Unfixing knowledges : queering the literacy curriculum

In the literacy classroom, students have few opportunities to use their literacy practices to contest narratives of race, class, gender and sexuality. Instead, extensive time is spent completing literacy activities associated with what “good” readers and writers do. Students’ literacy practices are often formulaic, repetitive, and serve classroom management strategies producing a mythic narrative of good literacy teaching. This paper introduces a queer literacy curriculum that poses pedagogy as a series of questions: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students? How does knowledge become understood in the relationship between teacher/text and student? (Lusted, 1986) It emphasizes developing critical analyses of heterosexism, heteronormativity and normativity with the goal of helping students understand binary categories are not givens, rather social constructions we are often forced to perform (Butler, 1990) through available discourses. The paper highlights an interruption into the literacy curriculum where, through collective memory work, students investigated, analysed and contested the usually-not-noticed ways a small understanding of heterosexuality has come to structure their lives.

Poly-Articulate

Poly-Articulate was a series of meditations around the paradoxes of articulation, considered in the heterogeneity of its material, visual, aural and conceptual aspects. Taking form through a collaborative working group of four artists/ designers/writers, the project used different technologies from the most ancient (the voice-box) to the most current (real-time rendering engines). With the utilisation of laser sensors crossing the gallery spaces, 20 digital monitors accompanied by vocal syllables would respond to the viewers? movement. Another piece of technology?a theramin installed below the sculpture of a trachea (inner ear)?mutated the vocal sounds upon its engagement along with a microphone suspended in one of the galleries. The visual and sound aspects of this project made it a compelling spatial experience.

An interactive CDRom accompanied with a text by Justin Clemens was published with this project.

In a far distant galaxy

Criticism of "Star wars" by George Lucas, 1977.

Romanticism and street shrewdness

Criticism of "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" by Milos Forman, 1975.

'The suffering members sympathise' : constructing the sympathetic self in the hymns of Charles Wesley

For the first time in history, this timely landmark volume brings together contributions from the leading scholars working on the life and work of Charles Wesley.

The non-verbal and the verbal: expanding awareness of practice-led research in creative writings

This paper takes up the concept of practice-led research: research (or the production and performance of knowledge) that is implicit within practice – in this case creative arts practice and more specifically, creative writing practice. Does practice-led research offer new possibilities for recognition of contributions to research by writers? This exploration of creative practice and research stretches out tendrils between creative writing and other art forms. What may the predominantly non-verbal creative arts disciplines offer creative writing in terms of exploring modes of knowledge production and performance?

Narrative and portfolio approaches to teacher professional standards

This paper analyses various uses of narrative in the exploration of teacher identity. It highlights the way many contemporary education writers use terminology such as ‘storying lives’ and ‘storied landscapes’ to describe teacher processes of reflection on practice. In this paper the authors discuss some recent approaches to narrative that incorporate or suggest systematic uses of narrative theory (Conle 2003, Kamler, 2001, Richardson, 2003). Consideration is also given to the links between critical ethnography and narrative in order to critique the use of teacher portfolios, as in a recent Australian initiative for the appraisal of beginning teachers. The authors conclude with an argument for the rehabilitation and refinement of narrative theory in the ‘writing’ of teacher identity.

Ferals, nomads, drifters, gypsies, vagrants, blow-ins, thieves, troublemakers, tricksters and terrorists : creative writing, from creative industries to creative ecologies

In this paper I consider some issues that I, as a creative writer and academic, find with the concept and current understandings of the term creative industries. The subject of creative industries is not one that has been adequately teased out in relation to creative writing, even though the creative industries model has been a strong force in cultural policymaking internationally since the late 1990s. It influences policies that in turn may affect writers, especially those applying for state or national funds to resource their writing, and also writers working within the academy and attempting to gain recognition and funding for creative work there. The issues relating to creative industries are also particularly pertinent at this time in Australian universities, as the new system of research quality measurement is negotiated, and creative arts scholars, including those in creative writing, struggle to define their work in terms of those negotiations. I will argue that the recent work of Paul Carter looks towards ways in which creative industries may be more inclusive and useful for the creative arts, including creative writing, and suggest that a reclaimed term, creative ecologies, indicates a good way of taking creative industries into the future.

Pain, passion and faith : revisiting the place of Charles Wesley in early Methodism

Pain, Passion and Faith: Revisiting the Place of Charles Wesley in Early Methodism is a significant study of the 18th-century poet and preacher Charles Wesley. Wesley was an influential figure in 18th-century English culture and society; he was co-founder of the Methodist revival movement and one of the most prolific hymn-writers in the English language. His hymns depict the Christian life as characterized by a range of intense emotions, from ecstatic joy to profound suffering.

Gregory Palamas on the relationship between philosophy and theology

The relationship between philosophy and theology has rarely been a harmonious and fruitful one. The two disciplines are often segmented into mutually exclusive compartments. On the one hand, philosophers, particularly contemporary philosophers working within the Anglo-American analytic tradition, widely agree that the claims made by theologians – such as the claim that there is a God and that God is a trinity of persons – are meaningless, or false, or irrational, or unsupported by evidence, or in some other way epistemically below par. On the other hand, it is not unusual to find theologians following in the footsteps of writers such as Tertullian, Kierkegaard and Barth in arguing that, when it comes to theology, faith suffices and reason merely perverts.

The philosophy-theology dispute was no stranger to fourteenth-century Byzantium, particularly in the writings of the most prominent spiritual and intellectual figure of this period, viz., Gregory Palamas (c.1296-1359). In his debates with Barlaam of Calabria (c.1290-1348), Gregory Akindynos (c.1300-1348) and Nikephoros Gregoras (c.1290-c.1358), the issue of the appropriateness of employing philosophical terms and modes of reasoning in theology occupied a central place.[1] But before looking at how Palamas tackled this issue, it will be helpful, firstly, to briefly outline how the Christian world (especially in the East) prior to Palamas tended to see the relationship between secular learning (including philosophy) and theology; and secondly, to ascertain what exactly was Palamas’ conception of philosophy.

Shaking hands on the fringe : negotiating the Aboriginal world at King George's Sound

In 1826 the British set up a garrison on the edges of an Aboriginal world at King George’s Sound, the site of present day Albany, Western Australia, with the aim of deterring the French from occupying the area.

The British newcomers and the area’s Indigenous inhabitants, the King Ya-nup, came to share a small space, forcing both cultures to adapt in order to communicate and interact with one another. Within this sphere associations and friendships were formed that were as surprising as they were unique.

This ethnographic history narrates several intimate cross-cultural stories of the developing relationships between British and Aboriginal individuals at King George’s Sound. The episodes recounted go beyond the common ‘friendly’ or ‘violent’ encounters, unearthing instead how and why particular King Ya-nup engaged with the British world, utilising the new presence to seeming advantage.

Shaking Hands on the Fringe presents innovative history writing and beautifully crafted prose in the tradition of Greg Dening and other writers of ethnographic history.

Despite the limited scope of the subject, the first two points liberate this book into a national (and international) interest: it is not a local book.

Historical fictions : the historical novel in Australia during the 1930s and 1940s

The thesis examines historical novels written in Australia during the 1930s and 1940s, providing close readings of Xavier Herbert's Caprocornia, Miles Franklin's All That Swagger, M. Barnard Eldershaw's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Katherine Susannah Prichard's goldfields trilogy, and Eleanor Dark's The Timeless Land. No attempt has been made at encyclopaedic completeness. The organising principle behind the study relates, instead, to the question of the status of the historical novel as a genre. The thesis considers the importance of genre in literary theory, and reflects on the construction of Australian literary history, which in the post-war period has consistently involved a debunking of historical fiction. In the first chapter, various approaches to historical fiction are considered, special attention being paid to Lukacs's The Historical Novel. This leads on to an examination of Marxist approaches to literature, including Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious, in order to establish some of the coordinates of the subsequent analysis. While Lukacs's study represents an inadequate theoretical basis for an examination of the historical novel, his popular frontism suggests a useful context for an examination of historical fiction written in Australia during the 'thirties and 'forties, raising the question of the relationship between literature and ideology during this period. The thesis, however, embraces a wider ideological spectrum than the Popular Front, including P.R. Stephensen's 'Australia First' Movement, as well as Katherine Susannah Prichard's communism. The next two chapters are devoted to a consideration of Capricornia and All That Swagger, novels P. R. Stephensen praised in the columns of The Publicist for being 'authentically Australian'. The thesis is generally concerned with the question of the relationship between Australian nationalism and literary production, a concern which is taken up in the following chapter, where Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Prichard's goldfields trilogy are examined in connection with the Popular Front. Eleanor Dark's development as a writer forms the subject matterof the concluding chapters of this study, when the significance of the historical novel for writers of her generation is established through considering the importance of the historical novel within her oevre.