental Dystopia and Relational Solidarity in Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations

Jaroslav Kušnír (Prešov), Past, Present, Dreaming and Aboriginal Identity: Nardi Simpsons Belburd

Lars Jensen (Roskilde), Gordon Bennett’s Artistic Practice and Thoughts in a Rapidly Changing Indigenous Australian Artistic Landscape

Roberta Trapé (Melbourne), Rejecting Rootedness to Begin again: Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice

NAMING, PLACING, ROOTING

11.15-13.00 – Room 5
Chair:
Salhia Ben-Messahel

Anna Gosebrink (Köln), Dany Adone (Köln-Sydney), ‘Bigmoba triyi’: Insights into Quantification in an  Australian Creole Language 

Katarína Danková (Košice), Rooted in the Present: Indigenous Temporality, Language, and Land in Tara  June Winch’s The Yield 

Margherita Zanoletti (Milano), Australia’s Stolen Generations and (Inter-)Epistemic Translation: The  Case of Ali Cobby Eckermann

THINKING THE FUTURE?

14.30-16.15 – Room 5
Chair:
Dany Adone 

Salhia Ben-Messahel (Toulon), Writing as Activism, the Dark Age of Innocence in Tim Winton’s Juice 

Zuzanna Zarebska Sanches (Lisbon), The Narratives of Care and Ageing in Charlotte Wood’s The  Weekend and Stone Yard Devotional: Of Women, Mice and Dogs 

Stacey Roberts (Melbourne), Colonial Mythscape in Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow (1980)

Iva Polak (Zagreb), Indigenous Epistemologies and AI: Deep Time Meets Deep Tech in Australia 

TIME FOR CARING

11.30-13.00 – Room 5
Chair:
Geoff Rodoreda 

Reia Farrall-Anquet (Grenoble), Strategic Pasts and Precarious Futures: Rethinking the Indo-Pacific in  the Present (maybe online) 

Valérie-Anne Belleflamme (Liège), Minding the Present and Speaking Shadows: Time and  Responsibility in Gail Jones’ Writing 

Astrid Schwegler-Castaner (Balearic Islands), “And We’ll Start Our Lives”: The Politics and Poetics of  Love in Madeleine Gay’s Green Dot 

Claudia Davidson-Novosivschei (Babeș-Bolyai), Violence: From the Epistemology of Ignorance to the  Multiplicity of Voices

Conveners

Plenary Lectures

Nowadays; the Extra-terrestrial, the Expanded Present and the Indigenous ‘Everywhen’

Gail Jones

Current postcolonial thinking admits not just terrestrial knowledge of imperial settlement, but also the extra-terrestrial, the ways in which ocean and sky have been sites of colonization and ‘Western’ hegemony. This paper considers the globe, the present, and the cross-cultural history of the sky. It asks whether it is possible to think from ‘other side’ of colonial temporality.  First, I argue for radical locatedness in the ways in which we might come to imaginative and academic knowledge between Europe and Australia. Second, I say a little about global thinking and philosophies of time, emphasizing unpredictability as a rejection of determinism and a refocussing on agency and capacity to change the future. Part three of this paper looks at the history of imagining the Southern skies, from their first description in Augsburg, Germany, in 1603, and compared to the development of ethnoastronomy and the ‘situated knowledge’ of Indigenous Australian cosmology. The final section considers the Indigenous ‘everywhen’ and ‘literary futurism’ and closes with a celebration of the sky painting of the great Walpiri artist, Paddy Japaljarri Sims (1917-2010).

The Politics of Allegiance in Anita Heiss’s Dirrayawadha

Maggie Nolan

In the field of Australian literary studies in the 1990s, there was a surge in books by white Australian authors that dealt explicitly with the issue of reconciliation between settler Australians and First Nations /Indigenous Australians. These were frequently historical fictions by some of Australia’s most renowned writers including Kate Grenville, Alex Miller and Gail Jones.
More recently, though, there has been an increase in historical novels by Indigenous authors who are less likely to draw upon the tropes of reconciliation. Rather, these novels focus more on the challenges and limitations of allegiance and alliances. In this sense, they are as much about the present, as they are about the past. After setting out the broad field, this paper will focus on Anita Heiss’s recently published historical novel Dirrayawadha (2024). Dirrayawadha, which means “Rise Up!” in Wiradjuri, and the novel is a fictionalised telling of the Bathurst Wars of the 1820s that had such a profound impact on Wiradjuri people and set up a pattern for frontier violence that continued across the continent.
Dirrayawadha tells the story of the historical Wiradyuri leader, Windradyne, through the lens of a fictional sister, a young Wiradyuri woman, Miinaa, who works as a domestic for an Irish family, the Nugents, who were granted land ownership by the British which they called ‘Cloverdale’. When Irish convict and political prisoner, Dan O’Dwyer, arrives at Cloverdale, Miinaa and Dan bond, partly through a shared sense of having faced injustice at the hands of the British. Through this relationship, and using some of the tropes of romance, Heiss explores the complexities of unequal power relationships within and between allies. While ostensibly historical fiction, this novel is also about the challenges of the present in contemporary Australia, and the importance of historical ties to Europe over two centuries.

Eucalyptus: Transnational Relations of Empire, Settler Colonialism, Slavery

Joseph Pugliese

The eucalypt tree is a pervasive presence in the Italian South, often encompassing vast forests that inscribe the southern landscape. Prompted by the knowledge that the eucalyptus is a native tree of Indigenous Nations in the continent of so-called Australia, in this paper I attempt to answer two research questions: When did the eucalypt tree first arrive in the Italian peninsula? Which forces were operative in its translocation? In the course of the paper, I trace an historical genealogy of the eucalyptus in the context of its transnational history and its diasporic journeys from so-called Australia to Britain and thence to the Italian South. My concern is to reveal the topological relations of empire, settler colonialism, slavery and botany that are materialised by a critical examination of the eucalyptus in its southern Italian context. In doing so, I examine how the eucalyptus arrived in the Italian South via Sir Joseph Bank’s expropriation of the plant during his Endeavour voyage with Captain James Cook.
The eucalyptus tree was first planted in Italy in the English Garden of the Royal Palace of Caserta, north of Naples, through the mediation of Banks. Caserta’s Royal Palace and English Garden, I argue, are entangled with intersecting histories of empire, settler colonialism and slavery. By discussing a number of eucalypt trees across a diversity of spaces, I envisage the trees as witnesses that attest to and disclose transcultural histories which would otherwise remain occluded.

Getting there and Touring the City

Scientific Committee

Dany Adone, Valérie-Anne Belleflamme, Salhia Ben-Messahel, Matthew Graves, Marie Herbillon, Irma Krčan, Maggie Nolan, Claudia Novosivschei, Marilena Parlati, Iva Polak, Geoff Rodoreda, Astrid Schwegler Castañer

Organising Committee

Maria Renata Dolce (University of Lecce)

Eleonora Federici (University of Ferrara)

Francesca Mussi (University of Pisa)

Marilena Parlati (University of Padova)