Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics.

‘Argue with us!’: audience co-creation through post-performance discussions.

In this article Caroline Heim explores an avenue for the audience's contribution to the theatrical event that has emerged as increasingly important over the past decade: postperformance discussions. With the exception of theatres that actively encourage argument such as the Staatstheater Stuttgart, most extant audience discussions in Western mainstream theatres privilege the voice of the theatre expert. Caroline Heim presents case studies of post-performance discussions held after performances of Anne of the Thousand Days and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which trialled a new model of audience co-creation. An audience text which informs the theatrical event was created, and a new role, that of audience critic, established in the process.

New maps of learning for quality art education : what pre-service teachers should learn and be able to do

It would be a rare thing to visit an early years setting or classroom in Australia that does not display examples of young children’s artworks. This practice serves to give schools a particular ‘look’, but is no guarantee of quality art education. The Australian National Review of Visual Arts Education (NRVE) (2009) has called for changes to visual art education in schools. The planned new National Curriculum includes the arts (music, dance, drama, media and visual arts) as one of the five learning areas. Research shows that it is the classroom teacher that makes the difference, and teacher education has a large part to play in reforms to art education. This paper provides an account of one foundation unit of study (Unit 1) for first year university students enrolled in a 4-year Bachelor degree program who are preparing to teach in the early years (0–8 years). To prepare pre-service teachers to meet the needs of children in the 21st century, Unit 1 blends old and new ways of seeing art, child and pedagogy. Claims for the effectiveness of this model are supported with evidence-based research, conducted over the six years of iterations and ongoing development of Unit 1.

Globalization, media policy and regulatory design : rethinking the Australian media classification scheme

This paper considers the debate about the relationship between globalization and media policy from the perspective provided by a current review of the Australian media classification scheme. Drawing upon the author’s recent experience in being ‘inside’ the policy process, as Lead Commissioner on the Australian National Classification Scheme Review, it is argued that theories of globalization – including theories of neoliberal globalization – fail to adequately capture the complexities of the reform process, particularly around the relationship between regulation and markets. The paper considers the pressure points for media content policies arising from media globalization, and the wider questions surrounding media content policies in an age of media convergence.

After the testing : talking and reading and writing the world

This critical essay discusses the challenges and prospects for the reform of school-based literacy programs. It begins with an overview of the effects of a decade of test-driven accountability policy on research and teachers’ work, noting the continuing challenges of new demographics, cultures and technologies for literacy education. The case is made that whole school literacy programs can make a difference in improving the overall education of students and youth from low socioeconomic and cultural minority backgrounds. But this requires a strong emphasis on engagement with substantive readings of cultural, social and scientific worlds through talk, reading and writing. The key questions facing teachers, then, are not simply around basic skills instruction and acquisition, but about sustained, intellectually demanding and scaffolded talk around texts, print and multimodal.

Local and global responses to disaster: #eqnz and the Christchurch earthquake

Building on innovative frameworks for analysing and visualising the tweet data available from Twitter, developed by the authors, this paper examines the patterns of tweeting activity that occurred during and after the Feb, 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Local and global responses to the disaster were organised around the pre-existing hashtag #eqnz, which averaged some 100 tweets per minute in the hours following the earthquake. The paper identifies the key contributors to the #eqnz network and shows the key themes of their messages. Emerging from this analysis is a more detailed understanding of Twitter and other social media as key elements in the overall ecology of the media forms used for crisis communication. Such uses point both to the importance of social media as a tool for affected communities to self-organise their disaster response and recovery activities, and as a tool for emergency management services to disseminate key information and receive updates from local communities.

Performing design analysis: game design creativity and the theatre of the impressed

We report and reflect upon the early stages of a research project that endeavours to establish a culture of critical design thinking in a tertiary game design course. We first discuss the current state of the Australian game industry and consider some perceived issues in game design courses and graduate outcomes. The second sec-tion presents our response to these issues: a project in progress which uses techniques originally exploited by Augusto Boal in his work, Theatre of the Oppressed. We appropriate Boal’s method to promote critical design thinking in a games design class. Finally, we reflect on the project and the ontology of design thinking from the perspective of Bruce Archer’s call to reframe design as a ‘third academic art’.

'Rebellion in the backland': discourse, truth and power

This article sets out to interpret the construction of truth discourse in the War of Canudos, through the classic 'Rebellion in the backland' by Euclides da Cunha. To enrich the research, the articles wrote by Cunha, while he was a war correspondent for the Estado de São Paulo newspaper, will be analyzed, too. Along with the text, the expression “truth-effects” designed by French philosopher Michel Foucault is being used. “Effects of truth” is an expression in reference to the idea of discourses being neither true nor false. In Os sertões, the effects of truth emerge from strategic power disputes amongst the Church, landowners, politicians and a seaside ruling elite that ignores the reality of the poor and forsaken hinterlands. Keywords: discourse, power, truth.

Confrontation and cooptation : a brief history of Australian political blogs

The history of political blogging in Australia does not entirely match the development of blogospheres in other countries. Even at its beginning, blogging was not an entirely alternative endeavour – one of the first news or political blogs was Margo Kingston’s Webdiary, hosted by the Sydney Morning Herald. In the United States, whose political blogosphere has been examined most comprehensively in the literature (see e.g. Adamic & Glance, 2005; Drezner & Farrell, 2008; Shaw & Benkler, 2012; Tremayne, 2007; Wallsten, 2008), blogging had a clear historical trajectory from alternative to mainstream medium. The Australian blogosphere, by contrast, has seen early and continued involvement from representatives of the mainstream media, blogging both for their employers and independently (Garden, 2010). Coupled with the incorporation of blog-like technologies into news websites, as well as with obvious differences in the size of the available talent pool and potential audience for political blogging in Australia, this recognition of blogging by the mainstream media may be one reason why, in political and news discussions at least, Australian bloggers did not bring about their own, local equivalents to the resignations of Dan Rather or Trent Lott in the U.S. –events which were commonly attributed in part to the work of bloggers (Simons, 2007). However, the acceptance of the blogging concept by the mainstream media has been accompanied by a comparative lack of acceptance towards individual bloggers. Analyses and commentary published by bloggers have been attacked by journalists, creating an at times antagonistic relationship between the mainstream media and bloggers (Flew & Wilson, 2010; Young, 2011). In this article, we examine the historical development of blogging in Australia, focussing primarily on political and news blogs. In particular, we review who the bloggers are and how the connections between different blogs and other titles have changed over the past decade. The paper tracks the evolution of individual and group blogs, independent and mainstream media-hosted opinion sites, and the gradual convergence of these platforms and their associated contributing authors. We conclude by examining the current state of the Australian blogosphere and its likely future development, taking into account the rise of social media, and in particular Twitter, as additional spaces for public commentary.

Web 2.0, social networking and the courts

In the last decade or so, we have witnessed the growth of web 2.0 technology and social networking platforms, and their rapid rise in popularity as methods of social interaction and communication. Yet, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are not just online social phenomena, but can impact on the way the law and courts operate. This article highlights the issues that legal practitioners and courts need to be aware of in engaging with this technology, and suggests possible ways forward.