Colonisation and domestic service: historical and contemporary perspectives research symposium
Professor Victoria Haskin’s Future Fellowship has bought together history, anthropology, gender studies, geography, fine art and law scholars from around the world to share insights about the connections between domestic service and colonisation.
In Her Place: State Intervention and Indigenous Domestic Service in Australia and the United States, 1880-1945 seeks to understand the expropriation and exploitation of land and resources by one group over another.
This symposium provided an opportunity to workshop individual papers in a collegial environment, drawing out key themes, topics and issues across different sites and times.
Dr Claire Lowrie and Professor Pam Nilan co-organised and co-convened five panels in which established and emerging scholars and post graduate students from Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Singapore, South Africa, Papua New Guinea and Australia participated.
These panel were; Resistance, Intimacies and Anxieties, the State and Domestic Service, Settler Colonialism and Domestic Service and Comparisons and Legacies.
A range of topics explored in these panels included:
- What is the relationship between domestic service and colonisation historically and into the present?
- How do the experiences and patterns of domestic service connect with processes of dispossession, displacement, and invasion and the social and cultural upheavals that such processes generate?
- What is the relationship between colonisation, and the gendering and racialising of domestic service?
- Is there a difference between domestic service in settler and non-settler colonies?
- Have such differences affected contemporary domestic service patterns?
- How has colonisation impacted on domestic service not only in the places being colonised, but in the colonising society "back home"?
- What are the historical parallels and connections between domestic service under colonisation, and the transnational nature of much domestic work today?
- What was/is the impact of colonisation on political organisation, activism and resistance in domestic service?
- How and why have colonising regimes sought to manage domestic labour and can we see similar or continuous developments in postcolonial states and neocolonial contexts?
- What are the implications for calls for government regulation of domestic work, particularly of migrant domestic work, today?
The keynote speakers were Professor Mary Romero (Arizona State University), Professor Barry Higman (ANU), and Associate Professor Swapna Banerjee (Brooklyn College of CUNY).
A selection of the workshopped papers resulting from the symposium will be included as peer-reviewed chapters in a book published by an international academic press.
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The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.