Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

 In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.

Transforming Paramythi in diasporic literature : five Greek Australian writers

 This thesis examines how paramythi, as a literary trope, circulates in different ways in the texts of five Greek Australian writers and what this reveals about diasporic subjectivities.

Uniting the perspectival subject: two approaches

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a “notional subject” of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the “actual subject,” the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere “imagined seeing.” I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally “unselfconscious,” with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal “contemporaneity,” and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart.

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.

Marking time: duration as subject (Tony Woods)

Tony Woods: Archive, edited by Andrew Gaynor and published locally in 2013, records the durability of the artist’s primary painting practice as will as his filmmkaing, a painting practice in which he has accrued a level of prestige over many years and changes of circumstance.

Subject matters of science, technology, mathematics and engineering

This chapter offers a critical review of curriculum in the STEM disciplines, overviewing contemporary context and issues around the STEM acronym as a contested space, issues of inquiry, social justice, current concerns with student engagement and their history, theoretical perspectives on teaching and learning in these disciplines, and key forms and foci of inquiry into STEM curriculum.

The event, the subject, and the artwork into the twenty-first century

Partly guided by Alain Badiou's controversial Century and its interpretation of the events and art of the last century, this book opens debates about these for the twenty-first century.