A journey through places: politics of spatial location in the stories of South Asian diaspora in Australia

In this paper, I analyse the post-colonial and post-modern experiences in the light of questions and issues concerning the spatial identities or locations that the diasporans carry. By politics of spatial location, I mean a migrant's positions within power hierarchies created through geographic, historical, political, economic and other socially stratifying factors in the new homeland. This paper is mainly concerned with the theoretical ways in which a shift is accelerated in Australia's literary landscape by the South Asian diasporic writers who produce and cover the dynamics of politics of location in different contexts. It also focuses on South Asian diaspora's widely agreed ‘ability to recreate their cultures in diverse locations’. I conclude that these stories are not just of spaces but also of a promising future for the South Asian diaspora in Australia.

Transforming Paramythi in diasporic literature : five Greek Australian writers

 This thesis examines how paramythi, as a literary trope, circulates in different ways in the texts of five Greek Australian writers and what this reveals about diasporic subjectivities.

Diasporic Greek-Australian writing deconstructed : challenging Europe with new voices, new perspectives

Contemporary Europe, culturally, historically and linguistically is filled with contradiction, silences and paradox.

Diasporic creative writers in Australia who are associated, either by virtue of their cultural heritage or through an intellectual engagement with Europe, can in fact provide a radical potential in contemporary European cultural analysis.

Deconstructing and interpreting narratives, prose and poetry of bilingual writers can open up unexplored areas which, up till now, have been either repressed or marginalised. This critical endeavour, drawing on recent post-colonial criticism, is a new way to interpret fiction, stories and even modern fairytales. It appears less threatening and confronting to venture into those cultural, psychological and subliminal areas which contemporary Europe perhaps wishes to forget or renounce. It is however an alternate method which can be used to compel criticism to puzzle over such areas and so open up new perspectives as well as allow for new voices.

Unleashing creative writers : situated engagement with mobile narratives

The emergence of sophisticated multimedia phones in combination with improvements to the mobile Internet provides the possibility to read texts and stories on mobile handsets. However, the question is, how to adapt stories in order to take advantage of the user’s mobility and create an engaging and appealing experience. To address these new conditions, a Mobile Narrative was created and access to individual chapters of the story was restricted. Authors can specify constraints, such as a location or time, which need to be met by the reader if they want to read the story. This concept allows creative writers of the story to exploit the fact that the reader’s context is known, by intensifying the user experience and integrating this knowledge into the writing process. Interviews with authors and creative writers and two user studies explored the effects of this way of writing on both parties. The paper presents our preliminary research findings discussing this new experience that was found to be exciting and interesting by both sides.

The culture of contemporary writers' festivals

This thesis examines the culture of contemporary writers’ festivals in an international context. In the last five decades writers’ festivals have emerged in cities across the world, and during this time they have expanded their literary discussions and debates to include numerous other topics of broad interest to society. To examine the expanded popularity and function of writers’ festivals, this thesis establishes a new vantage point for theorising the content now typically generated by these events using concepts in urban festivals and public culture research. Importantly, the new vantage point addresses the limitations of current commentary on writers’ festivals which routinely claim they trivialize literature, and more generally, contribute to the decline of public culture. The thesis presents two case studies: one on the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia and the other on the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Canada. The first case study, which focuses on the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival, illustrates the many overlapping and often conflicting discourses as well as opinions productively discussed and debated at writers’ festivals. Key topic discussed and debated at the Festival include local topics about the host city—its history, literature and politics, as well as broader literary, political and celebrity culture topics. The diversity of topics discussed at the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival is typical of the majority of writers’ festivals similarly located outside the largest geographic centres of global literary production and circulation, and designated as ‘peripheral’ festivals in this research. The second case study on Toronto’s International Festival of Authors examines the ways in which the 2006 Festival almost exclusively focussed on literary and celebrity culture discourses, and promoted itself on these terms. The 2006 International Festival of Authors’ discussion and debate of a narrow range of topics is typical of the few writers’ festivals located in global centres of literary production and circulation, and unlike ‘peripheral’ festivals they are not experiencing the same growth in number or popularity. The aim of these ‘international’ Festivals is not to democratise their elite literary beginnings, but rather to promote ‘literature’ as a niche brand for quality writing that is valid on a global scale. This thesis will assert that while all writers’ festivals are influenced by the marketing desires of publishing companies, the aim of international writers’ festivals in marketing to a virtually and globally connected elite literary audience makes them more susceptible to experiencing declines in audience and author participation.

Popular media as public 'Sphericules' for diasporic communities

The dynamics of 'diasporic' video, television, cinema, music and Internet use - where peoples displaced from homelands by migration, refugee status or business and economic imperative use media to negotiate new cultural identities - offer challenges for how media and culture are understood in our times. Drawing on research published in Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas, on dynamics that are industrial (the pathways by which these media travel to their multifarious destinations), textual and audience-related (types of diasporic style and practice where popular culture debates and moral panics are played out in culturally divergent circumstances among communities marked by internal difference and external 'othering'), the article will interrogate further the nature of the public 'sphericules' formed around diasporic media.

Fan writers [Författande fans]

[In Swedish: Varje dag ägnar sig mängder av ungdomar åt att skriva, läsa och kommentera fanfiction, berättelser baserade på karaktärer från redan kända verk. I fanfiction förflyttas förlagans miljöer och karaktärer in i andra sammanhang där nya historier skapas. Ungdomarna gör sina texter tillgängliga på olika nätsajter, där läsare över hela världen i interaktion med skribenterna kan kommentera och påverka. Detta möjliggör en kraftfull skrivprocess där aktörerna agerar som både författare, läsare och kritiker. Läs mer om boken på studentlitteratur.se]

Reflexive writers : re-thinking writing development and assessment in schools

Writing is a complex and highly individual activity, which is approached in different ways by different writers. Writers reflexively mediate subjective and objective conditions in specific and nuanced ways to produce a product in time and place. This paper uses a critical realist theory of reflexivity to argue that the teaching and assessment of writing must account for the different ways that students manage and make decisions in their writing. Data from linguistically and culturally diverse primary students in Australia are used to illustrate how four distinct reflexive modalities constitute the ways in which students approach writing. The paper offers a new approach to assessing writing for and of learning that considers writers as reflexive and agentic in different ways. It posits the importance of making visible and explicit the context and reflexive decision-making as writers shape a product for a purpose and audience.

Writers as performers : developing reflexive and creative writing identities

Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be conceptualised as a performance whereby writers shape and represent their identities as they mediate social structures and personal considerations. In this paper I use theories of reflexivity and discourse to analyse interviews and writing samples of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary students for evidence of particular kinds of writing identities. Findings indicate a clear influence of particular teaching strategies and contexts on the writing identities of students. I argue that making students aware of their writing choices, the influences on, and the potential impact of those choices on themselves, their text and their audience, is a new imperative in the teaching of writing.

Representing places never visited: Landscape and the diasporic imagination

While landscape photography’s complicity with the colonial possession of new territory has been substantially discussed and well understood, this paper considers the role of the European landscape as the focus of diasporic desire. The interdisciplinary project, S2Q/Good Blood began as a social history map of Scandinavian and Nordic migration to Queensland in the nineteenth century, incorporating archival material from local collections with visual field trip data gathered in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. In 2011, some of this material found its way into the installation work, 'my mother is water, my father is wood'. What emerged from this experiment was an imaginary landscape, melding its loci through original photography and video footage in tandem with stock imagery and historical material. This juxtaposition reinforced the represented landscape as a narrative landscape and evidence of the performativity of belonging. This practitioner reflection utilizes Lynette Russell’s research into landscape archaeology to consider the significance of relationships with landscapes that are “not always empirically demonstrable.”

Teachers-as-writers: Writing information texts in English and vernacular

Our contribution to this volume is not on the work of the teacher who inspires the child writer, but the teacher as the writer and illustrator of multilingual texts for classroom use that inspires the child reader. This chapter focuses on a first time teacher writer from Fiji, Bereta , who participated in a two day writing workshop known as the Information Text Awareness Project (hereafter ITAP). This chapter commences with an overview of the ITAP which was conducted in Nadi, Fiji, in 2012 with Bereta and 17 teachers from urban, semi-urban and rural contexts within the Nadi educational district. The politics of presenting Western ways of knowing to teachers from diverse cultural and linguistic contexts via a Western pedagogical approach is explored in the second section. We believe that this work involves a moral dimension that needs careful consideration. The third section outlines the eight stages of ITAP where teacher writers such as Bereta produced an English and a vernacular information text for use in their classrooms. The outline of the eight stages of ITAP is justified with links to the research literature. The final section recounts Bereta’s interview data where she talks about using the newly created English and vernacular information texts in the classroom and the community’s response to her inaugural publications. The findings may be of interest to those seeking to establish an adult writing cooperative to produce English and vernacular information texts for classroom use.

Theorising the impacts of digitally mediated social interaction on diasporic identity formation: A case of Chinese diaspora in Australia

With the scope of Chinese diaspora in Australia, this paper theorises the impacts of digitally mediated social interaction on diasporic identity formation in the new media landscape. People’s identity is the outcome of their social interactions with other individuals. In the new media landscape, digital media technologies are changing the way in which people communicate with others. On one hand, space and time are unprecedentedly compressed by media technologies so people can maintain more frequent and instant connections with others than before. On the other hand, the digital media technologies have constructed a virtual social space that might withdraw people from their physical social interactions. As we witness today, our social interactions are increasing digitally mediated, in the forms of posts and comments in social network sites, as well as the messages in social apps. As to the diasporic groups, this new media landscape is presenting a challenge to their identity formation. They physically live in the host countries but still keep close social and cultural connections with their homelands. Facilitated by digital media technologies, they are facing two platforms in which they can practice different identity performances: one is the digitally mediated social network; the other is the physical social network. In the case of Chinese diaspora, the situation is more complex due to the language factor and media censorship in Mainland China, which will be articulated in the main text. This paper aims to fill a gap between media studies and diaspora research. Most of existing research on the relationship between diasporic identity and media primarily focuses on the development of ethnic media institutions, and the production and consumption of ethnic media in the pre-digital media context. However, the process of globalisation and digital media technologies are increasing the homogeneity and hybridity of media content worldwide. In this new context, attributing the formation of different identities to the consumption of media content is arguable to some extent. Therefore, the overlapped area of new media studies and diaspora research still has space deserves further investigation.