Fellowship: Australian National University
Each year, a theme is chosen which inspires and informs research activity within the HRC. This theme is not intended to constrain, but, interpreted imaginatively, to foster collaboration between scholars from diverse fields and backgrounds. The HRC offers fellowships with grants to cover travel (up to $AUD3,000) and accommodation in Canberra to applicants working on projects connected to the annual theme. Applications for these are due each year in April for fellowships tenable in the following calendar year. Fellowships are from 6 to 12 weeks, with preference given to periods of longer duration. (Shorter and longer periods of tenure may be considered in special circumstances.)
2017 Theme: The Question of the Stranger
The theme asks us to look at the way individuals and cultures have understood, represented, and dealt with strangers in their intellectual, linguistic, legal, cultural, and artistic traditions; the way the dialectic of the familiar and the foreign has become the very condition of understanding and organisation in the world we have created for ourselves to live in. The question of the stranger not only reaches back to the oldest human culture and earliest human imaginings, it also presents (arguably paradoxically) with a special urgency today, in the so-called 'global' age we currently inhabit. 'Its ramifications are legal, ethical, and indeed comprehensively human', writes Simpson: 'who is welcomed and who is turned away? Who is a friend and who is an enemy? Who deserves the protection of the law and who is outside it? At what point does the working norm give way to the exception, and who gets to decide?' Over the last 350 years, we have witnessed an Enlightenment project of cosmopolitan universalism that sought to overcome the conditioned estrangement of religion, race, gender, and country of origin by way of reason, science, or sympathy, break down in protracted war, cultural misunderstanding, 'scientific' racial stereotyping, and the birth of often aggressive forms of racism and nationalism. Indeed, it is precisely because we are everyday forging more and more global connections with peoples once geographically distant and culturally alienated that we need to engage with the question of the stranger as it continues to inform human thought and feeling and their critical and creative expression.
