Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives

Imagined Landscapes teams geocritical analysis with digital visualization techniques to map and interrogate films, novels, and plays in which space and place figure prominently. Drawing upon A Cultural Atlas of Australia, a database-driven interactive digital map that can be used to identify patterns of representation in Australia’s cultural landscape, the book presents an integrated perspective on the translation of space across narrative forms and pioneers new ways of seeing and understanding landscape. It offers fresh insights on cultural topography and spatial history by examining the technical and conceptual challenges of georeferencing fictional and fictionalized places in narratives. Among the items discussed are Wake in Fright, a novel by Kenneth Cook, adapted iconically to the screen and recently onto the stage; the Australian North as a mythic space; spatial and temporal narrative shifts in retellings of the story of Alexander Pearce, a convict who gained notoriety for resorting to cannibalism after escaping from a remote Tasmanian penal colony; travel narratives and road movies set in Western Australia; and the challenges and spatial politics of mapping spaces for which there are no coordinates.

Romantic terrorism? Survivor narratives of psychological and emotional tactics of domestic violence

This paper draws on the theoretical arguments outlined in Hayes (2014) to frame critical analyses of two real life domestic violence narratives. The authors are both academic criminologists and victims/survivors of domestic violence, but within differing contexts – one a conventional heterosexual relationship, the other a female same-sex relationship. Their experiences are intertwined in an extensive collaborative auto-ethnographic analysis that spans seven years of working and socialising together, in which each provided a sounding board and support for the other. The analysis therefore documents two personal journeys. The academic and theoretical are intertwined with the personal and subjective to elicit an evocative and yet empirically validated study. The theoretical underpinnings of romantic love distortion, misogyny and sexism are used to frame these experiences of domestic violence and the differing sexualities of the authors provide a rich context for exploring the ways in which domestic violence victimisation experiences are impacted by gender, sexuality, and heteronormative discourses of love, sex and relationships.

Measuring and reporting on social performance: From numbers and narratives to a useful framework for social enterprises

This paper examines the need for a framework for social enterprises to measure and report on social performance. Reviewing social reporting practice, and concepts central to financial reporting, this paper presents a framework for social performance reporting in the context of social enterprises. A Statement of Social Performance is developed, through consideration of social reporting approaches, influences, and issues in third sector and private sector organisations. This Statement is applied in the context of an employment and training social enterprise, demonstrating its application in practice.

Co-creative media : theorising digital storytelling as a platform for researching and developing participatory culture

This paper considers the question, ‘what is co-creative media, and why is it a useful idea in social media research’? The term ‘co-creative media’ is now used by Creative Industries researchers at QUT to describe their digital storytelling practices. Digital storytelling is a set of collaborative digital media production techniques that have been used to facilitate social participation in numerous Australian and international contexts. Digital storytelling has been adapted by Creative Industries researchers at QUT as a platform for researching the potential of vernacular creativity in a variety of contexts, including social inclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged groups; inclusion in public histories of narratives that might be overlooked; and articulation of voices that otherwise remain silent in the formulation of social and economic development strategies. The adaption of digital storytelling to different contexts has been shaped by the reflexive, recursive, and pragmatic requirements of action research. Amongst other things, this activity draws attention to the agency of researchers in facilitating these kinds of participatory media processes and outcomes. This discussion serves to problematise concepts of participatory media by introducing the term ‘co-creative media’ and differentiating these from other social media production practices.

A Short History of Cultural Studies (Taiwanese edition)

This is the first volume to capture the essence of the burgeoning field of cultural studies in a concise and accessible manner. Other books have explored the British and North American traditions, but this is the first guide to the ideas, purposes and controversies that have shaped the subject. The author sheds new light on neglected pioneers and a clear route map through the terrain. He provides lively critical narratives on a dazzling array of key figures including, Arnold, Barrell, Bennett, Carey, Fiske, Foucault, Grossberg, Hall, Hawkes, hooks, Hoggart, Leadbeater, Lissistzky, Malevich, Marx, McLuhan, McRobbie, D Miller, T Miller, Morris, Quiller-Couch, Ross, Shaw, Urry, Williams, Wilson, Wolfe and Woolf. Hartley also examines a host of central themes in the subject including literary and political writing, publishing, civic humanism, political economy and Marxism, sociology, feminism, anthropology and the pedagogy of cultural studies.

The Second Life of urban planning? Using neogeography tools for community engagement

The majority of the world’s citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached the crossroads in thought leadership between traditional practice and a new, more participatory and open approach. Conventional ways to engage people in participatory planning exercises are limited in reach and scope. At the same time, socio-cultural trends and technology innovation offer opportunities to re-think the status quo in urban planning. Neogeography introduces tools and services that allow non-geographers to use advanced geographical information systems. Similarly, is there potential for the emergence of a neo-planning paradigm in which urban planning is carried out through active civic engagement aided by Web 2.0 and new media technologies thus redefining the role of practicing planners? This paper traces a number of evolving links between urban planning, neogeography and information and communication technology. Two significant trends – participation and visualisation – with direct implications for urban planning are discussed. Combining advanced participation and visualisation features, the popular virtual reality environment Second Life is then introduced as a test bed to explore a planning workshop and an integrated software event framework to assist narrative generation. We discuss an approach to harness and analyse narratives using virtual reality logging to make transparent how users understand and interpret proposed urban designs.

Fallen Awake

Photo from process: David Megarrity, albury 2007 - example of convergence of writing/design/perfomance/video RESEARCH COMPONENT Fallen Awake was a practice-led research process that opened the development process to the influence of collaborative authorship across artforms. The project focused on of how multiple artforms and artists converge their vision into a singular text, in the context of collaborative authorship. The work also uncovered new questions relating to the dream-life of children. The stimulus for the work was a selection of verbal statements by three-year-olds, raising complex ethical questions as the project progressed about the child’s voice, mediated by the adult artist, for the eventual presentation to a child audience. With the text emergent and open to influence, this project raised other questions related to the lived experience of children, dreaming, creative play and the development of consciousness. It pushed the creative process to experiment with associative, rather then causal narratives, and to negotiate the challenges this raises for traditional story structures and the development processes that usually shape them. It led to the consideration of each artforms and artist as equal contributors in the development of story: traditionally the province of the sole author. The outcomes appeared in various artforms, none of which was live-performance based. An ‘artist’s book’ by the designer, a ‘video treatment’ - a DVD capturing the approach to the performance and a script for an innovative large-scale performance. Fallen Awake was developed with the assistance of Strut & Fret Production House, Arts Queensland, and HotHouse Theatre, Albury Wodonga, through their ‘Month in the Country’ initiative.

Of tails and Tempests : Feminine sexuality and Shakespearean children's texts

This paper reads a range of nineteenth-century texts for children that retell either Shakespeare's The Tempest or mermaid narratives, considering the models of feminine subjectivity and sexuality that they construct. It then moves on to two key contemporary texts — Disney's film adaptation of The Little Mermaid (Clements and Musker 1989) and Penni Russon's Undine (2004) — that combine the Shakespearean heroine with the mermaid, and reads them against the nineteenth-century models. Ultimately, the essay determines that, while these texts seem to perform a progressive appropriation of the two traditions, they actually combine the most conservative aspects of both The Tempest and mermaid stories to produce authoritative (and dangerously persuasive) ideals of passive feminine sexuality that confine girls within patriarchally-dictated familial positions. The new figure for adolescent female subjectivity, the mermaid-Miranda, becomes in turn a model of identification and aspiration for the implied juvenile consumer.

On this Writing : An Autotheoretic Account

An invited chapter that provides an autobiographical account of 'critical incidents' in becoming an academic writer.

Re-imagining and re-imaging the nation through the history curriculum.

Nationalism is not a naturally occurring sentiment, but rather needs to be carefully nurtured and sustained in the social imaginary through the production and circulation of unifying narratives that invoke the nation’s imagined community. The school curriculum is crucial in this process, legitimating and disseminating selected narratives while de-legitimating and marginalising other accounts and their voices. Certain watershed events in nations’ histories have always posed political problems in history curricula (Cajani & Ross, 2007) –however the pressures and concerns of current times now suggest political solutions in history curricula. This paper briefly examines recent political debates in Australia to argue that the school history curriculum has become a site of increasing interest for the exercise of official forms of nationalism and the production of a nostalgic, celebratory national biography. The public debates around school history curriculum are theorised as nostalgic re-nationalising efforts in response to the march of cultural globalisation and its attendant uncertainties.

Certainties and uncertainties : ethics and professional identities of early childhood educators

This study is an inquiry into the professional identity constructions of early childhood educators, where identity is conceptualised as social and contextual. Through a genealogical analysis of narratives of four Queensland early childhood teachers, the thesis renders as problematic universal and fixed notions of what it is to be an early childhood professional. The data are the four teachers’ professional life history narratives recounted through a series of conversational interviews with each participant. As they spoke about professionalism and ethics, these teachers struggled to locate themselves as professionals, as they drew on a number of dominant discourses available to them. These dominant discourses were located and mapped through analysis of the participants’ talk about relationships with parents, colleagues and authorities. Genealogical analysis enabled multiple readings of the ways in which the participants’ talk held together certainties and uncertainties, as they recounted their experiences and spoke of early childhood expertise, relational engagement and ethics. The thesis concludes with suggestions for ways to support early childhood teachers and pre-service teachers to both engage with and resist normative processes and expectations of professional identity construction. In so doing, multiple and contextual opportunities can be made available when it comes to being professional and ‘doing’ ethics. The thesis makes an argument for new possibilities for thinking and speaking professional identities that include both certainty and uncertainty, comfort and discomfort, and these seemingly oppositional terms are held together in tension, with an insistence that both are necessary and true. The use of provocations offers tools through which pre-service teachers, teachers and teacher educators can access new positions associated with certainties and uncertainties in professional identities. These new positions call for work that supports experiences of ‘de-comfort’ – that is, experiences that encourage early childhood educators to step away from the comfort zones that can become part of expertise, professional relationships and ethics embedded within normative representations of what it is to be an early childhood professional.

Suicide plays

Suicide is a uniquely human behaviour and has always elicited strong - usually negative - opinions. Thus I would like to state from the very outset that this morbid collection of writing (all separately published elsewhere previously) should not be seen as an attempt to glamorise the act of felo-de-se. Nevertheless, one needs to recognise the inherent theatricality of suicide: too often it is a petulant, peevish performance intended to convey a bitter message to the audience of those left behind. Unfortunately, it is also a performance that many similarly unhappy souls try to emulate, and this phenomenon, known as “The Werther Effect”, is the subject of the first paper, which serves as a most appropriate introduction to the four plays that follow it. The first play, entitled “Hamlet + Ophelia = ?”, is deliberately provocative, and may easily be misunderstood as a call to commit self-murder. It is hoped, however, that the protagonists of this angry little piece are seen to be impetuous and childish, rather than noble or deep. The second play, “Games for Married Couples”, is less about seppuku than it is about the despair of child-less marriage. It is not much happier than the first, but may nevertheless raise a smile or two. “His ... or Her ... Suicide”, on the other hand, is utterly frivolous. I am sure no reader will take it seriously. Finally, and circuitously, is the stage adaptation (and translation) of Goethe’s classic 1774 novella "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers". This piece was produced as part of my 2005 Master of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Many thanks must go to my supervisor, Associate Professor Angela O’Brien, for prodding and poking me until the thesis was of an acceptable standard.

Introduction

The title of this book, Hard Lesson: Reflections on Crime control in Late Modernity, contains a number of clues about its general theoretical direction. It is a book concerned, fist and foremost, with the vagaries of crime control in western neo-liberal and English speaking countries. More specifically, Hard Lessons draws attention to a number of examples in which discrete populations – those who have in one way or another offended against the criminal law - have become the subjects of various forms of stare intervention, regulation and control. We are concerned most of all with the ways in which recent criminal justice policies and practices have resulted in what are variously described as unintended consequences, unforeseen outcomes, unanticipated results, counter-productive effects or negative side effects. At their simplest, such terms refer to the apparent gulf between intention and outcome; they often form the basis for considerable amount of policy reappraisal, soul searching and even nihilistic despair among the mamandirns of crime control. Unintended consequences can, of course, be both positive and negative. Occasionally, crime control measures may result in beneficial outcomes, such as the use of DNA to acquit wrongly convicted prisoners. Generally, however, unforeseen effects tend to be negative and even entirely counterproductive, and/or directly opposite to what were originally intended. All this, of course, presupposes some sort of rational, well meaning and transparent policy making process so beloved by liberal social policy theorists. Yet, as Judith Bessant points out in her chapter, this view of policy formulation tends to obscure the often covert, regulatory and downright malevolent intentions contained in many government policies and practices. Indeed, history is replete with examples of governments seeking to mask their real aims from a prying public eye. Denials and various sorts of ‘techniques of neutralisation’ serve to cloak the real or ‘underlying’ aims of the powerful (Cohen 2000). The latest crop of ‘spin doctors’ and ‘official spokespersons’ has ensured that the process of governmental obfuscation, distortion and concealment remains deeply embedded in neo-liberal forms of governance. There is little new or surprising in this; nor should we be shocked when things ‘go wrong’ in the domain of crime control since many unintended consequences are, more often than not, quite predictable. Prison riots, high rates of recidivism and breaches of supervision orders, expansion rather than contraction of control systems, laws that create the opposite of what was intended – all these are normative features of western crime control. Indeed, without the deep fault lines running between policy and outcome it would be hard to imagine what many policy makers, administrators and practitioners would do: their day to day work practices and (and incomes) are directly dependent upon emergent ‘service delivery’ problems. Despite recurrent howls of official anguish and occasional despondency it is apparent that those involved in the propping up the apparatus of crime control have a vested interest in ensuring that polices and practices remain in an enduring state of review and reform.

Alternative schooling programs for at risk youth : three case studies

This thesis develops a critical realist explanatory critique of alternative schooling programs for youth at risk taking place at three case study sites. Throughout the thesis the author pursues the question, \Are alternative provisions of schooling working academically and socially for youth at risk?. The academic lens targets literacy learning and associated pedagogies. Social outcomes are posited as positive social behaviours and continued engagement in learning. A four phased analysis, drawing on critical realism, interpretive and subject specific theories is used to elicit explanations for the research question. An overall framework is a critical realist methodology as set out by Danermark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen and Karlsson (2002, p. 129). Consequently phase one describes the phenomena of alternative schooling programs taking place at three case study sites. This is reported first as staff narratives that are resolved into imaginable historical causal components of \generative events., \prior schooling structures., \models of alternative schooling., \purpose., \individual agency., and \relations with linked community organisations.. Then transcendental questions are posed about each component using retroduction to uncover structures, underlying mechanisms and powers, and individual agency. In the second phase the researcher uses modified grounded theory methodology to theoretically redescribe causal categories related to a \needed different teaching and administrative approach. that emerged from the previous critique. A transcendental question is then applied to this redescription. The research phenomena are again theoretically redescribed in the third phase, this time using three theoretically based constructs associated with literacy and literacy pedagogies; the NRS, the 4 Resources Model, and Productive Pedagogies. This redescription is again questioned in terms of its core or \necessary. components. The fourth phase makes an explanatory critique by comparing and critiquing all previous explanations, recontextualising them in a wider macro reality of alternative schooling. Through this critical realist explanatory critiquing process, a response emerges not only to whether alternative provisions of schooling are working, but also how they are working, and how they are not working, with realistically based implications for future improvement.

Networks in the shadow of markets and hierarchies : calling the shots in the visual effects industry

The nature and organisation of creative industries and the creative economy has received increased attention in recent academic and policy literatures (Florida 2002; Grabher 2002; Scott 2006a). Constituted as one variant on new economy narratives, creativity, alongside knowledge, has been presented as a key competitive asset, Such industries – ranging from advertising, to film and new media – are seen as not merely expanding their scale and scope, but as leading edge proponents of a more general trend towards new forms of organization and economic coordination (Davis and Scase 2000). The idea of network forms (and the consequent displacement of markets and hierarchies) has been at the heart of attempts to differentiate the field economically and spatially. Across both the discussion of production models and work/employment relations is the assertion of the enhanced importance of trust and non-market relations in coordinating structures and practices. This reflects an influential view in sociological, management, geography and other literatures that social life is ‘intrinsically networked’ (Sunley 2008: 12) and that we can confidently use the term ‘network society’ to describe contemporary structures and practices (Castells 1996). Our paper is sceptical of the conceptual and empirical foundations of such arguments. We draw on a number of theoretical resources, including institutional theory, global value chain analysis and labour process theory (see Smith and McKinlay 2009) to explore how a more realistic and grounded analysis of the nature of and limits to networks can be articulated. Given space constraints, we cannot address all the dimensions of network arguments or evidence. Our focus is on inter and intra-firm relations and draws on research into a particular creative industry – visual effects – that is a relatively new though increasingly important global production network. Through this examination a different model of the creative industries and creative work emerges – one in which market rules and patterns of hierarchical interaction structure the behaviour of economic actors and remain a central focus of analysis. The next section outlines and unpacks in more detail arguments concerning the role and significance of networks, markets and hierarchies in production models and work organisation in creative industries and the ‘creative economy’.