Moving and dancing towards decolonisation in education: An example from an Indigenous Australian performance classroom

This paper explores the special type of thinking, moving and dancing place which is opened up for decolonisaton when students engage in an embodied pedagogical practice in Indigenous education. The author examines what decolonisation means in this context by describing the ways in which the curriculum, the students and teacher, and more generally the discipline of ethnomusicology itself, undergo a process to question, critique, and move aside the pedagogical script of colonialism in order to allow Indigenous ways of understanding music and dance to be presented, privileged and empowered. Key questions are: What is the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment and decolonisation and colonisation? In what ways is embodiment more than, or other than, the presence of moving bodies? In what ways is performativity an aspect of power/knowledge/subject formations? How can it be theorised? What could the pedagogical scripts of decolonisation look like?

Whistleblower protection: Is Africa ready?

The article critically examines propositions driving the exportation of western whistleblower concepts into the developing world.(1) Specifically it attacks the prevailing view that public interest disclosure is somehow a culture-free, or at least a culture-muted phenomenon, governed by a set of rules and conventions detached from local histories and practices. The article concludes that this exportation is in the spirit of neo-colonialism and issues a note of warning about the dangers of dispersing western conceived forms of corruption reporting to Africa. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje: The convergence of Croation nationalism on her apparitions

This article concerns the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in one of the most popular, 'active' apparitional sites in the world: Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The connection between nationalist discourse and apparitions has often been observed and noted in the literature on nationalism; however, the examples of this connection are scattered in the literature and the question why the apparitional phenomenon so easily lends itself to co-option into nationalist discourse has never been addressed. This article explores this question by showing that what binds the two phenomena together is the idea of 'chosenness' and 'specialness', which in turn can be theoretically linked to discussions about national election in the literature on nationalism. This article illustrates the convergence of nationalist and apparitional discourses by drawing on a selected number of examples of how the apparitions in Medjugorje have been appropriated by Croatian nationalist discourse.

The Strategic Utility of ‘Chineseness’ in the Political Cultures of Diasporic Chinese Communities: Some Preliminary Thoughts

It is not especially controversial to suggest that the academic literature on Chineseness has for some time been focused upon the ‘porousness’ and ‘strategic’ possibilities of identity categories. This is most clearly observable in the legacy of cultural theory upon identity politics. In particular, terms such as hybridity have not only expanded the political potential for fragmenting conventional identifications, but also symbolised the sorts of ‘complicated entanglements’ within which individuals and communities are perpetually caught. The discursive mileage of hybridity has meant, over time, that it has also attracted criticism. Some of this criticism comes from academics engaged in more materialist forms of research. These sorts of contrary perspectives have often sought to ground hybrid identifications within the cultural and historical milieu from which they are enacted, whenever they are enacted.