Sudanese refugees in Australia the impact of acculturation stress

Refugees from Sudan are the fastest growing community in Australia. Australian mental health professionals have to be prepared to offer services to this ethnic group along with the other mainstream and diverse consumers. In order to offer culturally competent services, these mental health professionals are required to be familiar with this emerging community. As such a review was undertaken with two main goals. Firstly, the review aimed to educate Australian mental health professionals about the demographics and culture of Sudan, the traumas encountered as a result of the civil war, factors leading to massive exodus, and the difficulties of the transit and post migration phase. Secondly, the review intended to inform Australian mental health professionals about the possible acculturation stress that is manifested in the form of intergeneration and role conflict and marital difficulties. The review highlights that there are few studies addressing acculturation stress of Sudanese refugees, and even fewer on the impact it has on relationships. Future research directions are discussed.

Mediatisation and institutions of public memory : digital storytelling and the apology

Institutions of public memory are increasingly undertaking co-creative media initiatives in which community members create content with the support of institutional expertise and resources. This paper discusses one such initiative: the State Library of Queensland’s ‘Responses to the Apology’, which used a collaborative digital storytelling methodology to co-produce seven short videos capturing individual responses to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’. In examining this program, we are interested not only in the juxtaposition of ‘ordinary’ responses to an ‘official’ event, but also in how the production and display of these stories might also demonstrate a larger mediatisation of public memory.

We’ve had the Redfern Park Speech and The Apology: What’s next?

What really changed for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people between Paul Keating’s Redfern Park Speech (Keating 1992) and Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the stolen generations (Rudd 2008)? What will change between the Apology and the next speech of an Australian Prime Minister? The two speeches were intricately linked, and they were both personal and political. But do they really signify change at the political level? This paper reflects my attempt to turn the gaze away from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and back to where the speeches originated: the Australian Labor Party (ALP). I question whether the changes foreshadowed in the two speeches – including changes by the Australian public and within Australian society – are evident in the internal mechanisms of the ALP. I also seek to understand why non-Indigenous women seem to have given in to the existing ways of the ALP instead of challenging the status quo which keeps Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples marginalised. I believe that, without a thorough examination and a change in the ALP’s practices, the domination and subjugation of Indigenous peoples will continue – within the Party, through the Australian political process and, therefore, through governments.

Marginalising the mainstream : a signed performance of The Miracle Worker places deaf issues centre-stage

William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker was staged at the Brisbane Powerhouse June 2009 by Crossbow Productions. In this adaption, people with hearing impairment were privileged through the use of shadow-signing, unscripted signing and the appropriation of signing as a theatrical language in itself. 250 people living with hearing impairment attended the production, 70 had never attended a theatrical event before. During the post-performance discussions hearing audience members expressed feelings of displacement through experiencing the culture of the deaf society and not grasping some of the ideas. This paper argues that this inversion enhanced meaning making for all and illustrates a way forward to encourage the signing of more theatrical events.

The naked audience : audience performance at a recent staging of Gibson’s "the Miracle Worker"

Contemporary mainstream theatre audiences observe etiquette strictures that regulate behaviour. As Baz Kershaw argues, “the idea of the passive audience for performance has been associated usually with mainstream theatre.” This paper explores a mainstream event where the extant contract of audience silence was replaced with a raw, emotional audience response that continued into the post-performance discussion. William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker was performed by Crossbow Productions at the Brisbane Powerhouse to an audience made up of mainstream theatre patrons and people living with hearing and visual impairment. Various elements such as shadow signing and tactile tours worked metatheatrically and self-referentially to heighten audience awareness. During the performances the verbal and non-verbal responses of the audience were so pervasive that the audience became not only co-creators of the performance text but performers of a rich audience text that had a dramatic impact on the theatrical experience for audience and actors alike. During the post-performance discussion the audience performers spilled onto the stage interacting with the actors, extending the pleasure of the experience. This paper discusses how in privileging the audience as co-creators and performers, the chasm between stage and audience was bridged. The audiences’ performance changed, enriched and created new meanings for each performance.

Introduction: Resistance, Recovery and Revitalisation

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives on contemporary cultural issues are presented in this collection of critical essays by indigenous Australians. From museums and anthropology to land rights and feminism, a range of topics are covered that touch on both indigenous and mainstream Australian history. Discussions of identity politics, the concept of Aboriginality, and aesthetic representations of indigenous people are rich with insight about the evolution of indigenous culture, with its shift from marginalization to cultural prominence in modern scholarship.

Show us your mess!

Epilogue for the edited book "Nexus: New Intersections in Internet Research"

Theatre audience contribution : facilitating a new text through the post-performance discussion

Theatre Audience Contribution introduces a new approach to theatre audience research: audience contribution through the post-performance discussion. This volume considers the physical and vocal behaviour of audience members as an integral part of the theatrical event that changes, adds to and informs the theatrical experience. Post-performance discussions, although rising in popularity, are yet an under-explored and under-utilised avenue for audience contribution. Beginning with an overview of reception theory and the historical role of theatre audiences, the author introduces a new method for the facilitation of post-performance discussions that encourages audience contribution and privileges the audience voice. Two case studies explore post-performance discussions that inform the theatrical event and discover a new role for the contemporary audience: audience critic. This accessible volume has significant implications for theatre theorists, practitioners and audiences alike.

Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship : emergent risk culture, social network markets, and the launch of Vogue in China

China has a reputation as an economy based on utility: the large-scale manufacture of low-priced goods. But useful values like functionality, fitness for purpose and efficiency are only part of the story. More important are what Veblen called ‘honorific’ values, arguably the driving force of development, change and value in any economy. To understand the Chinese economy therefore, it is not sufficient to point to its utilitarian aspect. Honorific status-competition is a more fundamental driver than utilitarian cost-competition. We argue that ‘social network markets’ are the expression of these honorific values, relationships and connections that structure and coordinate individual choices. This paper explores how such markets are developing in China in the area of fashion and fashion media. These, we argue, are an expression of ‘risk culture’ for high-end entrepreneurial consumers and producers alike, providing a stimulus to dynamic innovation in the arena of personal taste and comportment, as part of an international cultural system based on constant change. We examine the launch of Vogue China in 2005, and China’s reception as a fashion player among the international editions of Vogue, as an expression of a ‘decisive moment’ in the integration of China into an international social network market based on honorific values.

Where money and meanings meet : theorizing the emergence of new values in media and education

Recent developments in technology, globalization, and consumer activism have challenged the "broadcasting model" of natonally bounded, vertically integrated, monopolistic, expert-paradigm media industries, dedicated to supplying leisure entertainment to more or less passive consumers. Instead, attention has turned to globally traded formats, social network markets, consumer-created content, multiplatform "publication," and a semiotic long tail where niche representations can be as valuable as blockbusters. Such chenges are just as much a challenge to education as they are to business models. And education, both formal and informal, is a dynamic agent in these processes, participation, and creative content require a rethink of "studies" just as much as of "media."

Evolving citizenship : "the right to protest and the right to dance"

Citizenship is a term of association among strangers. Access to it involves contested identities and symbolic meanings, differing power relations and strategies of inclusion, exclusion and action, and unequal room for maneuver or productivity in the uses of citizenship for any given group or individual. In the context of "rethinking communication," strenuous action is neede to associate such different life chances in a common enterprise at a national level or, more modestly, simply to claim equivalence for all such groups under the rule of one law.

Whose creative Industries?

In an era of hyper-specialization it is unusual to find such a range of concerns as creative economy, media studies, copyright law and 'area' studies, but at the same time it is impossible to do justice to specialist domains without knowing how they fit together.

Resilient creative economies? Creative industries on the urban fringe

The relationship between culture and the economy is of growing interest to researchers, writers and policy makers. Advanced economies have become increasingly ‘culturalised’, pushing culture from the periphery to the centre of policy concerns and action. The economic downturn commencing in late 2008 generated predictions that ranged from the apocalyptic to the sanguine, across all sectors. This article offers an insight into the relationship between the economy, the creative industries and their geographic localities. It investigates creative industries situated away from the urban core, and located in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane. We suggest that for creative industries situated in outer suburbs, there are characteristics that may contribute to their economic resilience.

Lost children and imaginary mothers in Sonya Hartnett's Of A Boy

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes about lost children. These are what she calls “dejects,” who, in the psychodrama of subject formation, fail to fully absent the body of the mother, to accept the Law of the Father and the Symbolic, and subsequently to establish “clear boundaries which constitute the object-world for normal subjects.” Dejects are “strays” looking for a place to belong, a place that is bound up with the Imaginary mother of the pre-Oedipal period. Kristeva’s sketch of the deject as one who is unable to negotiate a proper path to the Symbolicis useful to a reading of Hartnett’s Of A Boy (2002),a novel that also deals with lost children and imaginary mothers. However, in its portrayal of children who are doomed to never achieve adulthood, Of A Boy enacts a haunting retrieval of the pre-Oedipal from the dark side of phallocentric representation, privileging the semiotic (Kristeva’s concept) and the maternal as necessary disruptive checks on a patriarchal Symbolic Order.