Australia - India Council announces every year the "Australian Studies Fellowships for Indian University Teaching Staff and Postgraduates".

The application form can be downloaded from the web-link:

http://www.dfat.gov.au/aic

The Fellowships are announced each year around December–January and the last date for applications is usually sometime in February.

Please forward information about the AIC Fellowships to your colleagues/students.

Sixth Biennial International Conference of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) from January 19 to 21, 2012:

Australia and India Now: Market Economy, Ethics and Empowerment.

Economics can not be free of moral values and therefore can not be neutral where poverty and suffering are involved, its claim to being a ‘moral science nonetheless. That imperative perhaps is a parameter also of a just world order.

While the second decade of the 21st century has seen nations getting out of the financial crisis or at least hopeful of being out of it soon, there continue to be perennial challenges of, at random, governance, inflation, ecology, rising prices, not only of petroleum products and gold sovereign, but also of essential commodities as well. It almost as if the civilization floating on a crisis experiences small temporally local distress situations that seem to give way to one another. Is our contemporary world like an obstacle race athlete ordained to move from one crisis to another. So there are issues to be handled foremost among them being the vagaries of and the fights for markets. In dealing with these the boundaries between East and West, strong and weak economies, rich and poor, good and bad governance become fuzzy in the overriding play of power and power groups.

Nations address these challenges in their own different ways. Not only the commercial or the economic but also the cultural and philosophical responses vary – and matter. Literatures embody these responses and hold important insights for global communication and communion. The world of learning and scholarship provides the ground for new approaches and new ideas and new modes of negotiations within and beyond nations. Often the issues are also addressed bilaterally, comparatively, between nations that share a commonality of understanding and vision.

At the Sixth Biennial International Conference of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) to be held in Delhi in January 2012, we invite scholars and academics to address these wider issues with a focus on the overarching theme ‘Australia and India Now: Market Economy, Ethics and Empowerment’. Australia and India, as we know, share a good volume of trade, of goods, and now of ideas as well..

Australia is India’s sixth largest and India is Australia’s fifth largest trading partner. Besides, the two market economies have commonalities such as simultaneous increase in interest rates in early 2011. It is a shared trend as against the economies of United States, Europe and Japan which have low interest rates for propping up of their economies. The Australian dollar too has touched comparable levels with the US dollar. The convergences and divergences of the two economies, their functioning, policy making, management, expansion and consolidation are issues for economists, planners, bureaucrats, cultural diplomats, philosophers, scientists, artists, law makers and people from all walks of life. How does the world of letters cognize these issues that touch the lives of live, be it the issue of mining revenue in Australia or 2G spectrum in India? In the perspective of the above and related issues the IASA Conference in Delhi in collaboration with Pondicherry University invites abstracts on the sub-themes as identified below:

• Literature and the Arts
• Contemporary Australia
• Globalisation and the State
• Foreign Policy/Diplomacy
• National Security
• Society and Development
• Human Rights
• Environment and Sustainable Development
• Australia and India in International Politics
• Internationalisation of Education
• Science and Technology

Conference Fees:

For Indian participants:

Rs. 1000.00 for members
Rs. 1500.00 for non-members
Rs. 500.00 for students

For Foreign participants:

AUD 150.00 for members
AUD 180.00 for non-members

Please note the Registration fee does not include accommodation costs.

Tariff includes Buffet Breakfast and Tea/Coffee in rooms and Wi-Fi service)

Membership fees of Rs. 250/- and taxes of about 15% are extra.
Check-in is 1 p.m. and check-out 12 p.m.

JNU Guest House:

Some limited accommodation may be possible at JNU Guest House at about Rs. 400.00 for a single room and Rs. 800.00 for a double room.

Members can book through IASA. Please book early as accommodation is subject to availability.

Communications may be addressed on e-mail santoshsareen@yahoo.co.in to Prof. Santosh Sareen, President, IASA, 6/10 Sarva Priya Vihar, New Delhi-110016, India.

Please e-mail dgopal@ignou.ac.in a copy to Prof. D. Gopal, General Secretary, IASA, Faculty of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi and Adjunct Professor, Institute of Hawke Research Studies, University of South Australia, Adelaide.