The joint Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology and Interpretation Australia conference will be taking place between the 10th and 14th of October 2017 and will be a conference with a difference. The theme is “Travelling Stories: connecting people and landscapes”. It will bring people together to explore new ways of telling stories about the important landscapes, places and environments in which we live and work. It will be a travelling conference, moving through venues from Launceston to Hobart via key places along the Midlands Highway including the World Heritage-listed Brickendon; Ross; the Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary and the Shene Estate. We anticipate the attendance of people from a broad range of disciplines and professions to explore common ground and approaches.
The conference theme will allow for the development of joint sessions and cross-disciplinary discussions about how data and research become transformed into knowledge and how knowledge can be shared with a wide range of audiences in a constantly changing world, as well as the opportunity for each organisation to develop sessions that relate to its professional interests and concerns. The sessions will be in the format of both formal conference sessions and informal integrated field excursions, and will also include some post-conference field trips.
The focus will be on the telling of new stories, using established and developing technologies for better interpretive outcomes, and in reaching audiences that previously may have seemed either physically remote or challenging to engage. We aim to foster new thinking, profitable collaborations and an atmosphere that encourages challenging the status quo.
Call for sessions
The conference convenors and organisers have already identified some key conference topics and programme spaces where these will be jointly addressed. We are now seeking suggestions from people who wish to propose and organise standalone sessions and/or workshops. These might be organisation-specific but we are open to suggestions that could be of interest to delegates from both organisations.
Session organisers are responsible for recruiting papers; introducing and timing the session; managing questions and concluding the session. Sessions are 100 minutes in duration and are designed to accommodate five papers of 15 minutes with 5 minutes for questions OR 4 papers of 20 minutes duration and a concluding discussion period of 20 minutes OR a workshop.
To facilitate the timely completion of the conference programme we ask that session proposals be submitted to the Organising Committee at: [email protected] by Monday 3rd July. For details of what needs to be included, please see the attached flyer.