My media studies : the history and future of ideas

In the context of a multi-paper special issue of TVNM on the future of media studies, this paper traces the tradition of ‘active audience’ theory in TV scholarship, arguing that it has much to offer in the study of new digital media, especially an approach to user-created content and dynamics of change. The paper argues for a ‘cultural science’ approach to ‘active audiences’ in order to analyse and understand how non-professionals and consumers contribute to the growth of knowledge in complex open media systems.

Digital storytelling as participatory public history in Australia

This chapter discusses digital storytelling as a methodology for participatory public history through a detailed reflection on an applied research project that integrated both public history and digital storytelling in the context of a new master-planned urban development: the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project.

Literacy and identity : examining the metaphors in history and contemporary research

In this review, the authors interrogate the recent identity turn in literacy studies by asking the following: How do particular views of identity shape how researchers think about literacy and, conversely, how does the view of literacy taken by a researcher shape meanings made about identity? To address this question, the authors review various ways of conceptualizing identity by using five metaphors for identity documented in the identity literature: identity as (1) difference, (2) sense of self/subjectivity, (3) mind or consciousness, (4) narrative, and (5) position. Few literacy studies have acknowledged this range of perspectives on and views for conceptualizing identity and yet, subtle differences in identity theories have widely different implications for how one thinks about both how literacy matters to identity and how identity matters to literacy. The authors offer this review to encourage more theorizing of both literacy and identity as social practices and, most important, of how the two breathe life into each other.

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.

Re-imagining and re-imaging the nation through the history curriculum.

Nationalism is not a naturally occurring sentiment, but rather needs to be carefully nurtured and sustained in the social imaginary through the production and circulation of unifying narratives that invoke the nation’s imagined community. The school curriculum is crucial in this process, legitimating and disseminating selected narratives while de-legitimating and marginalising other accounts and their voices. Certain watershed events in nations’ histories have always posed political problems in history curricula (Cajani & Ross, 2007) –however the pressures and concerns of current times now suggest political solutions in history curricula. This paper briefly examines recent political debates in Australia to argue that the school history curriculum has become a site of increasing interest for the exercise of official forms of nationalism and the production of a nostalgic, celebratory national biography. The public debates around school history curriculum are theorised as nostalgic re-nationalising efforts in response to the march of cultural globalisation and its attendant uncertainties.

The Melbourne Decision-Making Questionnaire : an instrument for measuring patterns for coping with decisional conflict

A study was conducted to examine the factorial validity of the Flinders Decision Making Questionnaire (Mann, 1982), a 31-item self-report inventory designed to measure tendencies to use three major coping patterns identified in the conflict theory of decision making (Janis and Mann, 1977): vigilance, hypervigilance, and defensive avoidance (procrastination, buck-passing, and rationalization). A sample of 2051 university students, comprising samples from Australia (n=262), New Zealand (n=260), the USA (n=475), Japan (n=359), Hong Kong (n=281) and Taiwan (n=414) was administered the DMQ. Factorial validity of the instrument was tested by confirmatory factor analysis with LISREL. Five different substantive models, representing different structural relationships between the decision-coping patterns had unsatisfactory fit to the data and could not be validated. A shortened instrument, containing 22 items, yielded a revised model comprising four identifiable factors-vigilance, hypervigilance, buck-passing, and procrastination. The revised model had adequate fit with data for each country sample and for the total sample, and was confirmed. It is recommended that the 22-item instrument, named the Melbourne DMQ, replace the Flinders DMQ for measurement of decision-coping patterns.

“I am a secondary teacher and I teach history and SOSE” : negotiating pre-service teacher identities in times of curriculum change

Secondary social education in Australia is set to change with the new national history curriculum but integrated social education will continue in the middle years of schooling. Competing discourses of disciplinary and integrated social education approaches create new challenges for pre-service teachers as identification with a teaching area is an important aspect of developing a broader teacher identity. Feedback on a compulsory, final year curriculum studies unit revealed the majority of secondary pre-service teachers identified with at least one social science discipline. However, only a small number listed the integrated social education curriculum of Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE), even though SOSE was an essential part of their brief. More complex identities were revealed in post-teaching practice interviews. In times of curriculum change, attention to pre-service teachers’ disciplinary knowledge is critical in developing a stable subject identity.

“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.

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.

Wrapped fragments : Drapery, the eighteenth century portrait bust and the male subject

The depiction of drapery (generalised cloth as opposed to clothing) is a well-established convention of Neo-Classical sculpture and is often downplayed by art historians as of purely rhetorical value. It can be argued however that sculpted drapery has served a spectrum of expressive ends, the variety and complexity of which are well illustrated by a study of its use in portrait sculpture. For the Neo-Classical portrait bust, drapery had substantial iconographic and political meaning, signifying the new Enlightenment notions of masculine authority. Within the portrait bust, drapery also served highly strategic aesthetic purposes, alleviating the abruptness of the truncated format and the compromising visual consequences of the “cropped” body. With reference to Joseph Nollekens’ portraits of English statesman Charles James Fox and the author’s own sculptural practice, this paper analyses the Neo-Classical use of drapery to propose that rendered fabric, far from mere stylistic flourish, is a highly charged visual signifier with much scope for exploration in contemporary sculptural practice.

Rethinking the notion of culture in the national history curriculum

Major global changes are placing new demands on the Australian education system. Recent statements by the Prime Minister, together with current education policy and national curriculum documents available in the public domain, look to education’s role in promoting economic prosperity and social cohesion. Collectively, they emphasise the need to equip young Australians with the knowledge, understandings and skills required to compete in the global economy and participate as engaged citizens in a culturally diverse world. However, the decision to prioritise discipline-based learning in the forthcoming Australian history curriculum without specifically encompassing culture as a referent, raises the following question. How will students acquire the cultural knowledge, understandings and skills necessary for this process? This paper addresses this question by situating the current push for a national history curriculum, with specific reference to the study of Indigenous history and the study of Asia in Australia.

Modern Times : The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia

Richly illustrated and beautifully designed, Modern Times - The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia reveals how modernism transformed all aspects of Australian culture across five tumultuous decades from 1917 to 1967. The influence of modernism was far-reaching. "Modern Times" looks at all things modern and as diverse as art, advertising, photography, film, fashion, the body, architecture, interiors, recreational sites such as the new swimming pools and fountains, milk bars and auto culture.Modernism embodied the utopian possibilities of the twentieth century. It transformed Australian cities into complex metropolises and offered access to new cosmopolitan cultures. This is the first time that such diverse material has been brought together in one volume.

Book Review: Larissa Behrendt, Chris Cuneen and Terri Libesman, Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia (Oxford University Press, Melbourne 2009) 376pp

Indigenous Legal Relations in Australia is a welcome and refreshing addition to the current literature on Indigenous legal issues. Written by a team of highly qualified Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics who share a long term commitment to Indigenous legal and social justice issues, this book provides a clearly written and accessible introductory text for tertiary students and general readers alike who are seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between Indigenous Australians and the Anglo-Australian legal system.