Articulating Opposition: Population Management and Practices of Resistance
The Laureate Centre for History and Population, 12 December 2025
Morven Brown, Lv. 3, Room 353
Convenor
Dr. Sarah Kennedy Bates
Contributing Scholars
Prof. Mina Roces, UNSW Sydney
Dr Laura Correa Ochoa, Rice University
Dr Stephen Pascoe, UNSW Sydney
Dr Micaela Pattison, Flinders University
Dr Virginie Rey, Deakin University
Rimi Nandy, UNSW Sydney
Daniel Swain, Yale University
Katrien Verbeke, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Synopsis
This academic workshop invites early career researchers to critically and creatively examine the concept of opposition from a historical perspective, with a focus on its political, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions. As authoritarian tendencies intensify across global contexts, the category of opposition—its meanings, mediations, and mobilisations—demands urgent reassessment. From the suppression of dissent to the strategic invocation of ‘the people’ as a homogenous body, contemporary regimes increasingly rely on discourses of division, co-optation, and corporatist unity to manage populations and forestall genuine contestation. Crucially, rising authoritarianism is bound up with the history and politics of population—from immigration and labour policy to land, energy, and food governance, as well as anti-trans legislation and the broader biopolitics of sex, gender, and sexuality. These state strategies not only regulate bodies and social life but also delimit the conditions under which opposition can be conceived, organised, or enacted. This event will consider how opposition has been defined, resisted, framed, and refigured in diverse historical conjunctures, and will ask what remains possible under the sign of resistance.
Program
| 12 December 2025 – Morven Brown, Lv.3, Room 353 | |
| 9.30am – 9.45am | Morning Coffee and Tea |
| 9.45am – 10am | Introduction and Welcome |
| 10am – 11am | Panel 1: Community Self-Fashioning and Resistance |
| Daniel Swain (Literature and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, Yale University) ‘Mongrelitude: Transhumanism and the Poetics of Resistance’ | |
| Dr Virginie Rey (Anthropology, Deakin University) ‘Ars Musealis: Community Museums as Technologies of the Self’ | |
| Chair: Prof. Alison Bashford (UNSW) | |
| 11am – 12pm | Panel 2: Land, Justice and Memory Struggles |
| Dr Laura Correa Ochoa (History, Rice University) ‘The Counter-Plantation in Neoliberal Times: Land Reform and Multiculturalism in Colombia in the 1990s’ | |
| Dr Stephen Pascoe (History, UNSW) ‘Resisting Oblivion: Transitional Justice and the Archive of Syrian Suffering’ | |
| Chair: Prof. Heidi Norman (UNSW) | |
| 12pm – 1pm | Lunch |
| 1pm – 2pm | Panel 3: Laughter, Fashion and Feminist Resistance |
| Dr Micaela Pattison (History, Flinders University) ‘“Pretty Girls With Angry Faces”: Laughter, Labour and the Urban Seamstress in Interwar Spain’ | |
| Prof. Mina Roces (History, UNSW) ‘Dress as Resistance: Fashion and the Self-Transformation of Filipina Domestic Workers in Singapore, 1990s-2017’ | |
| Chair: Assoc. Prof. Zora Simic (UNSW) | |
| 2pm – 2.30pm | Afternoon Coffee and Tea |
| 2.30pm – 4pm | Panel 4: Paternalism, Resistance, the Aesthetics of Political Condescension |
| Dr Sarah Kennedy Bates (History, UNSW) ‘State-Sponsored Infantilisation: Demography and Violent Affability in Neo-Authoritarian Southeast Asia’ | |
| Rimi Nandy (History, UNSW) ‘”Because They Know No Better”: “Poor Women’s Ignorance” and Early-Age Hysterectomy in India’ | |
| Katrien Verbeke (Visual Culture Studies, VUB) ‘Damming Dissent: Countervisuality and Resistance to Silencing in Colombia’s Green Energy Transition’ | |
| Chair: Dr Joanne Faulkner (Macquarie University) | |
| 4.30pm | Drinks – Shakespeare Hotel, Surry Hills |
For more info contact Dr Sarah Kennedy Bates (s.kennedy_bates@unsw.edu.au)