Embodying a mine site : enacting cyborg curriculum

This paper focuses on the construction of my post-operatively scarred body as a mine site, my experiences with reconstructively normalizing its appearance as a cyborg, and the implications for my work as an environmental educator  interested in how the body of a theorist is presented within theoretical spaces. The paper is not a victim's story as such, but rather a response to the  hypothesis that illness is a call for stories, that the body needs a voice that disease and illness take away. It relates Donna Haraway's notions of the cyborg and other feminist poststructuralist work to both my living body and the body of my curriculum work in environmental education.

Voluntarism, salvation, and rescue : British juvenile migration to Australia and Canada, 1890-1939

This article explores the relationships between governments and selected voluntary organisations involved in British migration to Australia and Canada from the 1890s to the Second World War. Prior to the Great War, there was considerable ill feeling by Dominion governments, especially Australian, towards philanthropic organisations, which appeared to undermine official immigration schemes through their attempts to reclaim and transplant the unwanted. Although voluntary associations were later subsidised by the British government and came under the group nomination schemes of the 1922 Empire Settlement Act, they were still viewed with suspicion. Organisations focusing on 'salvation', 'redemption' and 'rescue' in their migration work, however, provide us with an alternative ideology to the idea of building up 'fit populations' in the Dominions, where the notion of 'fitness' was perceived in a number of ways, not least in terms of class.

“The hope – the one hope – is that your generation will prove wiser and more responsible than mine.” Constructions of guilt in a selection of disaster texts for young adults

This paper explores a range of definitions of guilt, and argues that fiction for young adults which is set after a major disaster that has been caused by humans has surprisingly little emphasis on guilt. Focusing on Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells, Nuclear War Diary by James E. Sanford (Jr), The Last Children by Gudrun Pausewang, The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd and its sequel, The Carbon Diaries 2017, and Days Like This by Alison Stewart, the paper argues that in post-nuclear texts for young adults the emphasis tends to be on the perceived responsibility of the young adult reader's generation to work towards preventing the disaster from becoming reality, rather than on the guilt of the adult generation that caused the disaster. However, in texts dealing with environmental disaster, the young adult reader's generation can be seen to have some measure of culpability, and so the issues of guilt and responsibility become more complex

I me mine: artistic self/artistic persona

This work comprises of a series of video portraits and sound recordings that explore the connections between gesture, gaze and voice in video portraiture. Most of the subjects are artists represented in the current exhibition, but the disjunction between sound and image makes it difficult to categorically identify the authors of the sound bites on the work’s soundtrack. Designed to function as an introduction to the themes and issues generated by the Self/Persona relationship in the nascent field of Persona Studies, the work is also concerned with the presentation of the artistic self, and the ‘loss of self’ that may or may not occur as a consequence of artistic practice. Formally, the piece plays with the repetition and symmetry to underscore the vulnerability and mutability of the self within contemporary culture.

"... the credentials that would rescue me": Trauma and the fraudulent survivor

The author of the present study juxtaposes accounts by " postmemory" individuals with the fraudulent works of Binjamin Wilkomirski (Bruno Dössekker) and Jerzy Kosinski. Analyzing both phenomena as representative of the dynamics at work in memory of the Holocaust and of other "traumatic events," the author arrives at a formulation, via Giorgio Agamben, of the aporia (contradiction) that lies behind both the legitimized and illegitimated. © Oxford University Press 2010; all rights reserved.