The Burunh Program
Graduate Seminar Series

Dr Parsons is a Yuggerabul and Ugarem Le man who recently completed a PhD at VCA. He is a composer, producer and performer (baritone opera) whose singing practice is deeply embedded within his cultural identity. Highly skilled men and women kept culture alive through ongoing practices and knowledges to navigate sea and read stars.  He will discuss the intersection of culture, science, and music.

Given that cultural astronomy sits in a space that connects scientific knowledge with other ways of knowing, it may be worthwhile to discuss how that relation can be understood. The seminar will introduce the concept of ‘boundary work’ that was developed the American sociologist Thomas Gieryn to describe the intellectual labour dedicated to demarcate science as a cultural space. We will discuss the implications that Gieryn’s ideas have for cultural astronomy, including the mechanisms behind boundary work. We will also discuss whether a similar process is happening when demarcating indigenous knowledge as a cultural space.

This seminar will dive into the use of linguistic tools and methodologies when conducting cultural astronomy research. Led by experienced linguist Professor Nick Thieberger, we will discuss the importance of primary records for discovering information about celestial knowledge, how to find early records, how to access and to digitise them, and explore large texts using corpus tools such as AntConc/Voyant.