The silence of objects : forming the unsayable

The silence of objects phenomenologically explores the experience and memory of trauma through object-based artwork. It springs from a desire to map difficult psychological terrain and does so by tracking the process of a coming into 'expression' to communicate notions of loss, detachment and powerlessness. It maps a journey from silence to a forming 'voice' that gives shape to the unsayable. This practice-led research is multifaceted. Whilst the creative element uses transformed objects as material metaphors to tap into the sensory and affective operations of art, the written component blends reflection with theory and is informed by art theorists Jill Bennett and Mignon Nixon. By establishing a dialogue between theoretical constructs and creative works I consider how giving form to deep consciousness can counter the effects of trauma manifest as silence and invisibility.

Whe' yu' from?

"Whe' yu' from?" The question was put to me as I wandered, camera in hand, in the old square of Spanish Town, Jamaica's former capital. The local man, lounging in the shade of one of the colonial Georgian buildings that enclose the square, was mildly curious about what he took to be a typical white tourish photgraphing the sights of the decayed historic town. At that time, my home was in Kingston where i lived with my wife and baby son. I was then working in the Jamaican Government Town Planning Department in a job that took me all over the island. Turning to my questioner, I replied, "Kingston". There was a brief pause, and then the man spoke again: "No Man! Whe' yu' really from?" I still have difficulties when asked this question. Where am I from? What does this question mean? Does it refer to where I was born, where I spent my previous life or where I live now? Does it have a broader meaning, an enquiry about my origins in terms of background and previous experience? The following chapters are my attempt to answer these questions for my own satisfaction and, I hope, for the amusement of others who may be interested in the life of an ordinary English boy whose dream to travel and see the world was realized in ways he could not possibly have imagined. Finding an appropriate title for this book was difficult. Thursday's Child, North and South and War and Peace all came to mind but, unfortunately for me, those titles had been appropriated by other writers. Thursdays's Child is quite a popular book title, presumably because people who were born on that day and, in the words of the nursery rhyme, had 'far to go', are especially likely to have travellers' tales to tell or life stories of the rags-to-riches variety. Born on a Thursday, I have travelled a lot and I suppose that I have gone far in life. Coming from a working class family, I 'got on' by 'getting a good education' and a 'good job'. I decided against adding to the list of Thursday's Children. North and South would have reflected my life in Britain, spent in both the North and South of England, and my later years, divided between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the globe, as well as in countries commonly referred to as the 'advanced' North and the 'underdeveloped' South. North and South has already been appropriated by Mrs Gaskell, something that did not deter one popular American writer from using the title for a book of his. My memories of World War Two and the years afterwards made War and Peace a possible candidate, but readers expectnig an epic tale of Tolstoyan proportions may have been disappointed. To my knowledge, no other book has the title "Whe' Yu' From?". I am grateful to the Jamaican man whose question lingered in my memory and provided the title of this memoir, written decades later. This book is a word picture. It is, in a sense, a self-portrait, and like all portraits, it captures something of the character, it attempts to tell the truth, but it is not the whole truth. This is because it is not my intention to write my entire life story; rather I wish to tell about some of the things in my experience of life that have seemed important or interesting to me. Unlike a painted portrait, the picture I have created is intended to suggest the passage of time. While, for most of us in Western society, time is linear and unidirectional, like the flight of an arrov or the trajectory of a bullet, memory rearranges things, calling up images of the past in no particular order, making connections that may link events in various patterns, circular, web-like, superimposed. The stream of consciousness is very unlike that of streams we encounter in the physical world. Connections are made in all directions; thoughts hop back and forth in time and space, from topic to topic. My book is a composition drawn from periods, events and thoughts as I remember them. Like life itself, it is made up of patches, some good, some bad, but in my experience, always fascinating. In recording my memories, I have been as accurate as possible. Little of what I have written is about spectacular sights and strange customs. Much of it focuses on my more modest explorations includng observations of everyday things that have attracted my attention. Reading through the chapters, I am struck by my childhood freedom to roam and engage in 'dangerous' activities like climbing trees and playing beside streams, things that many children today are no longer allowed to enjoy. Also noticeable is the survival of traditions and superstitions from the distant past. Obvious too, is my preoccupation with place names, both official ones that appear on maps and sign boards and those used by locals and children, names rarely seen in print. If there is any uniting theme to be found in what I have written, it must be my education in the fields, woods and streets of my English homeland, in the various other countries in which I have lived and travelled, as well as more formally from books and in classrooms. Much of my book is concerned with people and places. Many of the people I mention are among those who have been, and often have remained, important and close to me. Others I remember from only the briefest of encounters, but they remain in my memory because of some specific incident or circumstance that fixed a lasting image in my mind. Some of my closest friends and relatives, however, appear nowhere in these pages or they receive only the slightest mention. This is not because they played an unimportant roles in my life. It is because this book is not the whole story. Among those whe receive little or no mention are some who are especially close to me, with whom I have shared happy and sad times and who have shown me and my family much kindness, giving support when this was needed. Some I have known since childhood and have popped up at various times in my life, often in different parts of the world. Although years may pass without me seeing them, in an important sense they are always with me. These people know who they are. I hope that they know how much I love and appreciate them. When writing my memoir, I consulted a few of the people mentioned in this book, but in the main, I have relied on my own memory, asided by daiary and notebook entries and old correspondence. In the preparation of this manuscript, I benefited greatly from the expert advice and encouragement of Neil Marr of BeWrite Books. My wife Anne, inspiration for this book, also contributed in the valuable role of critic. She has my undying gratitude.

Toward a theory of the architectural subject

The extraordinary event, for Deleuze, is the object becoming subject – not in the manner of an abstract formulation, such as the substitution of one ideational representation for another but, rather, in the introduction of a vast, new, impersonal plane of subjectivity, populated by object processes and physical phenomena that in Deleuze’s discovery will be shown to constitute their own subjectivities. Deleuze’s polemic of subjectivity (the refusal of the Cartesian subject and the transcendental ego of Husserl) – long attempted by other thinkers – is unique precisely because it heralds the dawning of a new species of objecthood that will qualify as its own peculiar subjectivity. A survey of Deleuze’s early work on subjectivity, Empirisme et subjectivité (Deleuze 1953), Le Bergsonisme (Deleuze 1968), and Logique du sens (Deleuze 1969), brings the architectural reader into a peculiar confrontation with what Deleuze calls the ‘new transcendental field’, the field of subjectproducing effects, which for the philosopher takes the place of both the classical and modern subject. Deleuze’s theory of consciousness and perception is premised on the critique of Husserlian phenomenology; and ipso facto his question is an architectural problematic, even if the name ‘architecture’ is not invoked...

The role of mindfulness in an extended TPB framework to understand drivers’ speeding intentions in school zones.

Many researchers have demonstrated the applicability of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in predicting both intention to speed and actual speeding behaviour. However, there remain shortcomings in the explanatory power of the TPB, with research suggesting that even when drivers had reported an intention to not speed approximately 25% of drivers report behaviour that does not align with their intentions (i.e., they engaged in speeding, Elliott & Armitage, 2006). This research explores the role of a novel and promising construct, mindfulness, in enhancing the explanatory utility of the TPB for the understanding of drivers’ speeding behaviour in school zones. Mindfulness is a concept which has been widely used in studies of consciousness, but has recently been applied to the understanding of behaviour in other areas, including clinical psychology, physical activity, education and business. It has been suggested that mindfulness can also be applied to road safety, though its application within this context currently remains limited. This study was based on an e-survey of the general driving public (N=240). Overall, the results identified mindfulness as a construct which may aid understanding of the relationship between drivers’ intentions and behaviour. Theoretically, the findings may have implications in terms of identifying mindfulness as an additional explanatory construct within a TPB framework. In road safety practice, the findings suggest that efficacious countermeasures around school zones may be those that function to heighten drivers’ mindfulness, such as flashing lights and physical speed reduction measures.

Participatory content creation and collective intelligence in Rio de Janeiro's favelas [Virtual presentation]

This proposal combines ethnographic techniques and discourse studies to investigating a collective of people engaged with audiovisual productions who collaborate in Curta Favela’s workshops in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. ‘Favela’ is often translated simply as ‘slum’ or ‘shantytown’, but these terms connote negative characteristics such as shortage, poverty, and deprivation referring to favelas which end up stigmatizing these low income suburbs. Curta Favela (Favela Shorts) is an independent project which all participants join to use photography and participatory audiovisual production as a tool for social change and raising consciousness. As cameras are not affordable for favelas dwellers, Curta Favela’s volunteers teach favela residents how they can use their mobile phones and compact cameras to take pictures and make movies, and afterwards, how they can edit the data using free editing video software programs and publish it on the Internet. To record audio, they use their mp3 or mobile phones. The main aim of this study is to shed light not only on how this project operates, but also to highlight how collective intelligence can be used as a way of fighting against the lack of basic resources.

Participatory content creation and collective intelligence in Rio de Janeiro's favelas

This proposal combines ethnographic techniques and discourse studies to investigate a collective of people engaged with audiovisual productions who collaborate in Curta Favela’s workshops in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. ‘Favela’ is often translated simply as ‘slum’ or ‘shantytown’, but these terms connote negative characteristics such as shortage, poverty, and deprivation which end up stigmatizing these low income suburbs. Curta Favela (Favela Shorts) is an independent project in which all participants join to use photography and participatory audiovisual production as tools for social change and to raise consciousness. As cameras are not affordable for favela dwellers, Curta Favela’s volunteers teach favela residents how they can use their mobile phones and compact cameras to take pictures and make movies, and afterwards, how they can edit the data using free editing video software programs and publish it on the Internet. To record audio, they use their mp3 or mobile phones. The main aim of this study is to shed light not only on how this project operates, but also to highlight how collective intelligence can be used as a way of fighting against a lack of basic resources.

Grenada, Education and Revolution, 1979-83

Grenada’s New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, was the first indigenous political grouping in the history of the English-speaking Caribbean to overthrow an existing government by armed force. Yet most of the four and a half years of the Revolution (1979-83) were characterized by considerable popular support for the new People’s Revolutionary Government before it came to it’s tragic, unexpected and shocking end in October 1983. Social, economic and political change seems possible in the 1970s and ‘80s. People in newly decolonizing countries were encouraged by the beginnings of the Non-Aligned Movement of Third World nations demanding new international economic order that would win them some economic justice after the ravages of colonialism. People also saw that some radical regimes, such as that led by Michael Manley in Jamaica and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, were articulating and implementing basic rights that held the promise of countering the social and political oppression that they had endured throughout the centuries of colonial history. A majority of Grenadians committed themselves to fighting by the side of the People’s Revolutionary Government for such new goals. This chapter will analyse how the Grenada Revolution reconceptualised the education, planned new goals, and implemented bold new educational policies. It will discuss the extent to which the government and people were able to reshape education as a tool for national reconstruction and the raising of national consciousness.

Paris 1947 : The woman of fashion

Paris 1947 is the site of one of twentieth century fashion’s fictive highpoints. The New Look combined drama and poetics through an abiding rhetoric of elegance. In doing so it employed traditional modes of femininity, casting the woman of fashion in the guise of an ambiguous ‘new’ figure: half fairytale princess, half evil witch. This fashionable ideal was widely disseminated through key photographic representations, Willy Maywald’s 1947 image of the Bar Suit being a case in point. It was precisely such mythic formulations of ‘woman’ which Simone de Beauvoir was to take to task just two years later with the publication of The Second Sex. Driven by frustration with the status quo of real women, de Beauvoir recognised the role of fictive representations, both textual and visual in defining women. This paper reads key sections of The Second Sex through a comparative analysis of two iconic images of French women from 1947; Cartier-Bresson’s classic portrait of de Beauvoir and Willy Mayhold’s spectacular evocation of Christian Dior’s New Look. Cued by a compelling range of similarities between these images this paper explores links between fashion, feminism and fiction in mid-century French culture.

The stitchery collective

The stitchery collective is fashion-based design collective. Founded in February 2010 the collective brings together creative practitioners from across an expanded field of fashion design to develop innovative new models for both the design, production and consumption of fashion in the 21st century. Under the broad question "can fashion be more than pretty clothes for pretty people?" the collective has developed a range of workshops, exhibitions and creative projects that both engage the wider public and targeted community groups. The projects include "consciousness raising: up cycling workshops, zero-waste pattern cutting workshops, and sewing workshops with members of Brisbane's Karen, Sudansese, and Iraqi communities. Through these projects we test how innovative fashion design practice can engage with questions of environmental sustainability, ethical practices, and social inclusion. Established around a set of people -centred values, the stitchery collective therefore seeks to re-cast fashion as a 'less bad' field of creative endeavor and, one that sustains, inspires and connects individuals and communities. In seeking to develop new models of fashion practice that are socially oriented and environmentally responsible the stitchery outcomes align with the broader field of Design for Sustainability.

Imagining neighbourhood-based community : an autoethnography

This research is an autoethnographic investigation of consumption experiences, public and quasi-public spaces, and their relationship to community within an inner city neighbourhood. The research specifically focuses on the gentrifying inner city, where class-based processes of change can have implications for people’s abilities to remain within, or feel connected to place. However, the thesis draws on broader theories of the throwntogetherness of the contemporary city (e.g., Amin and Thrift, 2002; Massey 2005) to argue that the city is a space where place-based meanings cannot be seen to be fixed, and are instead better understood as events of place – based on ever shifting interrelations between the trajectories of people and things. This perspective argues the experience of belonging to community is not just born of a social encounter, but also draws on the physical and symbolic elements of the context in which it is situated. The thesis particularly explores the ways people construct identifications within this shifting urban environment. As such, consumption practices and spaces offer one important lens through which to explore the interplay of the physical, social and symbolic. Consumer research tells us that consumption practices can facilitate experiences in which identity-defining meaning can be generated and shared. Consumption spaces can also support different kinds of collective identification – as anchoring realms for specific cultural groups or exposure realms that enable individuals to share in the identification practices of others with limited risk (Aubert-Gamet & Cova, 1999). Furthermore, the consumption-based lifestyles that gentrifying inner city neighbourhoods both support and encourage can also mean that consumption practices may be a key reason that people are moving through public space. That is, consumption practices and spaces may provide a purpose for which – and spatial frame against which – our everyday interactions and connections with people and objects are undertaken within such neighbourhoods. The purpose of this investigation then was to delve into the subjectivities at the heart of identifying with places, using the lens of our consumption-based experiences within them. The enquiry describes individual and collective identifications and emotional connections, and explores how these arise within and through our experiences within public and quasi-public spaces. It then theorises these ‘imaginings’ as representative of an experience of community. To do so, it draws on theories of imagination and its relation to community. Theories of imagined community remind us that both the values and identities of community are held together by projections that create relational links out of objects and shared practices (e.g., Benedict Anderson, 2006; Urry, 2000). Drawing on broader theories of the processes of the imagination, this thesis suggests that an interplay between reflexivity and fantasy – which are products of the critical and the fascinated consciousness – plays a role in this imagining of community (e.g., Brann, 1991; Ricoeur, 1994). This thesis therefore seeks to explore how these processes of imagining are implicated within the construction of an experience of belonging to neighbourhood-based community through consumption practices and the public and quasi-public spaces that frame them. The key question of this thesis is how do an individual’s consumption practices work to construct an imagined presence of neighbourhood-based community? Given the focus on public and quasi-public spaces and our experiences within them, the research also asked how do experiences in the public and quasi-public spaces that frame these practices contribute to the construction of this imagined presence? This investigation of imagining community through consumption practices is based on my own experiences of moving to, and attempting to construct community connections within, an inner city neighbourhood in Melbourne, Australia. To do so, I adopted autoethnographic methodology. This is because autoethnography provides the methodological tools through which one can explore and make visible the subjectivities inherent within the lived experiences of interest to the thesis (Ellis, 2004). I describe imagining community through consumption as an extension of a placebased self. This self is manifest through personal identification in consumption spaces that operate as anchoring realms for specific cultural groups, as well as through a broader imagining of spaces, people, and practices as connected through experiences within realms of exposure. However, this is a process that oscillates through cycles of identification; these anchor one within place personally, but also disrupt those attachments. This instability can force one to question the orientation and motives of these imaginings, and reframe them according to different spaces and reference groups in ways that can also work to construct a more anonymous and, conversely, more achievable collective identification. All the while, the ‘I’ at the heart of this identification is in an ongoing process of negotiation, and similarly, the imagined community is never complete. That is, imagining community is a negotiation, with people and spaces – but mostly with the different identifications of the self. This thesis has been undertaken by publication, and thus the process of imagining community is explored and described through four papers. Of these, the first two focus on specific types of consumption spaces – a bar and a shopping centre – and consider the ways that anchoring and exposure within these spaces support the process of imagining community. The third paper examines the ways that the public and quasi-public spaces that make up the broader neighbourhood context are themselves throwntogether as a realm of exposure, and considers the ways this shapes my imaginings of this neighbourhood as community. The final paper develops a theory of imagined community, as a process of comparison and contrast with imagined others, to provide a summative conceptualisation of the first three papers. The first paper, chapter five, explores this process of comparison and contrast in relation to authenticity, which in itself is a subjective assessment of identity. This chapter was written as a direct response to the recent work of Zukin (2010), and draws on theories of authenticity as applied to personal and collective identification practices by consumer researchers Arnould and Price (2000). In this chapter, I describe how my assessments of the authenticity of my anchoring experiences within one specific consumption space, a neighbourhood bar, are evaluated in comparison to my observations of and affective reactions to the social practices of another group of residents in a different consumption space, the local shopping centre. Chapter five also provides an overview of the key sites and experiences that are considered in more detail in the following two chapters. In chapter six, I again draw on my experiences within the bar introduced in chapter five, this time to explore the process of developing a regular identity within a specific consumption space. Addressing the popular theory of the cafe or bar as third place (Oldenburg, 1999), this paper considers the purpose of developing anchored relationships with people within specific consumption spaces, and explores the different ways this may be achieved in an urban context where the mobilities and lifestyle practices of residents complicate the idea of a consumption space as an anchoring or third place. In doing so, this chapter also considers the manner in which this type of regular identification may be seen to be the beginning of the process of imagining community. In chapter seven, I consider the ways the broader public spaces of the neighbourhood work cumulatively to expose different aspects of its identity by following my everyday movements through the neighbourhood’s shopping centre and main street. Drawing on the theories of Urry (2000), Massey (2005), and Amin (2007, 2008), this chapter describes how these spaces operate as exposure realms, enabling the expression of different senses of the neighbourhood’s spaces, times, cultures, and identities through their physical, social, and symbolic elements. Yet they also enable them to be united: through habitual pathways, group practices of appropriation of space, and memory traces that construct connections between objects and experiences. This chapter describes this as a process of exposure to these different elements. Our imagination begins to expand the scope of the frames onto which it projects an imagined presence; it searches for patterns within the physical, social, and symbolic environment and draws connections between people and practices across spaces. As the final paper, chapter eight, deduces, it is in making these connections that one constructs the objects and shared practices of imagined community. This chapter describes this as an imagining of neighbourhood as a place-based extension of the self, and then explores the ways in which I drew on physical, social, and symbolic elements in an attempt to construct a fit between the neighbourhood’s offerings and my desires for place-based identity definition. This was as a cumulative but fragmented process, in which positive and negative experiences of interaction and identification with people and things were searched for their potential to operate as the objects and shared practices of imagined community. This chapter describes these connections as constructed through interplay between reflexivity and fantasy, as the imagination seeks balance between desires for experiences of belonging, and the complexities of constructing them within the throwntogether context of the contemporary city. The conclusion of the thesis describes the process of imagining community as a reflexive fantasy, that is, as a product of both the critical and fascinated consciousness (Ricoeur, 1994). It suggests that the fascinated consciousness imbues experiences with hope and desire, which the reflexive imagining can turn to disappointment and shame as it critically reflects on the reality of those fascinated projections. At the same time, the reflexive imagination also searches the practices of others for affirmation of those projections, effectively seeking to prove the reality of the fantasy of the imagined community.

Investigating ways of seeing IT research : a tool for facilitating effective research partnerships?

Effective research partnerships, both intra- and interdisciplinary, as well as academy-industry partnerships, rely on shared understandings of particular aspects of the research endeavour. Research partnerships are essentially learning partnerships, if we accept the argument that research may be seen as learning at the collective level. This paper establishes the need to investigate information technology (IT) researchers' varying ways of seeing certain aspects of their research world, in order to assist the process of forging effective research partnerships. We analyse the importance of facilitating effective partnerships in IT research, discuss our plan for investigating the collective consciousness of IT researchers, and explain some of the strategies to be used in the investigation.

The Australian beachspace : flagging the spaces of Australian beach texts

The Australian beach is a significant component of the Australian culture and a way of life. The Australian Beachspace explores existing research about the Australian beach from a cultural and Australian studies perspective. Initially, the beach in Australian studies has been established within a binary opposition. Fiske, Hodge, and Turner (1987) pioneered the concept of the beach as a mythic space, simultaneously beautiful but abstract. In comparison, Meaghan Morris (1998) suggested that the beach was in fact an ordinary or everyday space. The research intervenes in previous discussions, suggesting that the Australian beach needs to be explored in spatial terms as well as cultural ones. The thesis suggests the beach is more than these previously established binaries and uses Soja's theory of Thirdspace (1996) to posit the term beachspace as a way of describing this complex site. The beachspace is a lived space that encompasses both the mythic and ordinary and more. A variety of texts have been explored in this work, both film and literature. The thesis examines textual representations of the Australian beach using Soja's Thirdspace as a frame to reveal the complexities of the Australian beach through five thematic chapters. Some of the texts discussed include works by Tim Winton's Breath (2008) and Land's Edge (1993), Robert Drewe's short story collections The Bodysurfers (1987) and The Rip (2008), and films such as Newcastle (dir. Dan Castle 2008) and Blackrock (dir. Steve Vidler 1997). Ultimately The Australian Beachspace illustrates that the multiple meanings of the beach's representations are complex and yet frequently fail to capture the layered reality of the Australian beach. The Australian beach is best described as a beachspace, a complex space that allows for the mythic and/or/both ordinary at once.

Othering the Malay in Malaysia : a planned consequence of politics?

This paper examines the rise in the politicisation of Islam in Malaysia and links it to the othering of the Malaysian Malay. It is my argument that both were “conquering” tools of Malaysia’s “Father of Modernisation”, Mahathir Mohamad, devised to win the support of the Malay Muslim majority in Malaysia. The many awards bestowed on Mahathir obscure the fact that he was instrumental in the systematic erosion of the power and roles of state institutions, especially at the Federal government level. This includes the significant loss of the independence of the Malaysian judiciary. Whilst per capita income in Malaysia may well have increased eight times under his 22-year leadership, this paper asks why is it that the majority of the Malays remain the largest number among the poor and the more disenfranchised of ethnicities in the country? Why have Malay and Muslim women suffered such a rapid decreasing ability to access justice? This paper examines existing research on the social and political changes Malaysia has experienced with Islamisation and under Mahathir’s rule, as well as studies on Malayness, Malay nationalism and Muslim Malay identity formation. The paper elaborates the othering of a majority people, the Malays in Malaysia, and how this othering has brought forth a fast-growing political power in the name of a supremacist Islam, a puritanical Sunni and Malay Islam. Specific events in the rise and rule of Mahathir as Malaysia’s then Prime Minister are reviewed, such as the banning of The Malay Dilemma, and the split in the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in 1987. Also examined is the varying emphasis between Muslim and race, and how during Mahathir’s rule, that strong misogynist and patriarchal attitudes took hold in Malay Muslim consciousness, a colonising consciousness that is othering the perceived cultural and genetic “impurities” within the Malay.

A Freirian reading of online writing workshops

Online writing workshops provide educational spaces within which writers can learn and refine their craft. In order to better understand the dialogic mechanisms behind that learning, this paper examines ways in which online writing workshops might be described as functioning in manners akin to Freirian culture circles. This paper identifies several key characteristics that define Paulo Freire’s concept of the culture circle. It compares these characteristics to the structure of and interactive practices within an online writing workshop. It unpacks some of Freire’s ideas about codification and decodification of situated problems and about achieving critical consciousness, and examines how exemplars of this can be found in online writing workshops.