Clergy Sexual Abuse Litigation: Survivors Seeking Justice By Jennifer M. Balboni (Boulder: First Forum Press, 2011, 180pp. £43.77)

Balboni identifies her interest as being the processes of official disclosure and the path taken to civil litigation by survivors of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic Clergy. The empirical data, on which this work is based, come in the form of in-depth face-to-face interviews with 22 survivors of clergy sexual abuse who have pursued litigation and 13 of their advocates. Balboni provides a space for survivors’ accounts of the ‘why’ behind their decision making and the impact of civil litigation on their lives to be heard, discussed and contextualized with both clarity and sensitivity. She acknowledges the breadth and depth of survivor responses, and the perspectives of their legal advocates, employing defiance theory, symbolic interaction and other points of analysis, to capture the journey of survivors towards litigation and beyond. Balboni’s work is deeply poignant in its recognition of survivors’ voices, the complex transformative capacity of litigation, the effects of community forming amongst survivors and the complex nature of ‘empowerment’ obtained by survivors through civil litigation. Acknowledging that, for many survivors, litigation becomes a means of identity change and truth telling, Balboni admits that ‘these survivors helped me understand that litigation is more about voice than monetary settlement’ (p. 149). This work is not deeply analytical or theoretically rich but privileges the voices of survivors and their advocates with sufficient frameworks to contextualize and explain participants’ perspectives and experiences.

Information practices of teen content creators : the intersection of action and experiences a grounded theory study

What are the information practices of teen content creators? In the United States over two thirds of teens have participated in creating and sharing content in online communities that are developed for the purpose of allowing users to be producers of content. This study investigates how teens participating in digital participatory communities find and use information as well as how they experience the information. From this investigation emerged a model of their information practices while creating and sharing content such as film-making, visual art work, story telling, music, programming, and web site design in digital participatory communities. The research uses grounded theory methodology in a social constructionist framework to investigate the research problem: what are the information practices of teen content creators? Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and observation of teen’s digital communities. Analysis occurred concurrently with data collection, and the principle of constant comparison was applied in analysis. As findings were constructed from the data, additional data was collected until a substantive theory was constructed and no new information emerged from data collection. The theory that was constructed from the data describes five information practices of teen content creators. The five information practices are learning community, negotiating aesthetic, negotiating control, negotiating capacity, and representing knowledge. In describing the five information practices there are three necessary descriptive components, the community of practice, the experiences of information and the information actions. The experiences of information include information as participation, inspiration, collaboration, process, and artifact. Information actions include activities that occur in the categories of gathering, thinking and creating. The experiences of information and information actions intersect in the information practices, which are situated within the specific community of practice, such as a digital participatory community. Finally, the information practices interact and build upon one another and this is represented in a graphic model and explanation.

One night stand : only you

Technical: This looped video work is made up from a number of still images animated in a sequence, not intended to be a smooth action, but syncopated. The gaps in real time suggest blinking, lapses in technology, warps in time and distance. The still images have been manipulated in photoshop and imported into an animation software program, showing subtle emphasis on various aspects of the features of the face and location from the screen shots. Content: Obsession is one of the most constant expressions of love, whether it is a negative attribute, such as stalking, or the need to see or stroke the beloved, or telling and re-telling the story of first meeting. “like the beat, beat, beat of the tom tom when the jungle shadows fall like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock as it stands against the wall like the drip, drip drip of the rain drops when the summer shower’s through a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you… only you...” (Cole Porter, Night and Day) My desire to immerse myself in my newly-met adult daughter as a reality is as obsessive as any new parent. The primary means of contact is video cam, which has become a kind of surveillance for me. I stare at her mouth as it moves, her ear as she moves her head, her smile, her grimaces, her high cheekbones, her eyes that are like mine, the shape of her head, her teeth that are like her father’s… hundreds of candid pictures screen shot over a year and a half were the source of the video images.

Hollywood's hidden advantage : creative suits

Creativity in Hollywood is not just about telling stories onscreen. Deal making is the name of the game in Hollywood from globally released franchised blockbusters to art house releases. Riding the currents of the twentieth century Hollywood has maintained dominance with its highly diversified production slate built on creative financing solutions. Using historical and recent case studies, the presentation will look behind the images at the numbers and discuss how 'the suits' have been, and continue to be just as creative as the 'creatives' in contemporary Hollywood.

Factors influencing funding decisions by elected politicians at the state/provincial level : a case study of public libraries in Canada

The purpose of this study was to determine factors (internal and external) that influenced Canadian provincial (state) politicians when making funding decisions about public libraries. Using the case study methodology, Canadian provincial/state level funding for public libraries in the 2009-10 fiscal year was examined. After reviewing funding levels across the country, three jurisdictions were chosen for the case: British Columbia's budget revealed dramatically decreased funding, Alberta's budget showed dramatically increased funding, and Ontario's budget was unchanged from the previous year. The primary source of data for the case was a series of semi-structured interviews with elected officials and senior bureaucrats from the three jurisdictions. An examination of primary and secondary documents was also undertaken to help set the political and economic context as well as to provide triangulation for the case interviews. The data were analysed to determine whether Cialdini's theory of influence (2001) and specifically any of the six tactics of influence (i.e, commitment and consistency, authority, liking, social proof, scarcity and reciprocity) were instrumental in these budget processes. Findings show the principles of "authority", "consistency and commitment" and "liking" were relevant, and that "liking" were especially important to these decisions. When these decision makers were considering funding for public libraries, they most often used three distinct lenses: the consistency lens (what are my values? what would my party do?), the authority lens (is someone with hierarchical power telling me to do this? are the requests legitimate?), and most importantly, the liking lens (how much do I like and know about the requester?). These findings are consistent with Cialdini's theory, which suggests the quality of some relationships is one of six factors that can most influence a decision maker. The small number of prior research studies exploring the reasons for increases or decreases in public library funding allocation decisions have given little insight into the factors that motivate those politicians involved in the process and the variables that contribute to these decisions. No prior studies have examined the construct of influence in decision making about funding for Canadian public libraries at any level of government. Additionally, no prior studies have examined the construct of influence in decision making within the context of Canadian provincial politics. While many public libraries are facing difficult decisions in the face of uncertain funding futures, the ability of the sector to obtain favourable responses to requests for increases may require a less simplistic approach than previously thought. The ability to create meaningful connections with individuals in many communities and across all levels of government should be emphasised as a key factor in influencing funding decisions.

Secrets, Lies and Children's Fiction

Many children learn from a very young age about the importance of always telling the truth. They also learn that telling lies is necessary if they are to survive in a world that paradoxically values the truth but practises deception. Secrets, Lies and Children’s Fiction demonstrates how this paradox is played out in texts for children and young adults, how secrets and lies may be a necessary means for survival and adaptation, and how mendacity may have its virtues.

Echo theatre : from experience to performance

This research project investigates the characteristics of Echo Theatre, its potential to foster performative and narrative competencies in students, and the role of the teacher in this performative and educational practice. Echo Theatre is a method devised during my storytelling practice and this research confirms that there is no identical research or teaching practice which involves students staging personal narratives in the classroom in this way. The study has been informed by crossdisciplinary theory studies from the fields of phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and theatre practice. To analyse and discuss Echo Theatre's potential contribution to the development of the child I have defined the concept of a performative competence as well as redefined the concept of a narrative competence. The situated, embodied and performative character of human cognition is emphasised as physical actions and thinking in movement is related to both gestural and conceptual understandings. Studies in philosophy and psychology confirm that narrative structure, related to identity construction and meaning-­‐making, can be attained through the performing body. We tell stories to know who we are. Telling stories then in the Echo Theatre model develops multiple competencies related to the performative aspects of theatre practice as well as the narrative aspects of storytelling. The practice-­‐led aspect of this research project includes two fieldwork projects involving a primary school class who created sixteen different Echo Theatre stories. Student participation reveals that Echo Theatre is most constructive when it moves through five phases; recalled experience, narrative, drama, performance, and evaluation. Ongoing reflection is a part of all five phases. The study also confirms that while there is potential for Echo Theatre to support the development of performative and narrative competencies in students, the effectiveness of this directly relates to the teacher's theatre knowledge and skills and his or her didactic attitude towards the students. This study confirms that the potential for learning through the moving and performing body of Echo Theatre is strengthened by working with personal narratives in the classroom and led by teachers displaying heightened skills and knowledge of the aesthetics and dynamics of theatrical form.

Living the indie life : mapping creative teams in a 48 hour game jam and playing with data

In contemporary game development circles the ‘game making jam’ has become an important rite of passage and baptism event, an exploration space and a central indie lifestyle affirmation and community event. Game jams have recently become a focus for design researchers interested in the creative process. In this paper we tell the story of an established local game jam and our various documentation and data collection methods. We present the beginnings of the current project, which seeks to map the creative teams and their process in the space of the challenge, and which aims to enable participants to be more than the objects of the data collection. A perceived issue is that typical documentation approaches are ‘about’ the event as opposed to ‘made by’ the participants and are thus both at odds with the spirit of the jam as a phenomenon and do not really access the rich playful potential of participant experience. In the data collection and visualisation projects described here, we focus on using collected data to re-include the participants in telling stories about their experiences of the event as a place-based experience. Our goal is to find a means to encourage production of ‘anecdata’ - data based on individual story telling that is subjective, malleable, and resists collection via formal mechanisms - and to enable mimesis, or active narrating, on the part of the participants. We present a concept design for data as game based on the logic of early medieval maps and we reflect on how we could enable participation in the data collection itself.

The seventh 48 hour game making challenge (2013)

The 48 hour game making challenge has been running since 2007. In recent years, we have not only been running a 'game jam' for the local community but we have also been exploring the way in which the event itself and the place of the event has the potential to create its own stories. Game jams are the creative festivals of the game development community and a game jam is very much an event or performance; its stories are those of subjective experience. Participants return year after year and recount personal stories from previous challenges; arrival in the 48hr location typically inspires instances of individual memory and narration more in keeping with those of a music festival or an oft frequented holiday destination. Since its inception, the 48hr has been heavily documented, from the photo-blogging of our first jam and the twitter streams of more recent events to more formal interviews and documentaries (see Anderson, 2012). We have even had our own moments of Gonzo journalism with an on-site press room one year and an ‘embedded’ journalist another year (Keogh, 2011). In the last two years of the 48hr we have started to explore ways and means to collect more abstract data during the event, that is, empirical data about movement and activity. The intent behind this form of data collection was to explore graphic and computer generated visualisations of the event, not for the purpose of formal analysis but in the service of further story telling. [exerpt from truna aka j.turner, Thomas & Owen, 2013) See: truna aka j.turner, Thomas & Owen (2013) Living the indie life: mapping creative teams in a 48 hour game jam and playing with data, Proceedings of the 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, IE'2013, September 30 - October 01 2013, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Fiction as a form of change : a paper overview of a literature panel discussion

It is well established that literary work can promote insights that result in future change, whether on a personal or an institutional level. As Umberto Eco (1989) notes, the act of reading does not stop with the artist but continues into the work of communities. The papers delivered in this panel consider the regenerative role of literature within culture, arguing that the special properties of literature can convey an important sense of nature (Bateson 1973, Zapf 2008). These concepts are discussed in relation to writing about Australian flora and fauna. Using an ecocritical focus based on ideas about the relationship between literature and the environment the paper considers Australian works and the way in which literature enlivens this complex intersection between humans, animals and the environment. This engagement is investigated through three modes: the philosophical, the literary, and the practical. The novels discussed include Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, and Sonya Hartnett’s Forest, as well as a range of fictional and non-fictional works that describe the Blue Mountains region in New South Wales. The paper closes with a discussion of the role of story-telling as a way of introducing the public to specific environmental locations and issues.

Amplified activism : transmedia storytelling and social change

The avenues through which communities and community organisations raise awareness about the issues they face and how they agitate for change have developed rapidly in the past ten years; and digital technology has provided community activists with the means to quickly create and widely disseminate stories. Perhaps the most influential and wide reaching of recent innovations in storytelling has been transmedia storytelling. This article explores a new breed of projects that utilise recognisable conventions of transmedia storytelling and borrow elements from other forms of storytelling that predate transmedia, such as digital storytelling and documentary film making. In addition to being hybrid in form these projects are independent and solely focused on raising awareness about particular social issues or telling the stories of marginalized groups, who otherwise do not have a voice in the public sphere.

Church officials believed claims were true

FORMER Anglican church officials have admitted they believed a former school headmaster had abused children at a north Queensland boarding school, despite telling a victim during mediation over a compensation payout that his allegations were not proven. For more than six years, Anglican officials dismissed the allegations of Queensland pensioner Bim Atkinson that he had been sexually abused between 1964 and 1968 by the Reverend Robert Waddington, the former headmaster of St Barnabas boarding school in Ravenshoe, on the Atherton Tablelands. In documents and letters obtained by The Weekend Australian, senior church officials in England and Australia told Mr Atkinson, now 59, that Waddington had denied the allegations and his claims were "not proven", despite an internal investigation. Mr Atkinson made his first complaint in 1999 -- when Waddington was living in retirement in York -- but dropped the case after being told the former school principal was near death after surgery for throat cancer. Waddington did not die until 2007. In 2004, Mr Atkinson refiled his complaint, with church officials telling him the allegations were "not proven" and did not warrant another investigation.

Publishing, postage, and prizes : classic Australian children’s literature in the public eye

2012 saw the publication of competing and complementary lines of Australian “classics”: “A&R Australian Classics” (HarperCollins) and “Text Classics” (Text Publishing). While Angus and Robertson were key in establishing a canon of Australian children’s classics in the twentieth century, it was the Text Classics line which included a selection of young people’s titles in their 2013. In turn, Penguin Australia launched a selection of “Australian Children’s Classics”. In so doing, these publishers were drawing on particular literary and visual cultural traditions in Australian children’s literature. Public assertions of a particular selection of children’s books reveals not only contemporary assumptions about desirable childhood experiences but about the operation of nostalgia therein. In encouraging Australian adults to judge books by their covers, such gestures imply that Australian children may be similarly understood. Importantly, the illusion of unity, sameness, and legibility which is promised by circumscribed canons of “classic” children’s literature may well imply a desire for similarly illusory, unified, legible, “classic” childhood. This paper attends to public attempts to materialise (and legitimise) a canon of classic Australian children’s literature. In particular, it considers the ways in which publishing, postage stamps, and book awards make visible a range of children’s books, but do so in order to either fix or efface the content or meaning of the books themselves. Moving between assertions of the best books for children from the 1980s to today, and of the social values circulated within those books, this paper considers the possibilities and problematics of an Australian children’s canon.

The eighth 48 hour game making challenge (2014)

The 48 hour game making challenge has been running since 2007. In recent years, we have not only been running a 'game jam' for the local community but we have also been exploring the way in which the event itself and the place of the event has the potential to create its own stories. The 2014 challenge is part of a series of data collection opportunities focussed on the game jam itself and the meaning making that the participants engage in about the event. We continued the data collection commenced in 2012: "Game jams are the creative festivals of the game development community and a game jam is very much an event or performance; its stories are those of subjective experience. Participants return year after year and recount personal stories from previous challenges; arrival in the 48hr location typically inspires instances of individual memory and narration more in keeping with those of a music festival or an oft frequented holiday destination. Since its inception, the 48hr has been heavily documented, from the photo-blogging of our first jam and the twitter streams of more recent events to more formal interviews and documentaries (see Anderson, 2012). We have even had our own moments of Gonzo journalism with an on-site press room one year and an ‘embedded’ journalist another year (Keogh, 2011). In the last two years of the 48hr we have started to explore ways and means to collect more abstract data during the event, that is, empirical data about movement and activity. The intent behind this form of data collection was to explore graphic and computer generated visualisations of the event, not for the purpose of formal analysis but in the service of further story telling." [exerpt from truna aka j.turner, Thomas & Owen, 2013) See: truna aka j.turner, Thomas & Owen (2013) Living the indie life: mapping creative teams in a 48 hour game jam and playing with data, Proceedings of the 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, IE'2013, September 30 - October 01 2013, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

The role of core protest group members in sustaining protest against controversial construction and engineering projects

Community-based protests against major construction and engineering projects are becoming increasingly common as concerns over issues such as corporate social accountability, climate change and corruption become more prominent in the public's mind. Public perceptions of risk associated with these projects can have a contagious effect, which mismanaged can escalate into long-term and sometimes acrimonious protest stand-offs that have negative implications for the community, firms involved and the construction industry as a whole. This paper investigates the role of core group members in sustaining community-based protest against construction and engineering projects. Using a thematic story telling approach which draws on ethnographic method and social contagion theories, it presents an in-depth analysis of a single case study - one of Australia's longest standing community protests against a construction project. It concludes that core group members play a critical role, within anarchic structures which provide a high degree of spontaneity and improvisation, in sustaining movement continuity by building collective identity, mobilising resources and a moving interface which developers find hard to communicate with.