Professional development in the contemporary educational context : encouraging practice wisdom

Preparing social work students to be effective practitioners is a complex and challenging task undertaken in a dynamic environment both in terms of the field of social work and the higher education sector. There have been recommendations that self knowledge, empirical knowledge, theoretical knowledge and procedural knowledge are the keys to high standards of social work practice. This paper suggests that the concept of practice wisdom is a useful focus for integrating these different aspects of informed practice and for focusing educational programmes for social work. As practice wisdom is more about process than possessed characteristics then there are important motivational and value-based considerations in developing wise practitioners. This discussion considers motivational and personal narrative aspects of practice wisdom so that it can be integrated into social work teaching.

[Book Review] Urban Maps : Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City by Richard Brook and Nick Dunn, Ashgate, Farham, United Kingdom, 2011, 250pp. ISBN 978-0-754676-5-77.

Urban maps discusses new ways and tools to read and navigate the contemporary city. Each chapter investigates a possible approach to unravel the complexity of contemporary urban forms. Each tool is first defined, introducing its philosophical background, and is then discussed with case studies, showing its relevance for the navigation of the built environment. Urbanism classics such as the work of Lynch, Jacobs, Venuti and Scott-Brown, Lefebrve and Walter Benjamin are fundamental in setting the framework of the volume. In the introduction cities and mapping are first discussed, the former are illustrated as ‘a composite of invisible networks devoid of landmarks and overrun by nodes’ (p. 3), and ‘a series of unbounded spaces where mass production and mass consumption reproduce a standardised quasi-global culture’ (p. 6).

Point of no return : exploring katabatic narrative and deterritorialisation in the Australian outback novel

This thesis consists of the novel Brolga and an exegesis examining in what ways the ideas of katabasis and deterritorialisation inform an understanding of descent narratives in contemporary Australian outback fiction. When writing the creative piece, it was observed that Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey was an imprecise model for my manuscript and indeed for many of the contemporary novels I had read written in similar outback settings. On analysis a better fit lies in the idea of a heroic journey from which there is no clear return from the underworld. This narrative form is defined in this thesis as a katabatic narrative. To unpack this narrative trope, the inverse of territoriality, deterritorialisation, is used as a lens to examine the complex thematic and symbolic resonances of the outback in both Brolga and analogous works of contemporary outback fiction.

Facilitating local stories in post-disaster regional communities : evaluation in narrative-driven oral history projects

Cyclone Yasi struck the Cassowary Coast of Northern Queensland, Australia, in the early hours of February 3, 2011, destroying many homes and property, including the destruction of the Cardwell and district historical society’s premises. With their own homes flattened, many residents were forced to live in mobile accommodation, with extended family, or leave the area altogether. The historical society members seemed, however, particularly devastated by their flattened foreshore museum and loss of their precious collection of material. A call for assistance was made through the Oral History Association of Australia’s Queensland branch (OHAA Qld), which along with a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) research team sponsored a trip to best plan how they could start to pick up the pieces to rebuild the museum. This chapter highlights the need for communities to gather, preserve and present their own stories, in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to them – whether that be because of a disaster, or as they go about life in their contemporary communities – the key being that good advice, professional support and embedded evaluation practices at crucial moments along the way can be critically important.

Slippage: Reclaiming personal family history through contemporary photomedia

This paper addresses the role of photography as a documentary medium and how this forms a basis for my practice-led studio investigations. In it, I will explore how photography is used to create histories and sustain specific notions of ‘legacy’ within the context of the family photo album. Family history is often based on stories to which the photo album provides a visual point of reference. Despite the ostensible ‘objectivity’ of the family photograph though it is nonetheless as subjective as the stories that surround it. In this way, the photo album perpetuates a hegemony of truth that obscures the fragmentary and highly selective nature of these documents and stories. The result is that every photo album implicitly documents the gaps or voids present in understandings of our own histories. Homi Bhabha refers to these kinds of voids as ‘disjunctive historical spaces’ – spaces of slippage that create the opportunity for new narratives and understandings to occur. Using Bhabha’s ideas as a chief point of reference, I will explore how these voids or gaps in information – and the opportunities for re-examination that they open up - can be explored through contemporary photomedia. Digital technologies such as camera phones and scanners generate a space in which photography’s own documentary conventions can be turned in on themselves to create a subterfuge. My current studio-based research involves using the scanner to navigate through my family’s sometimes-‘occulted’ history, in order to explore, document and recover my connection to this narrative. I am primarily interested in the scanner as a tool for capturing not simply surfaces, but objects, moments or movements in time. Objects or moments captured by the scanner can often be simultaneously distorted and consolidated, blurred and sharpened. This paper will propose that this ‘slippage’, literally expressed in the disruption of the pixelated field, can be used to create a space in which alternative readings or understandings of past events can be explored and new narratives produced.

Comparative exploration of narrative processes for better and poorer outcomes for depression

Background Contemporary psychotherapy research demonstrates that whilst most clients respond positively to psychological interventions, a small, but significant proportion of clients fail to experience the expected benefits of therapy. Although methodologies exist that enable the identification of successful and unsuccessful therapy, we have a limited understanding of the processes associated with these outcomes. Aim The current study sought to examine the relationship between therapeutic outcome and therapeutic language. Methodology: The therapeutic outcomes of 42 trainee-therapists who provided psychotherapy to 173 clients were tracked with the OQ-45.2 over a 5 year period with the view of identifying the client/ trainee-therapist dyads with the best and poorest outcomes. The 6 best outcome and 6 poorest outcome client/ trainee-therapist dyads were identified in order to examine the characteristics of therapeutic conversations associated with better and poorer therapy outcomes. Therapeutic conversations were analysed with the Narrative Process Coding System. Findings The best outcome client/ trainee-therapist dyads demonstrated significant increases in reflexive conversation over the course of psychotherapy. Implications Examining the practices of the best and poorest outcome client/ trainee-therapist dyads with objective measures of therapy outcome provides an important first step in understanding how therapeutic language may contribute to the greatest therapeutic improvement or deterioration.

The reader-assembled narrative: Representing the random in print fiction

The growing interest in co-created reading experiences in both digital and print formats raises interesting questions for creative writers who work in the space of interactive fiction. This essay argues that writers have not abandoned experiments with co-creation in print narratives in favour of the attractions of the digital environment, as might be assumed by the discourse on digital development. Rather, interactive print narratives, in particular ‘reader-assembled narratives’ demonstrate a rich history of experimentation and continue to engage writers who wish to craft individual reading experiences for readers and to experiment with their own creative process as writers. The reader-assembled narrative has been used for many different reasons and for some writers, such as BS Johnson it is a method of problem solving, for others, like Robert Coover, it is a way to engage the reader in a more playful sense. Authors such as Marc Saporta, BS Johnson, and Robert Coover have engaged with this type of narrative play. This examination considers the narrative experimentation of these authors as a way of offering insights into creative practice for contemporary creative writers.

The North in the Old English Orosius : A Geographical Narrative in Context

This doctoral dissertation examines the description of the North as it appears in the Old English Orosius (OE Or.) in the form of the travel accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan and a catalogue of peoples of Germania. The description is discussed in the context of ancient and early medieval textual and cartographic descriptions of the North, with a special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon sources and the intellectual context of the reign of King Alfred (871-899). This is the first time that these sources, a multidisciplinary approach and secondary literature, also from Scandinavia and Finland, have been brought together. The discussion is source-based, and archaeological theories and geographical ideas are used to support the primary evidence. This study belongs to the disciplines of early medieval literature and (cultural) history, Anglo-Saxon studies, English philology, and historical geography. The OE Or. was probably part of Alfred s educational campaign, which conveyed royal ideology to the contemporary elite. The accounts and catalogue are original interpolations which represent a unique historical source for the Viking Age. They contain unparalleled information about peoples and places in Fennoscandia and the southern Baltic and sailing voyages to the White Sea, the Danish lands, and the Lower Vistula. The historical-philological analysis reveals an emphasis on wealth and property, rank, luxury goods, settlement patterns, and territorial divisions. Trade is strongly implied by the mentions of central places and northern products, such as walrus ivory. The references to such peoples as the Finnas, the Cwenas, and the Beormas appear in connection with information about geography and subsistence in the far North. Many of the topics in the accounts relate to Anglo-Saxon aristocratic culture and interests. The accounts focus on the areas associated with the Northmen, the Danes and the Este. These areas resonated in the Anglo-Saxon geographical imagination: they were curious about the northern margin of the world, their own continental ancestry and the geography of their homeland of Angeln, and they had an interest in the Goths and their connection with the southern Baltic in mythogeography. The non-judgemental representation of the North as generally peaceful and relatively normal place is related to Alfredian and Orosian ideas about the unity and spreading of Christendom, and to desires for unity among the Germani and for peace with the Vikings, who were settling in England. These intellectual contexts reflect the innovative and organizational forces of Alfred s reign. The description of the North in the OE Or. can be located in the context of the Anglo-Saxon worldview and geographical mindset. It mirrors the geographical curiosity expressed in other Anglo-Saxon sources, such as the poem Widsith and the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi. The northern section of this early eleventh-century world map is analyzed in detail here for the first time. It is suggested that the section depicts the North Atlantic and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The survey of ancient and early medieval sources provides a comparative context for the OE Or. In this material, produced by such authors as Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus, Jordanes, and Rimbert, the significance of the North was related to the search for and definition of the northern edge of the world, universal accounts of the world, the northern homeland in the origin stories of the gentes, and Carolingian expansion and missionary activity. These frameworks were transmitted to Anglo-Saxon literary culture, where the North occurs in the context of the definition of Britain s place in the world.

Profligate Descent : The Cultural Transformations of Evolutionary Narrative

This dissertation traces a set of historical transformations the Darwinian evolutionary narrative has undergone toward the end of the twentieth century, especially as reflected in Anglo-American popular science books and novels. The study has three objectives. First, it seeks to understand the organizing logic of evolutionary narratives and the role that assumptions about gender and sexuality play in that logic. Second, it asks what kinds of cultural anxieties evolutionary theory raises and how evolutionary narratives negotiate them. Third, it examines the possibilities and limits of narrative transformation both as a historical phenomenon and as a theoretical question. This interdisciplinary dissertation is situated at the intersection of science studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and gender studies. Its understanding of science as a cultural practice that both emerges from and contributes to cultural expectations and institutional structures follows the tradition of science studies. Its focus on the question of popular appeal and the mechanisms of cultural change arises from cultural studies. Its view of narrative as a structural phenomenon is grounded in literary studies in general and feminist narrative theory in particular. Its understanding of gender and sexuality as implicated in discourses of epistemic authority builds on the view of gender and sexuality as contingent cultural categories central to gender studies. The primary material consists of over 25 British and American popular science books and novels, published roughly between 1990 and 2005. In order to highlight historical transformations, these texts are read in the context of Darwin s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, on the one hand, and such sociobiological classics as E. O. Wilson s On Human Nature and Richard Dawkins s The Selfish Gene, on the other. The research method combines feminist narrative analysis with cultural and historical contextualization, emphasizing discursive abruptions, recurrent narrative patterns, and underlying continuities. The dissertation demonstrates that the relationship between Darwin s evolutionary narrative and late twentieth-century evolutionary narratives is characterized by reemphasis, omissions, and continuous rewriting. In particular, contemporary evolutionary discourse extends the role assigned to reproduction both sexual and narrative in Darwin s writing, generating a narrative logic that imagines the desire to reproduce as the driving force of evolution and posits the reproductive sex act as the endlessly repeated narrative event that keeps the story going. The study argues that the popular appeal of evolutionary accounts of gender, sexuality, and human nature may arise, to an extent, from this reproductive narrative dynamic. This narrative dynamic, however, is not logically invulnerable. Since the continuation of the evolutionary narrative relies on successful reproduction, the possibility of reproductive failure poses a constant risk to narrative futurity, arousing cultural anxieties that evolutionary narratives need to address. The study argues that evolutionary narratives appease such anxieties by evoking a range of cultural narratives, especially romantic, religious, and national narratives. Furthermore, the study shows that the event-based logic of evolutionary narratives privileges observable acts over emotions, pleasures, identities, and desires, thus engendering a set of conceptual exclusions that limits the imaginative scope of evolution as a cultural narrative.

Christian Witness on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon: Narrative, Nonviolence, and the Formation of Character

This dissertation analyzes the theological and ethical convictions that led the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon to shelter thousands of refugees between 1939 and 1945. It does so by examining the themes of narrative identity, hospitality, character formation, nonviolence, and the contextual witness of church tradition. Though a number of studies have been published about the rescue activity in this region of France during World War II, none have thoroughly analyzed the theological nature of this activity. Using the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon as a case study in theological ethics, the dissertation draws on historical sources as well as the work of contemporary theologians and ethicists to understand, interpret, and analyze the witness of this community. After situating its rescue and resistance work within the Huguenot narrative of persecution and exile, I examine the theological convictions of the Reformed pastor of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, André Trocmé, who played a key role in making the Plateau a place of refuge during the Holocaust. The study highlights the importance of narrative in the actions of this community and discusses the relationship between narrative, character, and ethics. It then examines the nonviolent commitments of key leaders of the rescue effort, using this analysis as a springboard to engage in broader theological reflection about the ethics of nonviolence. After examining the radical hospitality practiced on the Plateau in light of biblical narratives and Reformed history, I investigate the counter-cultural nature of Christian hospitality. The study concludes by analyzing the nature and witness of the church in light of the legacy of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. The dissertation suggests that increased academic and ecclesial attention be given to the relationship between narrative and character, the counter-cultural shape of Christian hospitality, and the active nature of nonviolence. It presents an in-depth analysis of the theological and ethical convictions of the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, arguing that their witness has ongoing significance for communities of faith as they grapple with how to form disciples, relate to the wider society, welcome strangers, and communicate God's shalom in a world of violence.

‘Doing’ separation in contemporary Ireland: the experiences of women who separate in midlife

This study explores the experiences of fourteen Irish women who separated in midlife. The rationale for choosing to study this age group of women is because they are the first generation of Irish women to publically separate in midlife in such large numbers. All of them entered marriage at a time when divorce was not possible in Ireland and as such they are broadly without a cultural ‘script’ for how to ‘do’ separation. An exploratory study was conducted to try to capture the processes and events that are part of the lived experiences of separation for women in midlife. In-depth interviews were conducted with fourteen women who were recruited following their attendance at post-separation courses. The participants came from predominantly middle class backgrounds. Narrative interviews were conducted which covered topics such as the attitudes to separation internalised during childhood, the genesis of the marital problems, the events that triggered the separations, the women’s emotional reactions at the time of separating and their social, housing and financial outcomes of having separated. A theoretical framework using concepts related to connectedness and fragmentation was used to analyse the data. Significant diversity was found in the experiences of the interviewees. Most of the women retained connectedness to their children, to their families of origin and to friends who were not joint friends. Significant fragmentation was found in relationships with ex-husbands, with in-laws and with joint friends. All of the women were worse off financially than if they had remained married. They felt socially isolated in the aftermath of separation. Many of the women were struggling to establish positive identities as separated women. While a few of them were very relieved that their marriages had ended, for most, separation was experienced as a painful episode in their lives.

Nuove intersezioni: crimine e storia nella narrativa Italiana al cambio di millennio

My research investigates a recent tendency in Italian literature, characterized by elements of renewal within the novel-writing tradition and of discontinuity with postmodern culture. It proposes an interpretation of the genres of the historical novel and crime fiction in the last fifteen years, in order to underline the important role played by these types of narrative in revitalizing contemporary Italian literature. These modalities of writing are considered both individually and in their connections beyond a traditional notion of genre, emphasizing those characteristics which may be assumed as irreconcilable with a postmodern approach to fiction and those which, furthermore, seem to indicate attempts to take a new course. In particular, my study analyses the recent literary tendency to combine the elements of ‘crime’ and ‘history’ in order to represent political and social reality, and how the works examined relate to postmodern narrative. For this reason, I pay particular attention to the relationship between literature and the past and to the socio-political aspects connected with the praxis of narrating, offering an original interpretation of the way in which the authors studied engage with these characteristics.

Azione destabilizzante e impegno politico. Le figure femminili tra il giallo e il nero Italiani dal 1980 a oggi

My thesis analyses female figures in Italian crime fiction since 1980, from narratological, sociological and gender-studies perspectives. It considers the narrative structure of the giallo and the noir, taking into account the difficulties, particularly in Italy, of establishing what noir fiction is and if/how it is possible to frame it in a specific narrative scheme. This discourse connects to the extraordinary success of Italian giallo and noir fiction over the past fifteen-twenty years. In this scenario, I examine the place of female writers in relation to this phenomenon, especially since the 1980s: in terms of the level of visibility/acceptance of their work, in a narrative space traditionally considered as a male territory, and with regard to their writings, which introduce different narrative perspectives. Specifically, I consider selected texts by leading female Italian writers, in which female elements (writers/characters) become destabilizing factor both on the narrative level, by undermining the schemes of ‘formulaic’ fiction, and on the political one, through their implicit potential (as women) for disrupting the rigid models inherited from processes of social conditioning and from political structures. In terms of gender identities, such texts offer scope to question conventional social constructions of the subject: by empowering the female narrative voice and by embodying it in characters (investigators/killers) traditionally personified by male figures. These texts offer themselves as a critical space where, potentially, readers can rethink static gendered relationships and stereotypical symbolical categories.

Locating the transnational: representations and aesthetics of the city in contemporary European cinemas

This thesis focuses on two Western European cinematic cities, and two unique periods of their respective nations’ histories, in a bid to “locate” the transnational within a contemporary European milieu. I argue that my geo-cinematic case studies are emblematic of broader questions of the problematics of national identity in contemporary Europe in the face of cross-national flows yet, as a result of their representations as cities both “anchored” and “in flux”, they reject a European postnational identity. Through its engagement with cinematic Rome as the “Eternal City” of Europe and cinematic Dublin as the “newly Europeanised” city, my thesis traces how representations and aesthetics of the urban spaces of these two cities correspond with the tensions at the heart of the respective eras in question. Via the figures that inhabit it, navigate it and search for it, the city is utilised to highlight fixity and mobility, centrality and dislocation, in explicit and implicit ways, amid the rapidly changing landscape of its national terrain. It is through my analyses of the filmed places and sociopolitical, socioeconomic and sociocultural spaces of these capital cities under the rubric of the transnational that this research demonstrates the “pluralities” of the construct in its cinematic manifestations. It is also my aim to evaluate the concept of cinematic transnationalism when identifying and accounting for representations of a specific national, historical timeframe, when the momentousness of the changes that occur is not bound by the national, but rather is reflective of the influence of both domestic and external forces. To this end, my thesis draws attention to instances in which the nation is shown to persist and resist dilution, arguing that it is only against the backdrop and continuity of the nation (in its evershifting guises) that the transnational can be conceived in representative and aesthetic terms.

Afterwords: reparative queer death and the contemporary Irish novel, 1960-2000

Given that an extant comprehensive study of homosexuality and the twentieth century Irish novel has yet to produced, this thesis is an attempt at rectifying such a gap in research by way of close textual analysis of writing from the latter half of the century—that is, from 1960-2000. Analysis of seven novels by four male authors – John Broderick, Desmond Hogan, Colm Tóibín and Keith Ridgway – lead to one overarching feature common to all four writers becoming clear: the homosexual or queer is always dying or already ‘dead’. ‘Dead’ is placed in inverted commas here as it is not only biological death that characterises the fate of gay men in the aforementioned literature. In the first instance, such men are also always already ‘dead’—that is, by light of their disenfranchisement as homosexual or queer, they are, in socialized terms, examples of the ‘living’ dead. Secondly, biological death neither fully obliterates the queer body nor its disruptive influence. Consequently, one of the overarching ways in which I read queer death in the late twentieth century Irish novel is through the prism of its reparative ‘afterw(a)ord’. On the one hand, such readings are temporally based (that is, reading from a point beyond the death of the protagonist - or their ‘afterward’); while, on the other hand, such readings are stylistically premised (that is, reading or interpreting the narrative itself as an ‘afterword’). The current project thus constitutes an original contribution to knowledge by establishing variant ways of reading the contemporary Irish novel from the point of view of the queer ‘unliving’. In assessing such heterogeneous aspects of contemporary queer death, the project a) contributes to recent, largely Anglo-American-based literary theoretical research on the queer and the eschatological, and b) provides a more contemporized literary base upon which future research can uncover a continuum of Irish queer writing in the twentieth century, one concerned with writing prior to 1960 and not limited to writing my men, in which death and same-sex desire are at parallel angles to one another.