Ladies on the loose : contemporary female travel as a 'promiscuous' excursion

This paper maps gendered trouble spots in contemporary works of female travel. Since travel itself is a metaphor for the slippage or displacement of cultural knowledge, there is need for closer and more complex readings of the female practice. This paper locates the contemporary female traveller on ground and on page, and flags some of the cultural myths and misconceptions that affect how she moves through the world. When women travel, they inscribe themselves across landscapes that have been previously overlooked, openly discarded and largely unexamined. In doing so, they travel intricate courses due to historical connections between wandering and promiscuity and continuing confusions between issues of mobility and morality in the modern world. Taking gender then as its interpretative parameter, this paper explores the troublesome nature of women’s travel, citing various texts as examples.

Eat, pray, loathe : women’s travel memoir as moving metaphysical journey or narcissistic new-age babble?

This paper considers the contentious space between self-affirmation and selfpreoccupation in Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Following the surveillance of the female confessant, the female traveller has recently come under close scrutiny and public suspicion. She is accused of walking a fine line between critical self-insight and obsessive selfimportance and her travel narratives are branded as accounts of navel gazing that are less concerned with what is seen than with who is doing the seeing. In reading these themes against the backdrop of women’s travel, the possibility arises that the culture of narcissism is increasingly read as a female discursive practice, concerned with authorship, privacy and the subjectivity of truth. The novel, which has been praised by some as ‘the ultimate guide to balanced living’ and dismissed by others as ‘self-serving junk’, poses questions about the requisites in Western culture for being a female traveller and for telling a story that focuses primarily on the self.

Journalists in film : heroes & villains

We both love and hate our journalists. They are perceived as sexy and glamorous on the one hand, despicable and sleazy on the other. Opinion polls regularly indicate that we experience a kind of cultural schizophrenia in our relationship to journalists and the news media: sometimes they are viewed as heroes, at other times villains. From Watergate to the fabrication scandals of the 2000s, journalists have risen and fallen in public esteem. In this book, leading journalism studies scholar Brian McNair explores how journalists have been represented through the prism of one of our key cultural forms, cinema. Drawing on the history of cinema since the 1930s, and with a focus on the period 1997-2008, McNair explores how journalists have been portrayed in film, and what these images tell us about the role of the journalist in liberal democratic societies. Separate chapters are devoted to the subject of female journalists in film, foreign correspondents, investigative reporters and other categories of news maker who have featured regularly in cinema. The book also discusses the representation of public relations professionals in film. Illustrated throughout and written in an accessible and lively style suitable for academic and lay readers alike, Journalists in Film will be essential reading for students and teachers of journalism, and for all those concerned about the role of the journalist in contemporary society, not least journalists themselves. An appendix contains mini-essays on every film about journalism released in the cinema between 1997 and 2008.

Aircraft emission reduction through multi-disciplinary flight path optimisation

There is worldwide interest in reducing aircraft emissions. The difficulty of reducing emissions including water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) is mainly due from the fact that a commercial aircraft is usually designed for a particular optimal cruise altitude but may be requested or required to operate and deviate at different altitude and speeds to archive a desired or commanded flight plan, resulting in increased emissions. This is a multi- disciplinary problem with multiple trade-offs such as optimising engine efficiency, minimising fuel burnt, minimise emissions while maintaining aircraft separation and air safety. This project presents the coupling of an advanced optimisation technique with mathematical models and algorithms for aircraft emission reduction through flight optimisation. Numerical results show that the method is able to capture a set of useful trade-offs between aircraft range and NOx, and mission fuel consumption and NOx. In addition, alternative cruise operating conditions including Mach and altitude that produce minimum NOx and CO2 (minimum mission fuel weight) are suggested.

No Exit

Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit comes alive in this new English adaptation by academics and theatre practitioners Caroline Heim and Christian Heim. It is the most complete articulation of the ideals of Sartre’s existentialism. No Exit is an absurdist play about three people who meet in hell. This new adaptation premiered at the World Psychotherapy Congress in Darling Harbour, Sydney in August 2011. The production integrated and extended Sartre's concepts of "The Gaze", "Love and Sadism" and "Nothingness." Post-performance discussions were held after the performances to explore the discourses of the play.

Really really

In “Really Really”, a series of words float through animated star constellations. While apparently drifting aimlessly, the words can be rearranged in numerous ways to recount roughly the same sappy avowal of long-distance love. The many combinations of words, and their predictable associations, call attention to the thresholds of verbal expression. When some sincere words are needed most it seems as if they’ve all been said before. And so, this declaration of love is both enabled and haunted by the tension between sentiment and formula. “Really Really” continues my interests in how meaning is constructed and circulated, and in particular, how common models of communication continue to frame and yet fall short of our personal experiences.

Online dating and intimacy in a mobile world

The nature and possibilities for intimacy between adults are changing in the mobile era. Bauman (2003) has decreed this the era of ‘liquid love’, in which intimacy is commodified and committed relationships have been replaced by fleeting connections. In contrast, Giddens (1991; 1993) suggests that the reordering of everyday life in late-stage modernity has given rise to the possibility of a democratization of interpersonal interaction, characterized by reflexive ‘pure relationships’. The purpose of this paper is to consider theoretical debates about intimacy in the mobile era with regard to the contemporary practice of online dating. Drawing on our qualitative research with 23 online daters in Australia, we argue that, while the architecture of online dating is consistent with liquid love, many online daters simultaneously desire the possibilities for consumption afforded by liquid love, while aspiring to the formation of pure relationships and/or more practical forms of caring. This creates tensions in people’s experiences of this form of purposeful meeting, which are reflective of the conflicting socialities of intimacy available to us in the mobile era. At the same time, our research revealed disruptions to these tensions, by illuminating experiences where the consumerist orientation of online dating stimulated processes of reflexive self-discovery amongst our participants.

Can creativity be taught? And why should it be?

CreativityMoneyLove has an important question at its core – ‘what does the education and skills system need to look like in order for people to lead fulfilled creative lives, and in order for the creative and cultural industries in the UK to thrive?’ It is a question that is currently being asked by politicians and policy makers in different ways, in respect to different sections of industry, as they search for levers to economic growth. The aim of this publication is to give creative practitioners, employers and key thinkers a platform to express their views. Creativity as a concept is not an isolated part of the education system. It has the potential to underpin the entire way we learn, in order to build more imaginative, innovative and thoughtful people who can prosper in a rapidly changing world. It is vital therefore that we ask those at the forefront of their fields how they think the system could and should be changing. We have asked people to consider education in the broadest sense, from the school curriculum to vocational training, from university teaching to informal learning. The opinions expressed here are not our own. Many are overtly political, controversial, inspirational, and contradictory. We wanted to capture those views here, at this particular moment in time, when some key decisions are being made about the future of education in the UK. As two agencies that are in a position to take some of the ideas forward, this is an important part of the process of our own strategic thinking for the future. For A New Direction and Creative & Cultural Skills, the content generated through CreativityMoneyLove will provide the stimulus for a range of conversations, interventions, projects and discussions with young people, policy makers, employers, educators and creative practitioners. The dialogue has started at www.creativitymoneylove.co.uk, where all the pieces are also published online, and the bank of opinion can be added to. Spread the word, and add your own article on the subject.

Then I let you

In this video, a male voice recites a teenage love poem. Words flash on screen in time with the spoken words. Sometimes the two sets of words match, and sometimes they differ. This work examines processes of signification. It emphasizes disruption and disconnection as fundamental and generative operations in making meaning. Extending on post-structural and deconstructionist ideas, this work questions the relationship between written and spoken words. By actively disrupting the sincerity of a teenage love poem, it questions the sites and mechanisms of comprehension, poetry and signification.

Refund of imputation credits

The purpose of this paper is to explain the features of the new provisions for the refund of imputation credits, which are contained in the New Business Tax System (Miscellaneous) Act (No1) 2000.1 The provisions have been introduced to ensure that:  certain eligible resident taxpayers are taxed on their dividend income at their personal marginal rate of tax; and  certain eligible resident nonprofit organisations can apply their tax exemption on their dividend income. The provisions are contained in Division 67 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 for refunds to resident individuals and superannuation entities and Division 7AA of Part IIIA of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 for refunds to endorsed income tax exempt charities and certain deductible gift recipients.

Threshold

In this video, the words of a translated poem fade in and out above an abstract, moving horizon line. The animated words are set to an emotive stock music track. This work examines processes of signification. It emphasizes abstraction and disconnection as fundamental and generative operations in making meaning. Extending on post-structural and deconstructionist ideas, this work questions the signifying processes of translation and metaphor. By emphasizing the abstract qualities of a translated love poem, it questions the sites and mechanisms of signification.

Documentary as history, memory, dream and film

A century ago, as the Western world embarked on a period of traumatic change, the visual realism of photography and documentary film brought print and radio news to life. The vision that these new mediums threw into stark relief was one of intense social and political upheaval: the birth of modernity fired and tempered in the crucible of the Great War. As millions died in this fiery chamber and the influenza pandemic that followed, lines of empires staggered to their fall, and new geo-political boundaries were scored in the raw, red flesh of Europe. The decade of 1910 to 1919 also heralded a prolific period of artistic experimentation. It marked the beginning of the social and artistic age of modernity and, with it, the nascent beginnings of a new art form: film. We still live in the shadow of this violent, traumatic and fertile age; haunted by the ghosts of Flanders and Gallipoli and its ripples of innovation and creativity. Something happened here, but to understand how and why is not easy; for the documentary images we carry with us in our collective cultural memory have become what Baudrillard refers to as simulacra. Detached from their referents, they have become referents themselves, to underscore other, grand narratives in television and Hollywood films. The personal histories of the individuals they represent so graphically–and their hope, love and loss–are folded into a national story that serves, like war memorials and national holidays, to buttress social myths and values. And, as filmic images cross-pollinate, with each iteration offering a new catharsis, events that must have been terrifying or wondrous are abstracted. In this paper we first discuss this transformation through reference to theories of documentary and memory–this will form a conceptual framework for a subsequent discussion of the short film Anmer. Produced by the first author in 2010, Anmer is a visual essay on documentary, simulacra and the symbolic narratives of history. Its form, structure and aesthetic speak of the confluence of documentary, history, memory and dream. Located in the first decade of the twentieth century, its non-linear narratives of personal tragedy and poetic dreamscapes are an evocative reminder of the distance between intimate experience, grand narratives, and the mythologies of popular films. This transformation of documentary sources not only played out in the processes of the film’s production, but also came to form its theme.

Strolling through the (post)modern city: Modes of being a flaneur in picture books

The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children’s literature—an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction’s textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story—utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical—with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children’s literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism. Within this context of a changing urban ontology brought about by (post)modern styles and practices, this article examines five contemporary picture books: The Cows Are Going to Paris by David Kirby and Allen Woodman; Ooh-la-la (Max in love) by Maira Kalman; Mr Chicken Goes to Paris and Old Tom’s Holiday by Leigh Hobbs; and The Empty City by David Megarrity. I investigate the possibility of these texts reviving the act of flânerie, but in a way that enables different modes of being a flâneur, a neo-flâneur. I suggest that the neo-flâneur retains some of the characteristics of the original flâneur, but incorporates others that take account of the changes wrought by postmodernity and globalization, particularly tourism and consumption. The dual issue at the heart of the discussion is that tourism and consumption as agents of cultural globalization offer a different way of thinking about the phenomenon of flânerie. While the flâneur can be regarded as the precursor to the tourist, the discussion considers how different modes of flânerie, such as the tourist-flâneur, are an inevitable outcome of commodification of the activities that accompany strolling through the (post)modern urban space.

Digital Storytelling within a Service-Learning Partnership: Technology as Product and Process for University Students and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse High School Youth

This chapter describes a university/high school partnership focused on digital storytelling. It also explains the multi-stage process used to establish this successful partnership and project. The authors discuss the central role that technology played in developing this university/high school partnership, a collaboration that extended the impact of a digital storytelling project to reach high school students, university students, educators, high school administrators, and the local community. Valuing a reflective process that can lead to the creation of a powerful final product, the authors describe the impact of digital storytelling on multiple stakeholders, including the 13 university students and 33 culturally and linguistically diverse high school youth who participated during the fall of 2009. In addition, the chapter includes reflections from university and high school student participants expressed during focus groups conducted throughout the project. While most participants had a positive experience with the project, complications with the technology component often caused frustrations and additional challenges. Goals for sharing this project are to critically evaluate digital storytelling, describe lessons learned, and recommend good practices for others working within a similar context or with parallel goals.

Through the viewfinder : using multimedia techniques to engage Latino youth in community planning

This chapter reviews common barriers to community engagement for Latino youth and suggests ways to move beyond those barriers by empowering them to communicate their experiences, address the challenges they face, and develop recommendations for making their community more youth-friendly. As a case study, this chapter describes a program called Youth FACE IT (Youth Fostering Active Community Engagement for Integration and Transformation)in Boulder County, Colorado. The program enables Latino youth to engage in critical dialogue and participate in a community-based initiative. The chapter concludes by explaining specific strategies that planners can use to support active community engagement and develop a future generation of planners and engaged community members that reflects emerging demographics.