LAN cafes: cafes, places of gathering or sites of informal teaching and learning?

Despite the interest of sociologists and educational researchers in Internet café as sites for new cultural and social formations and informal learning, thus far little attention has been paid to the function of café owners, managers and other staff in the mediation and co-construction of those spaces. Drawing from interviews with managers of commercial Internet café in Australia specialising in LAN (Local Area Network) gaming, this article seeks to examine their role and their attitudes more closely; in particular with regard to school-aged users of their facilities. We contend that LAN café are liminal spaces situated at the margins of Australian culture and located at the junctions between home, school and the street, online and offline spaces, work and play. The roles of LAN café managers are similarly ambiguous: in many ways they can be regarded as informal teachers facilitating the process of informal learning.

Switching on the chronometer of history : communism, postcommunism and heritage

The destruction of monuments accompanying the fall of Communism ignited debates about preservation of manifestations of a hated regime. While heritage professionals called for their preservation as ‘historical documents’, many monuments were destroyed or removed. Yampolsky sees anti-Communist iconoclasm as a rejection of the totalitarianism of time embodied in Communist monuments. These ‘intentional monuments’ were intended to ‘negate the march of time and oppose to it the permanence of human action’. They demonstrated the alleged end of history in a classless utopia.

Iconoclastic acts against these monuments involved the crossing of ‘the invisible boundaries of the sacral zone surrounding monuments, switching on the chronometer of history’. In doing so, iconoclasts provide the conditions for reassertion of heritage practices: heritage requires a sense of the flow of time, a difference between past, present and future.

Having restarted the chronometer of history, a society is forced to assess where it stands in relation to its past. Will it continue on a path of ‘wilful forgetting’, or seek to confront the past? The danger of wilful forgetting is the creation of nostalgia. Alternatively, preservation of places of memory helps processing of the past required for movement into the future. ‘One need only consider the way in which Berliners tore down the hated Berlin Wall in the aftermath of 1989’, Fulbrook writes, ‘to understand the desire to rid the landscape of a hated excrescence, a symbol of a rejected political past. But…for those who come after, the effort of historical imagination is all the greater for lack of a topography of experience’.

Heritage preservation can produce a ‘topography of experience’, through which the experience of Communism is examined. Reassertion of a humanistic historical time through heritage practices reveals the arrogant futility of utopian projects seeking to bring history to an end.

Forms of memory in post-colonial Australia

There are many forms of memory in post-colonial Australia, and many kinds
of haunting. This paper investigates the poetry of contemporary Indigenous poets Sam Wagan Watson and Tony Birch, and reads the script of the Federal Government’s February 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, asking how and why the nation should be haunted – historically and imaginatively - into the future.

The role of memory in establishing and destabilising choreographic practice

This practice-based research examines the role of body memory, seen as a multiple and complex process in the development of a choreographic aesthetic, specifically in relationship to the creation of choreography. The thesis explores the idea that a dancer's body memory is not necessarily stable, but rather a constantly altered system.

Communities of memory? The Jewish holocaust museum and research centre, Melbourne

The Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHC), Melbourne, opened in 1984. Through the support of large numbers of Jewish people, it has become an impmiant part of their lives as they age, a place of solace and memorialisation. It is a second home for some, providing networking support within and between the different Jewish ethnic communities. This paper will draw on the JHC's ever growing videotestimony collection as well as oral interviews on the roles played by Melbourne survivor volunteers and others in developing the Centre. The survivors have experienced many different aspects of the Holocaust, have come from all over Europe and elsewhere, and 1 are sometimes culturally very different. It will discuss the role played by the various social and cultural communities in creating and responding to the JHC and the success they have had in establishing 'communities of memory' or, alternatively, representing and 1 contextualising the various social and cultural communities.