Promoting sociology in Australia
Facilitating sociology teaching and research
Enhancing the professional development of TASA members
Rural Australians have "grudgingly" come to accept free market policies,
a
public forum will be told during a national conference at the University
of New England next month.
The forum, "The End of the Rural?", will include speakers Professor
Geoffrey Lawrence, Director of the Rural Social and Economic Research Centre
at
the University of Queensland, and Rick Farley, former Executive Director of
the National Farmers’ Federation.
The forum, free and open to all, will be in Armidale Town Hall on Thursday,
December 4 at 8 pm, and is part of a three-day conference at UNE,
organised by The Australian Sociological Association.
Professor Lawrence is also expected to talk at the conference about
rural Australians’ precarious future. "Present policy settings seem to
be
accelerating socioeconomic decline in rural regions, but the overall
outcome appears to be a grudging acceptance by rural people of free market
policies," he said.
Mr Farley will be looking at how the floating dollar has affected rural
communities and will pay special attention to Indigenous communities
that, he said, "will become a significantly larger proportion of rural
and
remote communities over the next 24 years". Mr Farley is Chairman of the
NSW
Resources and Conservation Assessment Council and a member of the
Australian Landcare Council.
The forum will encourage questions and debate from the floor. It will be
chaired by UNE¹s Associate Professor Tony Sorensen and include Jan
FitzGerald, President of Australian Women in Agriculture. It will
conclude at 10 pm.
One of the conference organisers, UNE Senior Lecturer Dr Peter Corrigan,
said the public forum was aimed at sparking thought among regional
Australians about their future. "That is why we posed the question, ‘The
End of the Rural?’," Dr Corrigan said. "We would like to hear what
our
community thinks is their future."
The conference itself, on December 4, 5 and 6 will be made up of
sessions in which sociologists from across Australia will present papers on
a range
of topics. Areas to be examined include health, family life, the
environment, and ethnicity. Among the almost 200 papers to be presented are
Dr Gail
Hawkes’s talk on "The Sexual Landscape of the New Millennium", Eduardo
de la Fuente’s presentation on "Teaching Introductory Sociology through
Popular Culture", and a paper presented by Kath Albury titled "Understanding
Pornography in Australia".
Media contact: Dr Peter Corrigan, School of Social Science, UNE, Armidale
(02) 6773 2179
or
Lydia Clifford, Public Relations Manager, UNE, Armidale
(02) 6773 2779.