It came to pass

Peter Booth`s apocalyptic Burning City and Head stemmed from wartime experiences in Britain. Employing Friedrich`s Wanderer in the Sea of Fog as a portent of Germany`s imperialism, my painting collapses vision into nightmare, drawing in German artists Beuys and Rauch, caught up in a horrendous and inescapable legacy.

Stone soup drawing exhibition and workshop

This series of drawings based on the folk tale of stone soup, axe soup and other tales of travel and engagement with a new community. I also conducted a community workshop in which people drew on paper prepared by myself in which memories and placeswere the focus. As the community drawings were produce I substituted them for the ones I had produced and left them with the festival committee as a gift to the community.

Incorrigible and undisciplined lines in visual social research : ways of ‘writing’ and ‘drawing’ at the interstices

In this paper the author traces the possibilities afforded by engaging with the aesthetic, historic and socio-political nature of shodo (Japanese calligraphy) as an intersectional space. Shodo literally translated as 'the way of writing' is an artistic practice bringing together ink, brush and paper. It is simultaneously a juncture between studied discipline and an ongoing mediation of subjectivities. The calligrapher/writer/drawer communicates to the reader through the bold or subtle brush strokes, the pressure and movement at the completion of each stroke. The calligrapher/writer/drawer draws across the boundaries of text and image to meet the reader blurring the lines between subject and object. This discussion re-examines the hierarchical binaries of writing/drawing, text/image, self/Other as they play out from vanishing lines of distinction between truth and conjecture. Crossing these binaries opens up opportunity for decentring and questioning representational practice by enabling other possible meanings and practices to emerge (Lather, 2007). I work from a stance of theoretical promiscuity in order to disrupt constitutive discourses and restore the liminal in social research. Drawing across the fragments of research projects I illustrate the generative and speculative space of visualising pedascapes in educational research.

The drawer and the drawing

"The drawer and the drawing" is an installation that is a direct response to the Deakin artists books collection. Using original drawing, hand colouring, computer enhanced artwork, paper-cutouts, photographs, I created a glimpse of what the “book” tells me about the artist? I created "artworks, the books and the ephemera that was left over and behind when the “artbook” was taken away and placed in a gallery.

Assessment of proximal outcomes of self-management programs : translation and psychometric evaluation of a German version of the Health Education Impact Questionnaire (heiQtm)

Purpose This paper describes the translation, cultural adaption, and psychometric evaluation of a German version of the Health Education Impact Questionnaire (heiQ™), a widely used generic instrument assessing a wide range of proximal outcomes of self-management programs.

Methods The translation was carried out according to international standards and included forward and backward translations. Comprehensibility and content validity were tested using cognitive interviews with 10 rehabilitation inpatients. Psychometric properties were examined in rehabilitation inpatients (n = 1,202) with a range of chronic conditions. Factorial validity was assessed using confirmatory factor analysis; concurrent validity was explored by correlations with comparator scales.

Results The items of the German heiQ™ were well understood by rehabilitation inpatients. The structure of the eight heiQ™ scales was replicated after minor adjustment. heiQ™ scales had higher correlations with comparator scales with similar constructs, particularly mental health concepts than with physical health. Moreover, all heiQ™ scales differentiated between individuals across different levels of depression.

Conclusion The German heiQ™ is comprehensible for German-speaking patients suffering from different types of chronic conditions; it assesses relevant outcomes of self-management programs in a reliable and valid manner. Further studies involving its practical application are warranted.

Drawing the line: Chinese calligraphy, cultural materialisms and the “remixing of remix"

Remix in writing has very different expressions, and is grounded in very different legal, philosophical and creative materialisms, in Western and Chinese cultures. The infringement of authors’ Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in China is not only an irritant for Chinese-Western commercial and legal relations. It also points to different formations of the creative and legal domains across global space, and serves to introduce notions of creativity and originality that are largely unfamiliar in the West. Calligraphy, as a pictorial and material mode of writing, comprises a practice of Chinese remix in which the apprentice traces the lines of the master’s work: repetition of Yun 韵 (‘composed body movements’) stimulates the expression of Qing 情 (‘feelings’). What appears from a distance to be slavish imitation actually involves a philosophy of learning (or more precisely, of ‘unlearnt learning’) that, bypassing plagiarism’s traps, effectively ‘remixes remix’ as a creative model no longer dependent on the familiar Western rationales for the legitimacy of remix as appropriation, homage and/or pastiche. To see this though, one has to deploy a Taoist rather than a Confucian framework in the analysis of calligraphic practices. The case of Kathy Acker, allied with the work of Gilles Deleuze, reveals a largely invisible lineage of Taoist-influenced remix in Western creative writing. In this way, calligraphy emerges as a model of remix relevant to all forms of writing—for all writing is material, whether calligraphic or not. Further, as Acker shows, the materiality of writing constantly replenishes its remixing with cultural elements that may not be otherwise visible.

Mental context reinstatement or drawing: which better enhances children's recall of witnessed events and protects against suggestive questions?

The aim of this experiment was to examine the effectiveness of two techniques in enhancing children's recall of an event that they experienced approximately a week earlier. Younger (5–6 years) and older (8–9 years) children were interviewed about a magic show event in one of three conditions. Before recalling the event, some children were instructed to mentally reinstate the context of the event (MCR group), others were asked to draw the context of the event (DCR group), and others received no reinstatement instructions (NCR). Results showed that these instructions had no impact on children's free recall or responses to open-ended prompts. However, reinstatement instructions impacted children's responses to suggestive questions: those in the DCR group gave more accurate responses than those in the NCR group. These findings provide preliminary support for the use of drawing as a potentially protective exercise that lessens the impact of biased questions with child witnesses.