Speaking the bitter truth: The role of the creative imagination in the process of healing

This chapter is concerned with the complexity and difficulty of truth telling as it is played out in two graphic novels: Stitches: A Memoir (Small 2009) and Why We Broke Up (Handler & Kalman, 2011). These texts establish a link between creative imagination and pain as the central protagonists come to see the therapeutic value of literature and film in helping them understand the complex emotional worlds they inhabit and the bitter truths about love and relationships. The discussion examines how these texts privilege a particular kind of independent subjectivity through aesthetic creation and appropriation. It also considers how speaking and silence are co-present elements in gender relations and each has its part to play in the double process of suffering and healing.

The story of … the top hat

Throughout the 19th century, the top hat was a mainstay of Victorian life: a man in a topper was well-to-do, respectable, a man of industry. But now the top hat is only a caricature of the upper class privilege it once represented. Its history traces a line through dandies, beavers, silk, and madness...

Indigenous legal education at UNSW: A work in progress

Since the 1970s Australian law schools have provided alternative entry routes and, since the 1980s, pre-law programs and bridging programs. On-going support, once Indigenous students reach university law schools, has been an issue that has not been formally or appropriately addressed in most university law schools. In this way Indigenous students’ chances of entry are disguised as chances of success. Thus once Indigenous students start their law school studies, they are often expected to perform on a level playing field – their success or failure then depends on ‘gifts, merits or skills’ which are culturally appropriate for law school. This attitude fails to recognise the privilege which allows the development of such gifts, merits or skills...

Editorial of "International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, Volume 7, Number 1, 2014"

This edition testifies to the broad international reach of the journal, with contributions variously concerned with Arctic Indigenous communities, the Métis of Canada, Native Hawaiians and Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand). Two articles stress the need to work collaboratively and respectfully with Indigenous populations whilst conducting research. The first, by Gwen Healey, notes the increased interest in health research in the Arctic, particularly with Inuit populations. Healy seeks to add to the growing body of literature concerned with Indigenous ways of knowing by highlighting Inuit concepts that inform an effective Arctic research model. The second, by primary author Peter Hutchinson and a range of co-contributors, highlights the ways in which Métis collaborators working in health developed a participatory Indigenous research method that was unique in that it foregrounded Métis relationships and relationality. In so doing, the researchers were able to give substance to otherwise staid policy statements about the need for good ethical research conduct.