Interview with Toho Cholik Mutohir

Toho Cholik Mutohir is an Indonesian who studied at Macquarie University in 1980-1981 and in 1984-1986. He studied on a Colombo Plan Scholarship on both occasions, and completed a Masters, then a PhD in Teaching. His PhD thesis examined the development of student evaluation of teachers, and his Masters thesis was also about staff development. The interview was conducted in English on 5 August 2014 by Dr. Jemma Purdey of Deakin University and Dr. Ahmad Suaedy of the Abdurrahman Wahid Centre for Inter-faith Dialogue and Peace at Universitas Indonesia. This set comprises: an interview recording, a timed summary and a photograph.

Can macroalgae contribute to blue carbon? An Australian perspective

Macroalgal communities in Australia and around the world store vast quantities of carbon in their living biomass, but their prevalence of growing on hard substrata means that they have limited capacity to act as long-term carbon sinks. Unlike other coastal blue carbon habitats such as seagrasses, saltmarshes and mangroves, they do not develop their own organic-rich sediments, but may instead act as a rich carbon source and make significant contributions in the form of detritus to sedimentary habitats by acting as a “carbon donor” to “receiver sites” where organic material accumulates. The potential for storage of this donated carbon however, is dependent on the decay rate during transport and the burial efficiency at receiver sites. To better understand the potential contribution of macroalgal communities to coastal blue carbon budgets, a comprehensive literature search was conducted using key words, including carbon sequestration, macroalgal distribution, abundance and productivity to provide an estimation of the total amount of carbon stored in temperate Australian macroalgae. Our most conservative calculations estimate 109.9 Tg C is stored in living macroalgal biomass of temperate Australia, using a coastal area covering 249,697 km2. Estimates derived for tropical and subtropical regions contributed an additional 23.2 Tg C. By extending the search to include global studies we provide a broader context and rationale for the study, contributing to the global aspects of the review. In addition, we discuss the potential role of calcium carbonate-containing macroalgae, consider the dynamic nature of macroalgal populations in the context of climate change, and identify the knowledge gaps that once addressed will enable robust quantification of macroalgae in marine biogeochemical cycling of carbon. We conclude that macroalgal communities have the potential to make ecologically meaningful contributions toward global blue carbon sequestration, as donors, but given that the fate of detached macroalgal biomass remains unclear, further research is needed to quantify this contribution.

Detonating the research plan: exploding the supervisory process

Bomb making is dangerous work. And not just because what you’re creating can blow up in your face. Even as you type in your search terms – how to make a bomb – you wonder who is watching, what algorithm might throw you up into the light of surveillance and trigger the knock at the door. (McKnight, 2014, p. 1)AbstractSo begins Lucinda’s PhD. In this dialogic paper of interwoven stories we employ a critical auto-ethnographic approach to explode moments of our lives and work together as we worked through the “research plan” at the heart of the supervision timeline. Lucinda’s thesis highlights the way curriculum emerges from the struggles of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981) as she and a group of teachers, sought to produce and perform both individual gendered identities (Butler 1997, 2007) and plans for the identities of student subjects, while negotiating subject positions made available to girls and women in broader social contexts. The link between the personal and political is created by a methodology combining narrative inquiry and discourse analysis as a heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) text. In this paper we detonate the research plan developed in the first months of the PhD timeline as Jo responds to Lucinda’s narratives with her own, and we share jointly written narratives that try to capture some key moments of the process. We rework our own stories of the supervised and the supervisor through the competing discourses of our work and lives.

Celebrity value

This essay explores the notion of value and how it has been represented and organised by celebrity culture and some of the emerging online dimensions of "influencer" culture. The introduction situates the debates and where current research on celebrity and value are positioned and contextualizes the subsequent three chapter contributions in this part of the book.

Cyber sisters: Buddhist women’s online activism and practice

While the churches are emptying, other virtual religious places as the religious websites seem to be filling up. The researcher focusing on religion and internet or digital religion as an object of study must seek answers to a number of questions. Is computer-mediated religious communication a particular communication process whose object is what we conventionally call religion? Or is it a modern, independent form of religious expressiveness that finds its new-born status in the web and its particular language? To examine the questions above, and others, the book collects more empirical data, claiming that the Internet will have a specific or novel impact on how religious traditions are interpreted. The blurring of previous boundaries (offline/online, virtual/local, illegitimate/legitimate religion) is another theme common to all the contributions in this volume.

Reverberation and the parodic: an invitation to the spaces of sound

Jacques Rancière in The Politics of Aesthetics speaks of artistic practices ‘as ways of ‘doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making’ (2013: 8). ‘Reverberation’ in the various dimensions explored by this paper is the compelling and parodic force, which signals the transformative potential of the spaces of music, word and sound collaborations. This paper will present the mixed impulse of parody as repetition with difference in Deleuze’s sense, or ironic ‘trans-contextualisation’ (Hutcheon 2000: 32), contextualised by Foucault’s heterotopic thought, Steve Reich’s minimalist music, and Brian Eno’s recognition of ambient sound in 1975 (Howard 2004: 91). Also explored is Hutcheon’s investigation of the etymology of parody as ‘counter-song’, which suggests intimacy and accord. The latter understanding of parody will be of particular importance in a discussion of New York-based band, The National.

The stabilisation of ego identifications in psychosis

The paper discusses the stabilisation of psychotic fragmentation which can occur in psychoanalytic treatments of patients with psychosis. The paper examines the writing practice of James Joyce with reference to its construction of Joyce as the artist and the manner in which he uses his continuous writing practice to inscribe himself and his name into literary history. The clinical significance of this practice is examined according to the theory of writing as a stabilising symptom, drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan in his later seminars.

In the name of the Father : God in Lacan, Judaic or Christian?

This essay challenges the widespread notion that Lacanian psychoanalysis represents a 'Christianing' of psychoanalysis. It argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis brings to psychoanalysis a broadly "Averroist" attitude towards religion which develops out of and transcends Freud's position in Totem and Taboo. For Lacan, religious texts are an invaluable source of pre-psychoanalytic insight or another regal road into the champ Freudien: the dynamic of human beings' desire, in its co-conformity with language and Law. The text focuses on trying to decipher the missing content of the Names of the Father seminar: the seminar that "does not exist" (Miller, 2006) beyond its opening, esoteric and dramatic session. The force of doing this will be to show how much, and how fundamental, the things are that Lacan thinks the bible, and the first Abrahamic monotheism in particular, can teach us about human subjectivity and the instance of the Law that shapes it - insights which go to explain Freud's unmistakable attachment, despite himself, to the civilizational importance of his fathers.