Writing/reading a life : the rhetorical practice of autobiography

This essay examines how the introduction/preface to a non-fiction text is constructed as autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. The use and autobiographical effects of rhetorical tropes (stake inoculation, metaphor and binary oppositions) are examined in the introduction that prefaces Massacre myth (Moran, 1999), a polemic account of the 1926 police massacre of Aborigines that was the catalyst for Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Using the analytical methods of deconstruction, I tease out how language, structure and a (seemingly) objective account of historical virtues are recruited to the project of autobiography, and illuminate the role of language in the construction of the authorial subject (and Others), and show how these are entangled with broader social, political and epistemological issues. The analysis underlines the dialogic relationship between text, reader and society, and the instability of truth claims and the authorial subject of autobiography.

Circle: orbital commutation

In exercising vision we employ strategies to perceive space and to distinguish the objects of attention. Some processes however remain invisible to us; how we process binocular vision; and how we resolve vision in motion. This work images invisible motion perspective. Revelation of invisible mechanisms of vision exposes the haptic qualities of sight and their contribution to proprioception and ʻaffordanceʼ. Figuring the ʻvortex of visionʼ also releases symbolic and metaphoric potentials. This innovative outcome of practical research develops imagery which depicts relative movement in space using the principles of motion perspective (Herschel) and optic flow (J. J. Gibson); the locative awareness of volumes in space through the dimensions of time and space presented in 2D imagery. The mural scale (3.5 metres) work presented in 'Circle', a group show of work around the idea of 'the circle' curated by Melinda Capp is derived from a large production of digital photographs made in the London Underground. In this work, the circle is associated with the orbit of the commuter which bends around the twin poles of home and employment, work and rest, circulating in an ellipse around the Ideal Life. Each traveller's path is a braid woven through gyrations of force and resistance. Optic flow, emulated with the rotating lens, tracing the moving subject, makes this visible.

'We learnt that last week' : reading into the language practices of teachers

The messages teachers convey to their students through their use of language can often go unconsidered, yet such practices can have a significant impact on students and their schooling, and in the creation of learning difficulties. In this paper we employ a discursive and ideological approach to analysing teachers’ language practices and suggest that such systematic examination is warranted given the centrality of ‘teacher talk’ to students’ schooling. We draw attention to these concerns through an analysis of a spoken text between a teacher and student in the context of ‘show and tell’; a dialogue drawn from a larger body of data of interviews with and observations of teachers in six Australian primary schools. The analysis attempts to uncover the meanings conveyed to the student in question, Sam, through his teacher’s language practices and to demonstrate the potentially detrimental effects of these practices on his schooling. Generally, we propose that teachers frequently employ linguistic techniques to refashion students in various ways, according to the norms of schooling; norms that often do not account very well for student difference and which position them as ‘difficult’. Specifically, we argue that Sam’s teacher seems more interested in moulding Sam’s behaviour to conform to the interests of the school than in valuing his heritage and contributions.

How did we ever arrive at the conclusion that teachers are the problem? A critical reading in the discourses of Australian schooling

A Quality Teacher debate is presented within historical and contemporary contexts, including a political history of Australian schooling over the last 20 or so years. It is argued that there is a crisis of confidence in schooling, which is currently being played out by positioning teachers as the 'problem' and not just the 'solution' to this crisis.

The magic circle and the mobility of play

Convergent media and communication technologies have changed what it means for games to be mobile, but play has a mobility of its own that often goes unacknowledged. This article draws together emerging theory from debates in game studies on the separation of the experience of gameplay from the everyday. It examines the metaphor of the ‘magic circle’ and analyses how play, as a mode of experience, is mobilized across dimensions of hardware and software, extending the functions of games beyond the imagining of designers and manufacturers. The article considers what the mobility of play indicates for the player in the creation and management of identity online in the light of game studies consolidation of the magic circle through Goffman’s Frame Analysis. It sees new opportunities in the play of Zombie Media and the role of digital game artifacts in the presentation of the gamer persona, recasting Benjamin and Baudelaire’s flaˆneur as the ‘gameur’.

Reading room: experiments in posture, movement and comprehension

Participants were required to balance on a seesaw while reading texts in the mirror. They read forward, backward, upside-down and mirror texts while seated. They also crouched, twisted and stretched to read texts from floor to ceiling.

Reading house prices in Australian capital cities

House prices in the Australian capital cities have been increasing over the last two decades. An over 10% average annual increase arises in the capital cities. In Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, the house prices increased by more than 15% annually, while the house prices in Darwin increased by even higher at about 21%. It is surprising that, after a decrease in 2008, the house prices in the Australian capital cities show a strong recovery in their last financial year’s increase. How to read the house prices in cities across a country has been an issue of public interest since the late 1980s. Various models were developed to investigate the behaviours of house prices over time or space. A spatio-temporal model, introduced in recent literature, appears advantages in accounting for the spatial effects on house prices. However, the decay of temporal effects and temporal dynamics of the spatial effects cannot be addressed by the spatio-temporal model. This research will suggest a three-part decomposition framework in reading urban house price behaviours. Based on the spatio-temporal model, a time weighted spatio-temporal model is developed. This new model assumes that an urban house price movement should be decomposed by urban characterised factors, time correlated factors and space correlated factors. A time weighted is constructed to capture the temporal decay of the time correlated effects, while a spatio-temporal weight is constructed to account for the timevaried space correlated effects. The house prices of the Australian capital cities are investigated by using the time weighted spatio-temporal model. The empirical findings suggest that the housing markets should be clustered by their geographic locations. The rest parts of this paper are organised as follows. The following section will present a principle for reading urban house prices. The next section will outline the methodologies modelling the time weighted spatio-temporal model. The subsequent section will report the relative data and empirical results, while the final section will generate the conclusions.

Stakeholder analysis in urban development : the application of stakeholder circle methodology and social network analysis

The increasing research interest on stakeholder analysis in urban planning reflects a growing recognition that stakeholders can and should influence the decision-making. This paper concentrates on exploring the techniques for analysing stakeholders, especially the application of the Stakeholder Circle tool and Social Network Analysis. An urban renewal project and an infrastructure project in Australia are presented as case studies to verify the use of these two techniques. The stakeholders are identified and prioritized from two different points of view, namely, the attribute evaluations in the Stakeholder Circle tool, and the relationship network analysis. The paper ends with a discussion on the strengths and limitations of the techniques for stakeholder analysis. No method for stakeholder identification and prioritization is perfect. The selection of the approaches is an art with extensive considerations of ‘when, what, and how’ to choose methods to achieve the project objectives. Each method has its own strengths and limitations. Combining several methods when necessary is the best way to analyse stakeholders.

Visualising literature : screen adaptation and the process of reading/viewing

This study demonstrates a method of reading/viewing screen adaptations of literary works as intertextually situated works of art which interact through differences to make possible new interpretations. Switching between possible interpretations undermines views of the world which critics find embedded in the screen adaptation and literary precursors.

The compositor of the farce of dustiny : Lacan reading, and being read by, Joyce

"We have learnt to see Joyce as Lacan's own symptom," writes Jean-Michel Rabate, "and as the sinthome par excellence" (2006, 26). This duality of Joyce as an unreadable text permeated with enjoyment and at the same time as an enigma that Lacan wants to decipher supplies the key to an understanding of Seminar XXIII. Lacan's addition to the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary of a fourth term, the Sigma (or sinthome) firms up his late shift from the speakingbeing (parletre, the Lacanian neologism that indicates the insertion of the human being into the signifying chain) to MAN (LOM, a Lacanian play on l'homme). Instead of the human being as inserted into the Symbolic Order, Seminar XXIII presents Joyce as inserting himself into language, tying the signifier to the body in a special, unique way. For Lacan, the sinthome is eccentric to the registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, yet it paradoxically links them when the Name-of- the-Father fails. The implication is carried in the concept of "nomination" that the Name-of-the-Father (or its structural equivalents, such as "Woman," "God" and "Joyce") makes language possible for the individual.