Keynote Speakers
John Braithwaite
John Braithwaite is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Founder of RegNet (the Regulatory Institutions Network) at the Australian National University. He is currently embarked upon a 20-year project, Peacebuilding Compared, with Hilary Charlesworth, Valerie Braithwaite and Leah Dunn. In the past he has worked on a variety of areas of business regulation and on the crime problem. His best known work is on the ideas of responsive regulation and restorative justice. He has been active in social movement politics around these and other ideas for 40 years in Australia and internationally.
John’s books on restorative justice include Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge UP, 1989); Restorative Justice: Philosophy to Practice, co-edited with Heather Strang (Aldershot, 2000); Restorative Justice and Civil Society, also co-edited with Heather Strang (Cambridge UP, 2001); Shame Management through Reintegration, co-authored with Eliza Ahmed, Nathan Harris and Valerie Braithwaite (Cambridge UP, 2001); Restorative Justice and Family Violence, co-edited with Heather Strang (Cambridge UP, 2001) and Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (Oxford UP, 2002).
John’s contributions have been recognised through a number of prizes, in the US and Europe, from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the American Sociological Association, the Law and Society Association, the American Society of Criminology, the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order (for Global Business Regulation with Peter Drahos) and the inaugural Stockholm Prize for Criminology. His most recent award was an Honorary Doctorate at K. U. Leuven (Belgium).
Paul Dwyer
Paul Dwyer is Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. His publications on community-based theatre and the work of Augusto Boal have appeared in many leading journals in the field of theatre/performance studies, including New Theatre Quarterly, Modern Drama, Research in Drama Education, Australasian Drama Studies and Applied Theatre Researcher.
In collaboration with Professor Jim Martin and Dr Michele Zappavigna (Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney), he is a chief investigator on the project “Enacting Reconciliation”, a study of restorative justice conferencing in the NSW juvenile justice system supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.
Paul is also dramaturge for the contemporary performance group Version 1.0 and performs with this company The Bougainville Photoplay Project, a ‘performance ethnography’ that engages with the politics and poetics of reconciliation in the wake of civil war. Having toured this work around Bougainville in 2007, Paul will be returning there next year to continue field observations of the way western approaches to restorative justice are being syncretised with customary Bougainvillean forms of dispute resolution.
Diana Eades
Diana Eades is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences at the University of New England, specialising in critical sociolinguistics, language in the legal process, and intercultural communication, particularly involving Australian Aboriginal people who speak varieties of English. She has more than 25 years experience in research, teaching and practical applications of her scholarly work. She has been President, Vice-President and Secretary of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, and Vice-President of the Australian Linguistics Society. She is co-editor of The International Journal of Speech Language and the Law and is on the Editorial Board of Applied Linguistics. She was appointed by the Chief Justice of Hawai’i to the state Supreme Court Committee on Equality and Access to the Courts (1999-2002, 2002-2005).
Diana has provided expert evidence (for example in the Condren and Kina cases) and her work is cited as the authority on Aboriginal English in the legal system in government reports, judicial decisions, and legal publications. She presents regularly to a diverse range of professional groups interested in intercultural communication with Aboriginal people, including educational, health and welfare groups as well as legal practitioners.
Publications of particular relevance to the conference theme include: Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008); Aboriginal English and the Law: Communicating with Aboriginal English Speaking Clients: A Handbook for Legal Practitioners (Queensland Law Society, 1992); “Telling and retelling your story in court: Questions, assumptions, and intercultural implications” (Current Issues in Criminal Justice 20 (2), 2008: 209-230); “From expertise to advocacy: Forensic linguistics and advocacy in asylum seeker cases” (in Law and Language: Theory and Society, eds. Olsen, Lorz and Stein. Düsseldorf University Press, 2008: 87-118); “Language and Disadvantage before the Law” (in Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics, eds. Turell and Gibbons. John Benjamins, 2008: 179-195).
Peter Gray
Justice Peter Gray has served since 1984 as a judge of the Federal Court of Australia-the court responsible for pioneering the use of court-annexed mediation in Australia. He also sits as a judge on the Industrial Relations Court of Australia and is a presidential member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. For most of the 1990s, he served as the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, hearing Aboriginal land claims in the Northern Territory.
His interests in the broad area of ‘therapeutic justice’ take in the role of mediation practices, Indigenous courts and the workings of the National Native Title Tribunal. Because of his engagement with Aboriginal issues, arising from the experience of land rights and native title claims, he has been closely involved in the campaign for promoting greater understanding of Aboriginal culture among judges and magistrates. This included chairing the organising committee for the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration Indigenous Courts Conference in 2007 and membership of the organising committee for the follow-up conference in Rockhampton from 5-7 August this year.
Frances Rock
Dr Frances Rock lectures in the Centre for Language and Communication Research which is part of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. The focus of her recent research has been on language in legal settings. With a particular focus on the police, she has examined texts, processes and practices which mediate information between legal specialists and lay people, in both directions. This research contributed to the development of a new written text to explain rights to people in police custody and new procedures to accompany that text. This text and accompanying procedures are now in use in police stations throughout England and Wales.
This research project has led Frances to address a wider range of research questions using predominantly sociolinguistic and discursive techniques. These research questions cluster around themes of ‘difficult’ language, lay-specialist communication, workplace language and the communication of socially important information. She is currently examining ways in which lay people obtain information about the law other than through contact with legal personnel, analysing witness statement-taking, investigating the communication of warnings and developing a project on language in workplaces. These research projects involve a range of techniques, theoretical frameworks and concepts drawn from discourse analysis, new literacy studies, sociolinguistics, ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics.
Publications include: Communicating rights: The language of arrest and detention (Palgrave, 2007); “Looking the other way: Linguistic ethnography and forensic linguistics” (UK Linguistic Ethnography Forum papers, 2006); “‘Sometimes you pinch stuff’: Communities of practice in an institutional setting” (in Barton and Tusting eds. Beyond communities of practice. Cambridge UP, 2005); “Recontextualisation in the police station” (Forensic linguistics: the international journal of speech, language and the law Vol. 12, No. 1 2005) and “The genesis of a witness statement” (Forensic linguistics: the international journal of speech, language and the law Vol. 8, No. 2, 2001).
Julie Stubbs
Professor Julie Stubbs is currently teaching and researching in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney where she is also Deputy Director of the Institute of Criminology. Prior to joining the Law Faculty in 1989, she worked with the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research as a Senior Research Officer and Acting Deputy Director. She has also been a consultant for Legal Aid, the Office of the Status of Women, the NSW Police Service, the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service, and the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration. She has served on numerous government committees and the management committees of non-government organisations concerned with violence against women and was a member of an international expert panel that prepared a paper on violence against women for the United Nations.
Julie’s work on restorative justice relates closely to research she has carried out on violence against women and gender, race and class issues in criminology. Her publications include “Restorative justice, gendered violence and Indigenous women” (in J. Ptacek ed. Feminism, Restorative Justice, and Violence Against Women. Oxford UP, 2008); “Feminist theory, feminist and anti-racist politics, and restorative justice”, co-authored with Kath Daly (in Gerry Johnstone and Daniel van Ness eds. Handbook of Restorative Justice. Willan Publishing, 2007); “Beyond Apology? Domestic Violence and Critical Questions for Restorative Justice” (in Criminology & Criminal Justice Vol. 7, No. 2, 2007); Gender, Race and Restorative Justice: Special Issue of Theoretical Criminology, co-edited with K. Cook and K. Daly (Vol. 10, No. 1, 2006) and Restorative Justice, Domestic Violence and Family Violence (Australian Domestic & Family Violence Clearinghouse Issues Paper, No.9, 2004);
Julie is a member of the Editorial Board for the Sydney Institute of Criminology Monograph Series in addition to the journals Critical Criminology, Current Issues in Criminal Justice and the British Journal of Criminology.