Appropriation in the name of art: is a quotation exception the answer?

The Australian Law Reform Commission is at present considering the scope of exceptions to copyright infringement. Its consideration will no doubt be influenced to some degree by the outcome in EMI Songs Australia Pty Ltd v Larrikin Music Publishing Pty Ltd (2011) 191 FCR 444; (2011) 90 IPR 50 which concerned the quotation of a musical phrase in a later musical work. This article addresses the problem of creative appropriations and the extent to which a quotation exception, consistent with Art 10 of the Berne Convention, should be incorporated into Australian law. In doing so it considers the practical application of such a quotation exception in European jurisdictions (most notably Germany) and suggests the form in which such an exception might be incorporated into Australian law.

O where are you going? O do you imagine? Reproduction and response : a reflexive sociology of scholarship of teaching and learning in practical legal training

My doctoral research studies Australian PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning. I argue that many PLT practitioners are motivated to engage with scholarship of teaching and learning in their work. There are, however, individual and extra-individual impediments.
PLT practitioners are lawyers that teach in institutional practical legal training (“PLT”). Satisfactory completion of mandatory PLT is an eligibility requirement for admission to the Australian legal profession. The PLT requirement is additional to academic legal qualifications. PLT is undertaken at a post-graduate level with, or after, the academic law degree.
My study investigates PLT practitioners’ motivations and capabilities to engage with scholarship of teaching and learning (“SoTL”). I study organisational symbolic support for SoTL in PLT, and organisational allocation of resources to SoTL in PLT.
The study involves individual and extra-individual domains of PLT practitioners’ work. It considers how social structures (e.g. “the juridical”) are inscribed into individuals’ practices (“teaching”) and, conversely, whether practices influence social structures.
My research adopts qualitative methodologies. These involve inter-disciplinary exchanges between law, legal education, practice research, sociology of law, cultural theory, and theory and practice of teaching and learning. My theoretical framework draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s “reflexive sociology”, and Michel de Certeau’s “heterological science”.
I sourced data from documents, and semi-structured interviews with 36 Australian PLT practitioners. Documentary sources include statutory instruments, speeches, reports, practice directions, histories, and scholarly publications.
To analyse the data I adopted Kelle’s characterisation of “theoretical sensitivity”, drawing on “explicit” and “emergent” analysis strategies derived from “grounded theory”. The explicit strategies were based on my theoretical framework. The emergent strategy involved sensitivity to non-explicit concepts and theories that emerged from the data. Computer-aided qualitative data analysis software expedited these methods.
My findings to date question dominant legal structures’ readiness for change, the implications of this for teaching and learning in PLT, and in particular for PLT practitioners’ engagement with SoTL in PLT.
The espoused rationale for mandatory PLT (in statutes) is improvement for the protection of clients, the administration of justice, and to assure quality legal services. The tacit rationale is improved quality of legal education, and experiences, for lawyers-to-be. My thesis argues dominant structures in legal education impede the espoused and tacit objectives, and impede PLT practitioners’ engagement with scholarship of teaching and learning.

Not-I/Thou : the other subject of art and architecture

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, while Part Two returns to apparent lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, particularly the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and periodic (and renascent) avant-garde agitation. In-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things, Art and Architecture, as forms of speculative intellectual capital, emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency. Defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both, Art and Architecture are represented in this series of essays as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validating and valorizing the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end.

Pluralist risk cultures: the sociology of childbirth

Western medical approaches to childbirth typically locate risk in women’s bodies,making it axiomatic that ‘good’ maternity care is associated with medically trainedattendants. This logic has been extrapolated to developing societies, like Vanuatu, anIsland state in the Pacific, struggling to provide good maternity care in line with theWorld Health Organization’s Millennium Development Goals. These goals include thereduction of maternal mortality by two-thirds by 2015, but Vanuatu must overcomechallenging hurdles – medical, social and environmental – to achieve this goal.Vanuatu is a hybridised society: one where the pre-modern and modern coincide inparallel institutions, processes and practices. In 2010, I undertook an inductive study of30 respondents from four main subcultures – women living in outer rural communitieswith limited access to Western-trained health workers; women from inner urbancommunities with ease of access to medical clinics; traditional birth attendants whoare formally untrained but highly specialised and practised mainly in remote communities;and Western-trained medical clinicians (obstetricians and midwives). I invitedall the participants to comment on what constituted a ‘good birth’. In this article, Ishow that participants interpreted this variously according to how they believed theuncertainties of childbirth could be managed. Objectivist approaches that define risk asan objective reality amenable to quantifiable measurement are thus rendered inadequate.Interpretivist approaches better explain the reality that social actors not only findrisk in different sites but gravitate towards different practices, discourses and individualsthey can trust especially those with whom they feel a strong sense of community.Strategies are, therefore, formed less through scientific rationality but according tofeelings and emotions and the lived experience. The concept of risk cultures conveysthis complexity; they are formed around values rather than calculable rationalities. Riskcultures form self-reflexively to manage contingent circumstances.

Towards a sociology of measurement in education policy

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the bases for significant, high-stakes policy and reform decisions. This article traces how international comparability is produced, using the example of equity measurement in OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It focuses on the construction of the objects of comparison and traces the struggles to produce equivalence and commensurability across diverse and complex worlds. Based on conversations with a number of measurement experts who are familiar with the OECD and PISA, the article details how comparability is achieved and how it falters and fails. In performing such an analysis, this research is not concerned with ‘exposing’ the limitations of comparison or challenging their validity. Rather, based on the work of Steve Woolgar and other scholars, it attempts to mobilise a ‘sociology of measurement’ that explores the instrumentalism and performativity of the technologies of international comparisons.

Sociology of religion in Australia

The sociology of religion has been a moderately strong theme in Australian sociology. Most Australian sociologists of religion have been trained in Australia with a smattering of those trained in the USA, the UK or elsewhere. While Christian churches once maintained research offices including sociologists and some seminaries once included the sociology of religion in their offerings, this is no longer so. Other religious groups have not yet grown to such strength that the support of their own research sections has been possible, but several have actively funded research-including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Scientology. The Christian Research Association, founded in the mid-198os, is the only independent research organization in Australia devoted to the sociology of religion. While largely funded by church organizations, it also receives government grants and has maintained its independence of religious organisations.The National Church Life Survey group, which also commenced work in the mid-198os, conducts a nation-wide survey of church attenders every five years at the time of the Australian census (e.g. Kaldor et al. 1994, 1999 ). Their time series data on Australian Catholics are excellent, being gathered according to random selection techniques. The NCLS also provides five-yearly reports on Protestants and Anglicans and other studies of congregational life in Australia. There are no systematic data sources on the Orthodox, who comprise three percent of the national population and six percent of the population in Melbourne.

Bourdieu`s reflexive sociology and `spaces of points of view`: whose reflexivity, which perspective?

This paper considers Bourdieu's concepts of perspectivism and reflexivity, looking particularly at how he develops arguments about these in his recent work, The Weight of the World (1999) and Pascalian Meditations (2000b). We explicate Bourdieu's distinctive purposes and deployment of these terms and approaches, and discuss how this compares with related methodological and theoretical approaches currently found in social and feminist theory. We begin by considering three main ways in which 'reflexivity' is deployed in current sociological writing, distinguishing between reflexive sociology and a sociology of reflexivity. This is followed by a discussion of the main aspects of Bourdieu's approach to 'reflexive sociology' and its relation to his concepts of social field, perspectivism and spaces of point of view. He argues that we need to interrogate the idea of a single 'perspective' and account especially for the particularity and influence of the 'scholastic' point of view. He characterizes this latter point of view as unaware of its own historicity and as largely concerned with contemplation and with treating ideas primarily as abstractions (Bourdieu, 2000b). Bourdieu's intervention is to argue, as he has throughout his work, for a more reflexive account of one's location and habitus, and for sustained engagement with ideas and social issues as practical problems. Bourdieu exhorts researchers to work with 'multiple perspectives' (Bourdieu et al., 1999, p. 3), the various competing 'spaces of points of view', without collapsing into subjectivism or relativism. We then consider recent feminist engagements with and critiques of Bourdieu's notion of reflexivity and chart some of the main points of contention regarding its relevance and conceptual potential for theorizing gender identities and transformations in current times. We conclude with a brief outline of how we are working with a reflexive sociological approach in a cross-generational study of young women in difficult circumstances, 'on the margins' of education and work.

Anticipating policy and logics of practice : Australian institutional and academic responses to the globalising "quality research" agenda

Research assessment is now an international trend. This article mobilises a critical policy sociology informed by Bourdieu to unpack the differential effects of research policy shifts in Australia on universities, academics and the field of educational research. It argues in anticipating policy moves - from surveying the logics of practice that have emerged elsewhere from research assessment - that institutional, individual and field responses, while specific to the Australian policy context and mix, have assumed a logic of practice counter productive to "quality" research, education as a field, and equity.

Gathering collecting: art and the ethics of 'care at a distance'

Catalogue essay 2 in a catalogue of an exhibition held at SASA Gallery, Adelaide, 8 May-1 June 2007. He addresses the notion of what it is to collect and how art objects survive the transposition associated with collecting.

The evolution and conservation of Taiwan's aboriginal art heritage

This thesis synthesises perspectives from heritage, museum studies, anthropology and contemporary art to provide a dynamic account of the role of art among the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. It proposes that the continuing practice of contemporary Aboriginal art in Taiwan is an important instrument for maintaining Aboriginal groups' cultural vitality.

The best of all worlds: Immersive interfaces for art education in virtual and real world teaching and learning environments

A narrative interpretative research methodology was used to investigate collaboration between higher education students and an art educator with the aim of establishing a community of learners. Located, Cloud based and graphically built 3D virtual, socially networked, e-learning environments were used to encourage synchronous and asynchronous student participation in authentic learning and collaborative art practice. Discussion focuses on art educator observations, student visual journal entries, their virtual exhibition of artworks on Deakin Art Education Island in Second Life and student evaluations of the unit Navigating the Visual World. It was concluded that immersion in an e-technology rich blended learning environment resulted in the establishment of an effective e-learning community of art.

Cameras and body memory create new blends of performance with visual art practice

I propose that a learnt somatic experience of dance can translate into another discipline such as visual art. In my visual art practice I combine both photography, which is traditionally seen as a still medium, and performance in order to create a new form of embodiment. I have developed two series of art works of prints and video made in response to the Australian landscape. By analyzing my method of movement and photography I will describe how an embodied dance language can result in a material outcome – a series of drawings of light and movement, a body signature made possible through old and new technology. I have activated a performative state while capturing images discovering new ways of using technology reliant upon my knowledge of dance, performance and photography. Making a human size camera to make analogue prints I gained an intuitive knowledge of light – a skill that has become foundational in performance and photography. In response to space and light in the Australian landscape I then built a custom made camera that allows for the longest possible time to capture an image. I move while taking the image and use the camera as if an eye at the end of my arm. In this way I activate dance skills and embodied knowledge of space, timing and light, opening up a radical space for new thinking, making and performing.Furthermore this process engages memory and sentiment embodied through age. Many artists have responded to the unique qualities of the Australian landscape and by using a performative/photographic approach I have engaged with my own body memory. Being brought up in the landscape and training in ballet my body has acquired memories at a cellular level. My method has given memory a voice. In doing these works I have become conscious of how unconscious memories of the space and light in the landscape is a movement vocabulary activated in a way that ‘feels’ like dancing. As an ageing person this experience is profound and the resultant materialisation of the photographs and videos leave a material record of the event. The sentiments evoked through my process bridge the past with the present, the body with the mind, memory with body and space connecting disciplines in a new way.The materialisation of artworks itself continues cross-disciplinary processes using a technique that is a continuum of the performative. Through using technology I release memory of the landscape and pixel by pixel build imagery that relies on and is a part of the performative process. It is a photographic performance dance manifesting as pigment on paper exhibited a gallery context. The exhibition allows a space for the viewer to respond - re-membering the universal the act of moving. The works titled ‘body signatures’ and ‘Fly Rhythm’ become a communicative device in the gallery context.My paper through an analysis of process and methods used in making the two series will talk to several of the subjects listed and reveal a new way of connecting performance and visual art and old and new technologies.