Moving from Awareness to Knowing, Understanding, Speaking and Doing: Indigenous Women Academics in Higher Education. National Tertiary Education Women's Conference, 18-19 July 2009, South Melbourne, Victoria.

Bronwyn Fredericks was asked to outline some of the issues faced by Indigenous women academics.

There is nothing that 'identifies me to that place' : Aboriginal Women's perceptions of health spaces and places

There is a growing body of literature within social and cultural geography that explores notions of place, space, culture, race and identity. The more recent works suggest that places are experienced and understood in multiple ways and are embedded within an array of politics. Memmott and Long, who have undertaken place-based research with Australian Indigenous people, present the theoretical position that ‘place is made and takes on meaning through an interaction process involving mutual accommodation between people and the environment’. They outline that places and their cultural meanings are generated through one or a combination of three types of people–environment interactions. These include: a place that is created by altering the physical characteristics of a piece of environment and which might encompass a feature or features which are natural or made; a place that is created totally through behaviour that is carried out within a specific area, therefore that specific behaviour becomes connected to that specific place; and a place created by people moving or being moved from one environment to another and establishing a new place where boundaries are created and activities carried out. All these ideas of places are challenged and confirmed by what Indigenous women have said about their particular use of, and relationship with, space within several health services in Rockhampton, Central Queensland. As my title suggests, Indigenous women do not see themselves as ‘neutral’ or ‘non-racialised’ citizens who enter and ‘use’ a supposedly neutral health service. Instead, Aboriginal women demonstrate they are active recognisers of places that would identify them within the particular health place. That is, they as Aboriginal women didn’t just ‘make’ place, the places and spaces ‘make’ them. The health services were identified as sites within which spatial relations could begin to grow with recognition of themselves as Aboriginal women in place, or instead create a sense of marginality in the failure of the spaces to identify them. The women’s voices within this paper are drawn from interviews undertaken with twenty Aboriginal women in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, Australia, who participated in a research project exploring ‘how the relationship between health services and Aboriginal women can be more empowering from the viewpoints of Aboriginal women’. The assumption underpinning this study was that empowering and re-empowering practices for Aboriginal women can lead to improved health outcomes. Throughout the interviews women shared some of their lived realities including some of their thoughts on identity, the body, employment in the health sector, service delivery and their notions of health service spaces and places. Their thoughts on health service spaces and places provide an understanding of the lived reality for Aboriginal women and are explored and incorporated within this paper.

Is the Marlboro man the only alternative? The role of gender identity and self-construal salience in evaluations of male models

This research examines how men react to male models in print advertisements. In two experiments, we show that the gender identity of men influences their responses to advertisements featuring a masculine, feminine, or androgynous male model. In addition, we explore the extent to which men feel they will be classified by others as similar to the model as a mechanism for these effects. Specifically, masculine men respond most favorably to masculine models and are negative toward feminine models. In contrast, feminine men prefer feminine models when their private self is salient. Yet in a collective context, they prefer masculine models.These experiments shed light on how gender identity and self-construal influence male evaluations and illustrate the social pressure on men to endorse traditional masculine portrayals. We also present implications for advertising practice.

“Queer” … does not have a uniform : articulations of queer identity in Australian queer student activist media

This article explores articulations of queer identity in recent Australian queer student media. Print media is of particular importance to queer communities because, as Cover argues, it provides a crucial grounding for community development and a model of queer to guide the positioning of identity and activism. This article uses discourse analysis of queer student activists’ media representations of diversity and inclusiveness to investigate the articulations of queer identity in one specific context: metropolitan Australian universities. This reveals real-life appropriations of this contentious term and contributes to a genealogy of sexuality, documenting one visible moment in history.

Identity and disciplinarity : Multi-disciplinary student cohorts in Higher Education [Abstract]

This paper will describe a research project that examines the implications of multidisciplinary student cohorts on teaching and learning within undergraduate and postgraduate units in higher education. Whist students generally specialise in one discipline, it is also common that, at some point during their degree, they will choose to undertake subjects that are outside their specialist area. Students may choose a multidisciplinary learning experience either out of interest or because the subject is seen as complementary to their core discipline. When the lens of identity is applied to the multi-disciplinary cohorts in undergraduate and postgraduate units, it assists in identifying learning needs. The nature of disciplinarity, and the impact it has on students’ academic identity, presents challenges to both students and teachers when they engage in teaching and learning, impacting on curriculum design, assessment practices and teaching delivery strategies (Winberg, 2008). This project aims to identify the barriers that exist to effective teaching and learning in units that have multidisciplinary student cohorts. It will identify the particular needs of students in multidisciplinary student cohorts and determine a teaching and learning model that meets the needs of such cohorts. References Becher, T. & Trowler, P.R. (2001). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of the discipline. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Light, G. & Cox, R. (2001). Learning and teaching in higher education: A reflective professional. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Neumann, R. (2001). Disciplinary differences and university teaching. Studies in Higher Education, 26 (2), 135-46. Neumann, R., Parry, S. & Becher, T. (2002). Teaching and Learning in their disciplinary contexts: A conceptual analysis. Studies in Higher Education, 27(4), 405-417. Taylor, P.G. (1999) Making Sense of Academic Life: Academics, Universities and Change. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Winberg, C. (2008). Teaching engineering/engineering teaching: interdisciplinary collaboration and the construction of academic identities. Teaching in Higher Education, 13(3), 353 - 367.

Defining an Identity : The Evolution of Science Education

Research in science education is now an international activity. This book asks for the first time, Does this research activity have an identity?-It uses the significant studies of more than 75 researchers in 15 countries to see to what extent they provide evidence for an identity as a distinctive field of research.-It considers trends in the research over time, and looks particularly at what progression in the research entails.-It provides insight into how researchers influence each other and how involvement in research affects the being of the researcher as a person.-It addresses the relation between research and practice in a manner that sees teaching and learning in the science classroom as interdependent with national policies and curriculum traditions about science. It gives graduate students and other early researchers an unusual overview of their research area as a whole. Established researchers will be interested in, and challenged by, the identity the author ascribes to the research and by the plea he makes for the science content itself to be seen as problematic.

A 'deleterious' effect? : Australian legal education and the production of the legal identity

A body of critical legal scholarship argues that, by the time they have completed their studies, students who enter legal education holding social ideals and intending to use their legal education to achieve social change, have become cynical about the ability of the law to do so and no longer possess such ideals. This is explained by critical scholars to be the result of a process of ideological indoctrination, aimed at ensuring that graduates uphold the narrow and conservative interests of the legal profession and capitalist society, being exercised by law schools acting as adjuncts of the legal profession, and exercised upon the passive body of the law student. By using Foucault’s work on knowledge, power, and the subject to interrogate the assumptions upon which this narrative is based, this thesis intends to suggest a way of thinking differently to the approach taken by many critical legal scholars. It then uses an analytics of government (based on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’) to consider the construction of the legal identity differently. It examines the ways in which the governance of the legal identity is rationalised, programmed, and implemented, in three Queensland law schools. It also looks at the way that five prescriptive texts to ‘surviving’ law school suggest students establish and practise a relation to themselves in order to construct their own legal identities. Overall, this analysis shows that governance is not simply conducted in the profession’s interests, but occurs due to a complex arrangement of different practices, which can lead to the construction of skilled legal professional identities as well as ethical lawyer-citizens that hold an interest in justice. The implications of such an analytics provide the basis for original ways of understanding legal education, and legal education scholarship.

Ipswich stories : using digital storytelling to research intergenerational sharing of heritage, history, place, identity and community connection : a pilot study

Co-creative media production practices offer important new modes and opportunities for social participation and engagement. In mid-2009 Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation researchers at QUT adapted a specific model of co-creative media production, known as ‘digital storytelling’ and piloted it as an action research platform for facilitating and researching knowledge production based on intergenerational dialogue and exchange. Nine stories were produced and important insights were generated into this particular use of digital storytelling, as well as the impact of institutional constraints and opportunities on the possibilities and outcomes co-creative media practices and processes.

"I'm thinking 'bout moving in"... An examination of the issues impacting on the recruitment of secondary school graduates to the library and information profession

In recent years concern has been expressed internationally about the future of the library and information services (LIS) profession: recruitment and retention, changing skill sets and declining numbers of people choosing librarianship as a career are all factors contributing to an uncertain future. One area yet explored in any depth is the topic of why LIS studies are not perceived, let alone promoted, as a good first professional qualification for high school graduates. This paper considers the professional literature that examines the uptake of librarianship as a first qualification by school leavers and discusses, in the context of the Australian library sector, the role of professional associations, library schools, National and State Libraries, as well as individual libraries and librarians. Examples of best practice are presented to highlight the opportunities for inspiring and motivating students through well structured and stimulating work experience programs. The topic is relevant to all librarians who are interested in the future of the LIS profession. It is argued that the focus of the present conference on ‘moving up’ and ‘moving on’ can only have real significance when the profession has a more complete understanding of the barriers to and the opportunities for ‘moving in’.

Hypercapitalism:Political economy, electric identity, and authorial alienation

Hypercapitalism, with its "knowledge economy", is the form of capitalism under which thought itself is produced, commodified, and exchanged within the globally integrated system of communication technologies. As such, hypercapitalism may be seen as not so much a revolution, but rather an evolution: the progressively thorough, inexorable totalisation of social relations by Capital. The study on which this paper is based synthesises the sociological perspectives of Marx (1970, 1844/1975, 1846/1972, 1976, 1978, 1981) and Adorno (1951/1974, 1991; Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/1998), and the Critical Discourse perspectives of Fairclough (1989, 1992) and Lemke (1995) to argue that alienated thought and language are the fundamental, irreducible commodity-forms of Cybersociety’s knowledge economy.

Identity, relationships and culture

The purpose of this paper is to consider contemporary developments in the knowledge area dealing with culture, relationships and individual identity. It has three main objectives: the first is to examme the ways in which knowledge is currently produced within the discipline; the second is to look at an alternative approach to the issues, an approach which stresses more piecemeal and contingent ways of understanding; finally, this paper looks at how this new theoretical knowledge is being applied, or can be applied, to areas which impact directly upon educational practices.

I got drunk and lost my virginity : young women's magazines and the management of sexual identity

It has often been argued that young woman’s magazine’s, like Cosmopolitan, Cleo Dolly and Seventeen, constitute a significant instrument in the patriarchal repression of young women - their hegemonic success lying in the fact that they appear to be sites wherein young women are ‘free’ from the elements of coercion so obviously in evidence within other terrains, such as the school and the family. This paper will suggest an alternative approach to these magazines. Rather than locating such texts within an overall model of repression and patriarchal domination, it will be argued here that they can be regarded as practical manuals which enrol young women to do specific kinds of work on themselves. In doing so, they form an effective link between the governmental imperatives aimed at constructing particular personas (such as, for example, ‘the sexually responsible young woman’), and the actual practices whereby these imperatives are operationalised. These manuals do not prevent young women from learning to ‘project a unique self’, they constitute a significant source of practices and techniques through which particular types of self are shaped.