How I became the first Aboriginal person in Australia to lead a national education organisation

In this paper, Bronwyn Fredericks reflects on how, in 1997, she became the National President of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations Inc. (CAPA). The paper describes the election process faced by Fredericks, and identifies some of her key achievements during her time as National President. In becoming the National President, Bronwyn became the first Aboriginal person in Australia to lead a national education organisation. The story within this paper is told from the author’s autobiographical memory, drawing on the cultural, social and political context in which the story and the author were (and are) situated (Wojecki 2007). In this way the story teller reveals story lines which have not previously been articulated (Wojecki 2007). Throughout this paper, Fredericks ‘re-stories’ her experiences of leadership.

Globalisation and international higher education : contested positionings

This article stems from recent policy research involving participants in an international higher education program. Story lines of the program from Thai and Australian policy makers and policy actors are interpreted from a poststructural stance. Through the multiple and shifting positionings of the participants, agency and identity within this globalised space is constructed and reconstructed. The study contributes constructions of the relationship between globalisation and international higher education previously obscured by the apparent domination of the neoliberal discourse. Possibilities for international higher education as constructive of globalisation are encountered in these policy readings.

Learning between schools and hospitals – young people and a curriculum of (dis)connection

As noted in other papers in this volume, a group of health and education researchers and practitioners came together to further develop their understanding of the situation of young people, who were clients of The Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute in 2007 in Melbourne, Australia. The resultant research project, funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, aimed to understand young people's perspectives on who they are and what matters to them in relation to education connectedness, identity, social relationships, and experiences with professionals. The project team was aware of the persisting patterns of relationships between the hospital, schools, young people, and their families. They were also cognizant of the heavy emphasis in the research and professional literature on evidence from relevant family adults and from health and education professionals. The intention of this project was to put the young people at the centre a study with the stories they told through word and image. Identity issues and school connections framed the analytical work. Thirty-one adolescents dealing with chronic illness participated in this longitudinal qualitative study for a 3-year period of their lives. Given the apparently active role of teachers and health professionals in the lives of these young people, the researchers wanted to include the various relevant adults to see what coherence or lack of coherence existed in the categories, emphases, and values they expressed compared with those of the young people. The researchers have had to determinedly keep their focus on the data from the young people and not be seduced by the familiar and readily accessible data from these professionals. Nonetheless, this data set does provide a ‘curriculum conversation’, which is profitably read behind the stories of the young people and in the foreground of new pathways of curriculum construction. It is this data which informs the work reported in this paper and which has led the researchers to resist the rhetoric of currently held story lines in this field, to see beyond the present hierarchies of power over relevant ‘knowledges’, to maintain a dual focus with the young people at centre stage and the professionals as ‘walk ons /extras’ and to argue for a ‘curriculum of connection’ between young people and the relevant education and health professionals. These issues are readily engaged in arguments for change through the interweaving of larger discourses of inclusivity, curriculum, and policy. This paper works those intersections in the everyday positionings of professionals and young people.

Islamic organizational leadership within a Western society: the problematic role of external context

This research tests qualitatively the relationship between leadership, organizational culture and organizational effectiveness in Islamic organizations in Australia in the early years of the 21st century. We also researched the contextual challenges faced by Islamic organizations in Western societies during the early years of the 21st century. Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed qualitatively. Theoretical sampling and theoretical coding generated a positive and negative story-line. A grand narrative of Muslim disenfranchisement and several micro-stories of organizational complexity brought to life the story-lines. One conclusion is that context invariably is problematic for leadership. Another conclusion is that leadership cannot be studied fruitfully out of context. A third conclusion from this substantive setting is that a challenge for Islamic leadership is to reconstitute the context of the organization. An underlying parallel with structure-agency theory is noted. The leadership of Islamic organizations is faced with the traditional leadership challenges found in the extant literature. In addition it must accommodate a problematic external context, a heterogeneous followership, the important role of religion, the influence of Imams, and increasing roles for women and young Muslims. © 2010.

Is it art or knowledge? Deconstructing Australian Aboriginal creative making

Abstract Australian Aboriginal symbols are visual forms of knowledge that express cultural intellect. Being classified by a Western interpretation of “art” devalues thousands of years of generational knowledge systems, where visual information has been respected, appreciated and valued. This article highlights how Aboriginal creativity has little concept of aesthetical value, but is a cultural display of meaning relating to Creational periods, often labelled as The Dreamings. With over 350 different Aboriginal Nations in Australia, this article focuses of the Dharug Nation, located around the northern Sydney area of New South Wales. The Dharug term for the Creational period is Gunyalungalung—traditional ritualized customary lores (laws). These symbols are permanently located within the environment on open rock surfaces, caves and markings on trees. Whilst some symbols are manmade, others are made by Creational ancestral beings and contain deep story lines of information in sacredness. Therefore, creative imagery engraved or painted on rock surfaces are forms of conscious narratives that emphasise deep insight.Keywords: Aboriginal Art; Australia; visual knowledge; culture; traditional; symbols

Percorsi di gender performance: fotografia tra arte e moda dagli anni Novanta ad oggi

My project explores and compares different forms of gender performance in contemporary art and visual culture according to a perspective centered on photography. Thanks to its attesting power this medium can work as a ready-made. In fact during the 20th century it played a key role in the cultural emancipation of the body which (using a Michel Foucault’s expression) has now become «the zero point of the world». Through performance the body proves to be a living material of expression and communication while photography ensures the recording of any ephemeral event that happens in time and space. My questioning approach considers the gender constructed imagery from the 1990s to the present in order to investigate how photography’s strong aura of realism promotes and allows fantasies of transformation. The contemporary fascination with gender (especially for art and fashion) represents a crucial issue in the global context of postmodernity and is manifested in a variety of visual media, from photography to video and film. Moreover the internet along with its digital transmission of images has deeply affected our world (from culture to everyday life) leading to a postmodern preference for performativity over the more traditional and linear forms of narrativity. As a consequence individual borders get redefined by the skin itself which (dissected through instant vision) turns into a ductile material of mutation and hybridation in the service of identity. My critical assumptions are taken from the most relevant changes occurred in philosophy during the last two decades as a result of the contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze who developed a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach to interpret the crisis of modernity. They have profoundly influenced feminist studies so that the category of gender has been reassessed in contrast with sex (as a biological connotation) and in relation to history, culture, society. The ideal starting point of my research is the year 1990. I chose it as the approximate historical moment when the intersection of race, class and gender were placed at the forefront of international artistic production concerned with identity, diversity and globalization. Such issues had been explored throughout the 1970s but it was only from the mid-1980s onward that they began to be articulated more consistently. Published in 1990, the book "Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity" by Judith Butler marked an important breakthrough by linking gender to performance as well as investigating the intricate connections between theory and practice, embodiment and representation. It inspired subsequent research in a variety of disciplines, art history included. In the same year Teresa de Lauretis launched the definition of queer theory to challenge the academic perspective in gay and lesbian studies. In the meantime the rise of Third Wave Feminism in the US introduced a racially and sexually inclusive vision over the global situation in order to reflect on subjectivity, new technologies and popular culture in connection with gender representation. These conceptual tools have enabled prolific readings of contemporary cultural production whether fine arts or mass media. After discussing the appropriate framework of my project and taking into account the postmodern globalization of the visual, I have turned to photography to map gender representation both in art and in fashion. Therefore I have been creating an archive of images around specific topics. I decided to include fashion photography because in the 1990s this genre moved away from the paradigm of an idealized and classical beauty toward a new vernacular allied with lifestyles, art practices, pop and youth culture; as one might expect the dominant narrative modes in fashion photography are now mainly influenced by cinema and snapshot. These strategies originate story lines and interrupted narratives using models’ performance to convey a particular imagery where identity issues emerge as an essential part of fashion spectacle. Focusing on the intersections of gender identities with socially and culturally produced identities, my approach intends to underline how the fashion world has turned to current trends in art photography and in some case turned to the artists themselves. The growing fluidity of the categories that distinguish art from fashion photography represents a particularly fruitful moment of visual exchange. Varying over time the dialogue between these two fields has always been vital; nowadays it can be studied as a result of this close relationship between contemporary art world and consumer culture. Due to the saturation of postmodern imagery the feedback between art and fashion has become much more immediate and then increasingly significant for anyone who wants to investigate the construction of gender identity through performance. In addition to that a lot of magazines founded in the 1990s bridged the worlds of art and fashion because some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates encouraging innovation. The inclusion of art within such magazines aimed at validating them as a form of art in themselves supporting a dynamic intersection for music, fashion, design and youth culture: an intersection that also contributed to create and spread different gender stereotypes. This general interest in fashion produced many exhibitions of and about fashion itself at major international venues such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then this celebrated success of fashion has been regarded as a typical element of postmodern culture. Owing to that I have also based my analysis on some important exhibitions dealing with gender performance like "Féminin-Masculin" at the Centre Pompidou of Paris (1995), "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose. Gender performance in photography" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York (1997), "Global Feminisms" at the Brooklyn Museum (2007), "Female Trouble" at the Pinakothek der Moderne in München together with the workshops dedicated to "Performance: gender and identity" in June 2005 at the Tate Modern of London. Since 2003 in Italy we have had Gender Bender - an international festival held annually in Bologna - to explore the gender imagery stemming from contemporary culture. In few days this festival offers a series of events ranging from visual arts, performance, cinema, literature to conferences and music. Being aware that any method of research is neither race nor gender neutral I have traced these critical paths to question gender identity in a multicultural perspective taking account of the political implications too. In fact, if visibility may be equated with exposure, we can also read these images as points of intersection of visibility with social power. Since gender assignations rely so heavily on the visual, the postmodern dismantling of gender certainty through performance has wide-ranging effects that need to be analyzed. In some sense this practice can even contest the dominance of visual within postmodernism. My visual map in contemporary art and fashion photography includes artists like Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Hellen van Meene, Rineke Dijkstra, Ed Templeton, Ryan McGinley, Anne Daems, Miwa Yanagi, Tracey Moffat, Catherine Opie, Tomoko Sawada, Vanessa Beecroft, Yasumasa Morimura, Collier Schorr among others.

Between the lines on the American front: a boys' story of the great European war,

Mode of access: Internet.

Rural lines, USA : the story of cooperative rural electrification.

Originally published in Rural lines, Oct. 1959.

Teacher is here to ask for your help : a story of schools, employers and networks

This paper explores the development of the Jobs4Kids (J4K) campaign, a joint initiative of the SGR LLEN Employer Reference Group and the Beacon Foundation. Involving a three-year business plan, the J4K campaign aims to broker young people into employment in local jobs in the region. The campaign is the result of the intersection between an evolving project within the LLEN and the growth of an established program of the Beacon Foundation. The paper will use a Deleuzian lens to explore the ground shifts that have occurred in the process of forming this connection; I am concerned with the intersecting movements of different orders that have created a necessary transitory coordination. Within such a 'rhizome' there are only lines: dimensional lines of segmentarity and stratification and lines of flight as 'the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature' (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p.21). My perspective of this metamorphosis is specifically focused on SGR LLEN; I close with a consideration of the possibilities of this change in nature for the continuing work of the LLEN.

Re-framing the riot : journalism, creative non-fiction and telling the story of Australia's black history

On 19 November 2004, an Aboriginal man was arrested on Palm Island, off the coast of Townsville in northern Queensland. He was taken to the local watch house on a drunk and disorderly charge. An hour later, he lay dead on a cell floor. His liver, an autopsy showed, had been split in half and his spleen ruptured. But when that autopsy report also found that Mulrunji Doomadgee’s severe injuries were not caused by force, the Palm Island Indigenous community, enraged and grief-stricken, went looking for payback.

The Palm Island “riots” ensured that this Aboriginal death in custody made international news headlines where others barely got a mention, if at all (Hollinsworth, 2005). The ensuing Coronial Inquest and criminal prosecution of the arresting Queensland police officer, Chris Hurley, also were covered consistently by the news media. Senior Sergeant Hurley has, however, so far escaped punishment and the Queensland media’s most recent report of the case was to tell how the Qld Police Union now funds a legal bid to clear his name. Meanwhile, little is heard in the news media of the Doomadgee family, the Palm Island community, or of other deaths in custody occurring steadily through the 18 years since the Royal Commission that was supposed to implement a raft of preventative recommendations.

While the news media’s framing of these issues has most often followed historically predictable and ultimately racist lines, a work of creative non-fiction tells the story with warranted complexity and power. Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island documents Cameron Doomadgee’s death, the riots, and the ensuing legal farce from the front row. Hooper, in the tradition of Truman Capote, arrived at Palm Island as a white writer from a big city. But by “walking the talk” – being with the Doomadgee family and their community through the hearings and after, Hooper was given extraordinary access to community, history, and significant cultural nuance barely identified by, let alone understood by, non-Indigenous readers.

By focussing on Hooper’s experience with sources and court reporting, compared with some print media coverage, this paper will consider the comparative roles of journalism and creative non-fiction in re-framing the Palm Island “riot”. It will suggest that Hooper’s work subverts some dominant (and racist) news media representations of Australian Indigenous peoples through its use of source relationships in an extended narrative structure.