Exploring girl power : gender, literacy and the textual practices of young women attending an elite school

Popular discourses concerning the relationship between gender and academic literacies have suggested that boys are lacking in particular, school-based literacy competencies compared with girls. Such discourses construct “gender” according to a binary framework and they obscure the way in which literacy and textual practices operate as a site in which gendered identities are constituted and negotiated by young people in multiple sites including schooling, which academic inquiry has often emphasized. In this paper I consider the school-based textual practices of young women attending an elite school, in order to explore how these practices construct “femininities”. Feminist education researchers have shown how young women negotiate discourses of feminine passivity and heterosexuality through their reading and writing practices. Yet discourses of girlhood and femininity have undergone important transformations in times of ‘girl power’ in which young women are increasingly constructed as successful, autonomous and sexually agentic. Thus young women’s reading and writing practices may well operate as a space in which new discourses around girlhood and femininity are constituted. Throughout the paper, I utilize the notion of “performativity”, understood through the work of Judith Butler, to show how textual practices variously inscribe and negotiate discourses of gender. Thus the importance of textual work in inscribing and challenging notions of gender is asserted. I argue that critical literacy is just as important, but perhaps no more guaranteed, within elite girls’ education as it is within boys’ education.

Heteroglossia : a space for developing critical language awareness?

This paper reports on research into the challenges of implementing a critical writing pedagogy within a teacher education program in Australia. Participants in this study are student teachers enrolled in a compulsory subject, “Language and Literacy in Secondary School”, a subject requiring them to develop a knowledge of the role of language and literacy across the secondary school curriculum and to show personal proficiency in literacy as part of graduate outcomes for teacher education dictated by the State Government of Victoria. To develop an understanding of the way that language has shaped their lives, students write a narrative about their early literacy experiences – a task which they all find very challenging, especially in comparison with the formal writing of other university subjects. Rather than simply reminiscing about their early childhood, they are encouraged to juxtapose voices from the past and the present, and to combine a range of texts within their writing. Later in the semester they revisit these accounts of their early literacy experiences and, in a separate piece of writing, endeavour to place these accounts within the contexts of theories and debates they have encountered in the course of completing this unit. The students’ writing provides a small window on how they are experiencing their tertiary education and their preparation as teachers, including the managerial controls that are currently shaping university curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that such heteroglossic texts (Bakhtin, 1981) prompt students to stretch their repertoires as language-users, enabling them to develop a socially critical awareness of language and literacy, including the literacy practices in which they engage as university students.

A 'respectful relationships' approach : could it be the answer to preventing gender-based violence?

Student use of an assessed online discussion space

The dataset contains quantitative information concerning university students' usage of online discussion areas and the impact of the students' participation on their final results.

The data includes the following categories of information:
• student age (whole years at the end of semester);
• student gender (male or female);
• student normal mode of study (on-campus or off-campus);
• student course of study (BTech, BE or other);
• student prior general academic performance (measured at Deakin University by the weighted average mark [WAM]);
• the total number of discussion messages read (or at least opened) by the student;
• the total number of new/initial discussion postings made by the student;
• the total number of follow-up/reply discussion postings made by the student; and
• the final unit mark obtained by the student.

Festivals and music : negotiating culture, identity and place

It is noted in the introduction to this book that ' Festivals are believed to recreate and emphasize relationships that are normally submerged; of being built in structures whilst following unstructured codes, of creating a separate world with its own rules, personnel and expectations; of encompassing contradictory ideas and practices while involving formal and informal institutions: So what is this 'separate world'? What relationships, normally unseen or unnoticed, are made apparent within the space of the festival? While the origins of festivals lie in the close relationship of the quotidian and ritual aspects of traditional communities, how do contemporary festivals relate to the diversity of multicultural societies? Conversely, how are they inflected by the forces of globalization, by the festivalization of culture that in recent years has become a widespread tactic for the promotion of cities and regions? While many traditional festivals still exist, increasing urbanization, improved communications and diversified migration have meant that many contemporary festivals are of recent origin, the products of what Giddens refers to as the post-traditional state of present societies (Giddens 1994). This description highlights the self-conscious nature of dealing with culture in a world of competing and overlapping world views. While cultural identity and authenticity are still used to infer the existence of qualities intrinsic to communities, ethnicities or nations, the fragmentation and interconnectedness of contemporary societies have long made assertions of essence untenable. Meanings have become dependent on performativity and context. Cultural identity, while traditionally applied to those sharing a particular geographic, linguistic, ethnic or religious background, has become extended to other senses of belonging, to communities based on sexuality, physicality or simply shared experience and taste. The notion that festivals might create separate worlds suggests that part of the reason for their recent proliferation in recent times is that they provide the ideal medium for both performance and participation in this diffuse and shifting environment.

En-gendering the nation : gender-bending and nationalism in Miles Franklin's 'My brilliant career' and Emily Lawless's 'Grania: The story of an Island'

Writing in the lee of first-wave feminism and in an era of nation-invention, the Irish Ascendancy novelist, Emily Lawless, and the aggressively Australian Miles Franklin (of Irish, English and German extraction and coming from families who were pastoralists) wrote novels of adolescence, respectively, 'Grania: the Story of an Island' (1892) and 'My Brilliant Career' (1901). Similar and different in many ways, they both wrote as women and self-consciously inserted themselves into nation-inscribing projects with an eye to overseas readerships, and they played fast and loose with class. Curiously, both contributed to the process of transforming 'nowhere-places' into iconic nationalist places: Franklin put the Monaro on the map (a region that was a nationalist icon before the 'Red Centre' usurped its place); and Lawless wrote in ethnographic ways about the Aran Islands more than a decade before J.M. Synge tramped westward in search of the 'Peasant Quality', so beloved of the Abbey Theatre playwrights and audiences. Most compellingly, they wrote of the near-pathologies of masculinities within nationalist agendas, and of marriage and sexuality. This article examines the novels comparatively and contrastively and asks uncomfortable questions about why and how their interventions were untimely.

En-Gendering the Nation: Gender-bending and Nationalism in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Emily Lawless’ Grania: the Story of an Island

Writing in the lee of first-wave feminism and in an era of nation-invention, the Irish ascendancy novelist, Emily Lawless, and the aggressively Australian Miles Franklin (of Irish, English and German extraction and coming from families who were pastoralists) wrote novels of adolescence, Grania: The Story of an Island (1892) and My Brilliant Career (1901) respectively. Similar and different in many ways, they both write as women, and self-consciously insert themselves into nation-inscribing projects with an eye to overseas readerships, and they play fast and loose with class. Curiously, both contributed to the process of transforming ‘nowhere-places’ into iconic nationalist places: Franklin put the Monaro on the map (a region that was a nationalist icon before the ‘Red Centre’ usurped its place); and Lawless wrote in ethnographic ways about the Aran Islanders more than a decade before Synge tramped westward in search of the ‘Peasant Quality’ so beloved of the Abbey playwrights and audiences. Most compellingly, they write of the near-pathologies of masculinities within nationalist agendas, and of marriage and sexuality. This paper examines the novels comparatively and contrastively and asks uncomfortable questions about why and how their interventions were untimely.

Hybrid perspectives : defining the relativity of culture and identity through migration experiences

This paper examines how culture and identity can be relatively defined through hybrid perspectives in relation to migration experiences. Addressing and portraying definitions of culture and identity is crucial in understanding how notions of such issues connect and initiate the migrant subject through new experiences, perspectives and ways of being. In enunciating the transitions from home to a new place, and elaborating on the rupture of an inherited culture and grounded identity, I refer to them through self-reflexive perspectives. The search for meaning through appraisals of cultural lineage and linguistic capital through a Diaspora, a post colonial history and lived life experiences from my home country, pre-empts the ambivalent and hybrid status in defining culture(s) and identit(ies). It is crucial to recognise how challenges for adaptation to new culture, language, societal norms, and differences in class, nationality, race and gender play specific roles in the migrant experience. My current experiences of migration to Australia are narrations of encountered difficulties, fears, inhibitions, new aspirations, perceptions and perspectives, which map an ‘identity crisis.’ From this narrative structure, I investigate through my ongoing PhD study, how my artistic expression and representations progress towards experiences, and themes that metaphorically reflect, inspire and enact the hybrid structures of culture(s) and identit(ies). Explored reflexively my representations suggest how the ‘liminal space’ or the ‘third space,’ (Bhabha, 1990) express transitions about the ‘self’ and my artistic expression, which enable further reflection and positions to emerge and extend to metaphorical expressions.

The place of scandal : Lara Bingle and Brendan Fevola

Over the period of a few short weeks in 2010 Australian media coverage and public discussion was dominated by news of a ‘sex scandal’ involving two high-profile celebrities – Lara Bingle (model and then fiancée of the vice-captain of the Australian cricket team Michael Clarke), and the Australian rules football ‘bad boy’ Brendan Fevola. The scandal began with the publication of a pixellated photograph in the popular Australian women’s magazine, Woman’s Day, of a naked and apparently unconsenting Bingle in the shower, which was allegedly taken by Fevola during a brief affair years previously and distributed via his mobile phone. This article examines the constructions of women’s sexuality, gender and celebrity scandal in mainstream media coverage of this event. Attending to the Australian news media’s discursive constructions of Bingle’s sexual behaviour, this research begins to map the ways in which celebrity scandals in the mainstream media provoke wider debate about ‘gender appropriate’ conduct (sexual and otherwise).

My place: exploring children's place-related identities through reading and writing

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children’s place-related identities through their engage- ment with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey’s notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatt’s notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.

Place-related identity, texts, and transcultural meanings

The spatial turn has been marked by increasing interest in conceptions of space and place in diverse areas of research. However, the important links between place and identity have received less attention, particularly in educational research. This paper reports an 18-month research project that aimed to develop a theory of place-related identity through the textual transactions of reading and writing. The research was an in-depth qualitative study in two phases: the first phase involved the development of an interdisciplinary theory of place-related identity, which was ‘tested’ in a second empirical phase. Two contrasting primary school classes were the site for the research that included the development of a unit of work, inspired by the book My place, as a vehicle for exploring place-related identity. The data were interviews, classroom observations and outcomes from pupils’ work. The construct of transcultural meanings, established from the analytic categories of localising identity, othering identity and identity as belonging, was identified as a defining phenomenon of place-related identity. The conclusions offer reflections on the development of our initial theory as a result of the empirical work, and the implications for practice and future research.

Board diversity or gender diversity? Perspectives from Europe, Australia and South Africa

Board diversity has been a hot topic for several years. However, it is only in recent years that pertinent questions have been asked about what is actually meant by board diversity and what would constitute a board with an ideal diversity. In the past the debate on board diversity has always been dominated by the lack, or very low numbers, of females on boards. This has been a fact in most countries with sophisticated corporate law and corporate governance systems in place. The issue of female representation on boards still dominates the board diversity debate, but other forms of diversity, including age, cultural, nationality and race have also become part of the debate. The quest is to find answers to questions like whether a diversified board would be better, and whether diversified boards will ensure a better return for investors; in other words, whether there is a ‘business case’ to be made out to have diversity on a board. Many studies have been done, but the answer is still evasive. This is not totally unexpected as the criteria used for these studies differ and the circumstances and complexities of business are such that a final conclusion will probably never be reached. In this article we focus on the board diversity debate in Europe, Australia and South Africa – three completely different parts of the world. In addition we devote Part V to put the topic of board diversity in a broader context, but paying particular attention to gender diversity.

Would you like some gender with that leadership?

The recent toppling of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, continues to raise questions about women and leadership. Gillard was regarded as smart, capable and resilient. However, a string of bad decisions and broken promises had the public and politicians questioning her capacity to lead. In her final exit speech before Kevin Rudd took her place, Gillard responded to the “gender wars” discourse that had come to represent her leadership, saying that “the reaction to being the first female PM”—in other words, gender—did not explain everything nor did it explain nothing.

Global positioning systems : altered representations of place

Global Positioning Systems: altered representations of place, presents an exegesis from the practice led research submitted for the degree of Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. The thesis proposes a particular understanding of altered states of consciousness that is relevant to my practice.  This is outlined by Charles Tart and supported by the Altered States of Consciousness Consortium and explores a psycho-aesthetic experiences and does not involved transcendental states or spiritual associations. These experiences are transformed by an exhaustive application of digital technologies, where mosaic-like complexity emerges that induces sustained disorientation and surrounds a viewer in an immersive space.

Quo vadis, Delhi? Urban heritage and gender: towards a sustainable urban future

Historic architectural heritage is important to sustainable urban planning policy, particularly in cities that have heritage sites and/or themselves have ancient archaeological value. Delhi is one of the oldest living cities in the world. However, the vision of its planning policy is limited to valuing heritage for itself and for its economic value instead of also exploring the ways in the city’s heritage might contribute to the social organisation and utilisation of the urban public space. Particularly, like most national policy documents on heritage, it ignores the heritage/gender nexus, which has implications for the identity and status of women in Delhi, community development and ecological preservation. But twenty women practioners and scholars of development in Delhi referred to heritage as a challenge as well as opportunity for gender and urban sustainability when asked for their perspectives on the most important sustainability issues in the city. I argue that Delhi’s urban planning strategies must acknowledge the gender/heritage nexus to enable holistic and gender-inclusive urban development for the present and future generations of its citizens, which is an important thrust of the sustainability agenda.