Psychological Reflections on Post - Modernist Gothic Literature

The thesis consists of a creative component, two short stories, 'The Conservatory' and 'Psychosis', and a novella, 'The Lady of Tangiers', in the genre of Gothic fiction, and accompanying theoretical component with a psychological interpretation of literature, including theories of C.G.Jung, identifying psychological elements including symbolism of the unconscious, transformation and individuation in the short stories 'The Conservatory' and 'Psychosis', and an analysis of the novella 'The Lady of Tangiers', discussing the essay 'The Uncanny' by Sigmund Freud. The critical analysis and interpretation of the writing reflects the psychological development of the individual.

Tracking the nomadic life of the educational researcher :- what future for feminist public intellectual(s) and/in the performative postmodern university

Is the idea of the liberal university dead, has the post modern university any chance of being emancipatory, has the theory practice divide merely collapsed in an era of 'new knowledge work', or has the university just become one aspect of market state and global capitalism. Knowledge based economies simultaneously locate universities as central to the commodification and management of knowledge while the legitimacy of the university and the academic as knowledge producers is challenged by post modernist, feminist, postcolonial and indigenous claims within a wider trend towards the 'democratisation of knowledge' and a new educational instrumentalism and opportunism. What becomes of the educational researcher, and indeed for their professional organizations, in this changing socio political and economic scenario? Is our role one of policy service or policy critique, technical expert or public intellectual? In particular what place is there for feminist public intellectuals in a socalled era of post feminism and public-/private convergence? The paper draws on recent debates around the nature of knowledge based societies, trends in relations between policy and educational research, and draws upon feminist and critical perspectives to mount a case for the importance of the postmodern university and the public intellectual.

Vision and rationalisation : a study of the school psychology profession within the Victorian Government school system

Since its origins in the 19th century, modern schooling has been a continuously contested domain within nation states. Underlying this contestation dynamic lie competing value systems about the social purpose of education; competing values around which are generated different discourses, and which in turn generate inherently contradictory social and organisational structures. As reflected in other areas of society, the 20th century expansion of state-provided schooling has essentially developed around variations of a bureaucratic model Thus, organisational cultures based around bureaucratic values have come to permeate the enterprise of schooling on a world wide scale. Concomitantly, the value for education to be fundamentally associated with human emancipation from psychological, social, political, or economic states of being, persists as a recurring theme in modern schooling. Premised on these understandings, the thesis argues that the development of the practices of school psychology as a profession, like education in general, and special education in particular, has similarly been influenced by tensions between different and competing constellations of values. It is argued that throughout the 20th century, the pervasiveness of formal schooling systems suggest that schooling may be understood as a modernist cultural archetype. As a socially constructed reality, the phenomenon of schooling has become unproblematic the apparent cultural inevitability of formal schooling in the modern era can also be understood as a premise of a systemised way of looking at the world; that of bureaucratic consciousness. Dialectically, bureaucratic consciousness persists in influencing every manifestation of schooling; structurally through its organisational forms, and epistemologically through the institutionalization of teaching and learning. A particular illustration of the dialectical relationship between bureaucratic consciousness and the social forms and social practices of schooling is the school psychology profession which has developed as a part of school systems. The thesis argues that the epistemic archeology of psychology as a knowledge discipline can be traced through an earlier European intellectual and cultural tradition, but in the 20th century, has come to develop a symbiotic yet contradictory relationship with compulsory schooling in the modern nation state. The research study employs historical and fieldwork methods in a study of the development of the school psychology services within the Victorian Education Department, particularly between 1947 and 1987. The thesis also draws upon several usually distinct literatures; the philosophical and theoretical discourse of modernity and post modernity, the history and development of modern schooling, the ethnography of schooling, the international comparative literature on the school psychology profession, and the literature on action research in education practice and curriculum development, As a case study of Victorian school psychology, the research eschews a quantitative statistical approach in favour of qualitative investigatory genres, which have in turn been guided by the values of action research in education, as well as those of critical theory. The important focus of the thesis is its investigation of some aspects of the development and transformations within the Victorian state education bureaucracy, and the dialectical relationship that has persisted between the evolution of change processes and the shifting conceptions of school psychology practices in the 20th century. A history of the organisational development of school psychology services in Victoria constitutes an important part of the thesis. This is complemented by specific illustrations of how some school psychologists have been influenced by and have contributed towards paradigm shifts within the profession, shifts relating to how the changing nature of their work practices have come to be understood and valued by teachers and by school administrators. The work of J. R. MacLeod from the 1950s is noted in this regard. Particular attention is also drawn to the dialectical relationship between bureaucratic consciousness and school psychology's professional orientation in the 1980s. As a means of providing field data to explore this relationship, ethnographic case studies with two school communities are included as part of the fieldwork of the thesis, and are based upon the author's own work in the mid 1980s. These case studies provide a basis for conceptually refraining the school psychologist's professional experience within schooling systems, and an opportunity to examine how competing value systems impact upon the work of the school psychologist. The thesis concludes with some observations about bureaucratic transformations within educational organisations, and about the future relationship of the school psychology profession with schooling systems, as framed by the theoretical parameters of the modernist /post modernist debate. The issue of competing value systems within the administration of public education is re-examined as is the value of promoting human empowerment in the ongoing work of the school psychologist. Finally, some scenario building with reference to the future of school psychology in Victoria in is undertaken.

Who stole the cheese? or : How postmodernism can grow your business

In this paper, I examine some of the key management literature of the neoliberal 1990s to make a series of wider observations about contemporary ideology. Post-structuralist or post-modernist theory is often presented as the arch-enemy of neoliberal capitalism, as the orthodoxy of late capitalism. However, adding to work by Frederic Jameson, Thomas Frank and others, this paper examines uncanny proximity between neoliberal ideas about disaggregating, outsourcing, networking, etc. and the learning motifs of postmodernist theory. Its guiding hypothesis is that postmodernism in the academy, despite its own self-misrecognition as "racial", is a further ideological expression of the samr neoliberal drive to overcome "Fordist", "authoritarian" ways of organising producation and social regulation.

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.

Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times

Post-structuralist youth studies theorists have argued for nuanced perspectives on agency that are not reliant on an assumption of subjects as rational and internally coherent individuals, and understand subjectivity and social structure as produced in concert. These are important theoretical developments that have shaped recent scholarship on girls' identities and cultures. In this paper, we seek to give them some further sociological grounding by thinking through their resonance for the specific debate about young women and what feminist agency consists of, or looks like today. What we wish to further flesh out is how more familiar, modernist ideas about girls' agency have started to reach their limits not merely because of the post-structuralist turn, but because of the socio-cultural conditions of neoliberalism, post-feminism and post-girlpower. We unpack some recent shifts and complexities around three concepts: choice, empowerment and voice. These are the terms by which the possibility of girls' and young women's agency has traditionally been understood in feminist scholarship and much work in girls' studies. However, when we interrogate these concepts within the specific neoliberal, post-feminist, post-girlpower context, their usefulness for either understanding or enabling feminist agency is thrown into question.