Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Swings And Roundabouts: Changes In Language Offerings At Australian Universities 2005-2011, Kerry S. Dunne, Marko Pavlyshyn

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this study we report on changes in language offerings in Australian universities for the period 2005–2011, focusing on languages with small enrolments. We also give a progress report on collaborative arrangements that were introduced to ensure wider availability of language programs. These programs were surveyed most recently in the 2009 DASSH project on collaborative models for the provision of languages in Australian universities (Winter 2009). We find that there has been an increase in the number of less commonly taught languages (LCTLs) offered across the tertiary sector. However, it is not the case that all of these languages are …

More (Colonial) Hauntings In The Turn Of The Screw, Paul Sharrad

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Let me start by asking two questions to which the voluminous scholarship on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw has seemingly not paid full attention. First, from where does Flora learn her shocking language? Second, in a tale whose details are inspected from as many angles as critics can devise, what weight might we give to the Indian origin of the two children who provide an extra turn to the storytelling screw? My argument here is that a postcolonial reading of the text can provide us with answers. In teasing out intertextual uses of the details regarding the children’s …

'Is A True Story Always True?' : An Approach To Fictionalizing Matthew Flinders' Narrative Of Tom Thumb's Cruize To Canoe Rivulet, Catherine Mckinnon

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

First-person narrations of historical events are powerful. Yet readers, gripped by the story, often neglect to question the narrative form. What strategies guided their progression through the story? Were those strategies employed to shape their judgments about the people and events portrayed? One of the tales in the creative component of my recently completed practice-led PhD was based on Matthew Flinders’ Narrative of Tom Thumb’s cruize to Canoe Rivulet (Flinders 1985): a first-person account of the exploration trip Flinders, George Bass, and Bass’s servant, William Martin, took along the south coast of New South Wales. I was writing a fictional …

The (New) Accident Of Art, Su Ballard

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Accidental encounters in the art gallery occupy a critical space that moves visitors beyond established behaviours and expectations. Accidents are crucial to everyday encounters with art objects and tend to occur in the interval between images. The emergence of the 'New Aesthetic' in March 2012 contributed to a more generalised interest in spotting and documenting moments where the digital intercedes in the everyday. The New Aesthetic suggests that it is possible to see accidental spaces of machinic vision. But what happens when the viewer is also not human? Does the robot machine employed by GoogleArtProject to patrol the major galleries …

Staging Patti Smith: (Un)Reliable Stories, Identity, And The Audience-Text-Reader Relationship, Catherine Mckinnon

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Humans are the only animals that use stories to help make sense of the world. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argues that ‘we lead our lives as stories, and our identity is constructed both by the stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves and by the master narratives that consciously or unconsciously serve as models for ours’ (2002:11). An inquiry into how humans construct stories is also an inquiry into reliable and unreliable narration, into identity, and into the relationship between author, text and reader. It goes to the root of what it means to be human.

In this paper these three …

Can We Inhabit (Narrative) Time?, Shady E. Cosgrove

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

With the emergence of time-based movements (such as the ‘Slow Food’ movement and Japan’s ‘Sloth Club’) that question the pace of late-capitalist economies, time is emerging as a critical issue in the twenty-first century. This is of particular interest to authors because so much of time is understood within the context of narrative – and time has always been a key issue for authors in constructing texts. A novel can span one day (James Joyce’s Ulysses) or family generations (Jung Chang’s Wild Swans). It can be recounted from a position in the far-off future (Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre) or the …

Wikinews - A Safe Haven For Learning Journalism, Free Of The Usual Suspects Of Spin And Commercial Agendas, David Blackall, Leigh T. Blackall, Brian Mcneil

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Online distributed and networked voluntary journalism, across all media, is attracting attention as an alternative news service - offering situated, active, learning opportunities for emerging journalists. The internationally oriented journalism site Wikinews is positioned to offer high-quality learning in newswriting; while emphasizing ethics, reliability and therefore accuracy. Wikinews also offers opportunities for supported production and learning in the converged media context for original investigative journalism across the print, audio and visual formats.

This paper reviews the assignment processes in two 2011 undergraduate subjects in journalism, where Wikinews was used for publishing and assessment. Wikinews was effective for improving student engagement, …

'They Don’T Flinch’: Creative Writing/Critical Theory, Pedagogy/Students, Joshua M. Lobb

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In Creative Writing and the New Humanities, Paul Dawson declared that “Creative Writing needs to answer the critique of authorship and of the category of literature offered by Theory” and that central to discussion is the question “how do writing programmes negotiate the insights of contemporary theory, and the critique of literature which these offer?” (2005, 161). In the late 1990s, the rhetoric of Creative Writing academics certainly reflected this challenge. Jen Webb proposed that “one of the skills writing students need is an understanding of the politics of identity and representation” (2000); Kevin Brophy agreed, declaring that Creative Writing …

Backfire Manual: Tactics Against Injustice, Brian Martin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In 1991, protesters in Dili, East Timor were massacred by Indonesian troops. This turned out to be a political disaster for the Indonesian government, greatly increasing international support for the East Timorese independence struggle. The massacre backfired on the Indonesian government. The Backfire Manual explains why. Imagine you're planning an action and think you might come under attack. Maybe it's a rally and there's a risk of police brutality. Maybe you're exposing government corruption and there could be reprisals against your group. To be prepared, you need to understand the tactics likely to be used by your opponent, for example …

How Academics Can Help People Make Better Decisions Concerning Global Poverty, Keith J. Horton

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

One relatively straightforward way in which academics could have more impact on global poverty is by doing more to help people make wise decisions about issues relevant to such poverty. Academics could do this by conducting appropriate kinds of research on those issues and sharing what they have learned with the relevant decision makers in accessible ways.

But aren’t academics already doing this? In the case of many of those issues, I think the appropriate answer would be that they could do so much better. As an illustration, I examine the academic input into one decision about an issue concerning …

Implicit Racial Prejudice Against African-Americans In Balanced Scorecard Performance Evaluations, David R. Upton, C Edward Arrington

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

No abstract provided.

Citizen Of Australia...Citizen Of The World: An Australian New Woman's Feminist And Nationalist Vision, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Writing in the 1890s, South Australian author, Catherine Martin, contributed to what John Docker has labelled ‘those feverish years of utopian and dystopian visions’. Her popular 1890 novel, An Australian Girl, presents modern historians with one fin-de-siècle vision for a newly emerging Australian nation, a vision that reveals itself as a utopian blend of feminist and nationalist aspirations. What emerges from this book is a sense of an Australian landscape that was as feminised as masculinised; a belief in a national identity that may have been transnationalist in that it was shaped by understandings of what it meant to be …

Oral History And The Radio Documentary/Feature: Introducing The 'Cohrd' Form, Siobhan A. Mchugh

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

In an era when audio is increasingly associated with three-minute digital storytelling, the use of crafted oral history in long-form radio narratives deserves to be recognized as a specific genre: the ‘COHRD’ (Crafted Oral History Radio Documentary), a blend of oral history, art and radio journalism. The author, a long-term practitioner of both disciplines, compares the theory and practice of oral history interviewing and the narrative concerns of the radio documentary/feature producer. The article considers how oral history may be enhanced by imaginative treatment and careful crafting, to yield a hybrid COHRD form. This combines the creative scope of the …

Attending To Anthony Mccall's Long Film For Ambient Light, Lucas M. Ihlein

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

In March 2007, The Teaching and Learning Cinema, an artist group from Sydney, Australia, coordinated by Louise Curham and myself, recreated the conditions for a contemporary experience of Anthony McCall's Long Film for Ambient Light (1975). Long Film for Ambient Light is a work of Expanded Cinema, comprising the bare minimum elements required for "film": light, time, a screen, and an audience. Here I discuss some aspects of this recreation, with particular focus on the compilation of an "experiential document" as a way of understanding how the work affected individuals who encountered it.

Accident And Process, Derek J. Kreckler

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

I recently read that ancient Greek and Roman theatres invoked certain gods and goddesses in their application and appreciation of life and art. The goddess of fate - of luck - of chance – was known asTyche in Greece and Fortuna in Rome. As the ancient folk believed in, and understood the involvement of chance to be an everyday occurrence, they found it useful to place statutes of the appropriate gods in entertainment venues, sometimes even within the seating as spectators. As chance-based processes guide so much art today, it interests me that unlike antiquity, contemporary statues are not …

Artefacts Of Authenticity, Garry C. Jones

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

I recently made a visit to the Australian Museum in Sydney to study their archive of Aboriginal artefacts from western New South Wales, particularly boomerangs, clubs and shields. I say 'artefacts' because in this context this is how these objects were framed, not as art but as ethnographic objects. While I wanted to understand this archive better in terms of my own cultural heritage, my hope was to locate an object that might inspire my own seemingly flagging art practice. Moving slowly and thoughtfully from shelf to shelf, mindful of the museum attendant patiently supervising my visit, I was on …

Envisioning The Shôjo Aesthetic In Miyazawa Kenji's 'The Twin Stars' And 'Night Of The Milky Way Railway', Helen Kilpatrick

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Despite an ever-growing body of scholarship on the shôjo (girl) in manga and anime, little has been written about representations of the ‘girl’ in Japanese picture books. Shôjo literature and culture have grown exponentially in Japan since about the 1980s, but there has been a tendency in popular media to overemphasise the 'cute', disempowering aspects of the ‘girl’. By using Takahara Eiri's (1999) concept of “girl consciousness” and Honda Masuko's (1992) envisioning of the girl’s imagined freedom through a hirahira (fluttering) aesthetic, notions of the powerless or mindlessly consuming shôjo can be dispelled. Such concepts help demonstrate that the girl …

Social Inclusion As An Unfinished Verb: A Practice-Based Approach, Lynne Keevers, Pamela Abuodha

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

The Australian Government has embarked on a social inclusion agenda that includes ambitious targets to increase and widen participation in higher education. From the evidence to date their approach to social inclusion in higher education focuses attention on statistical indicators of "proportional representation". Most of the available measures of social inclusion and exclusion have an individualistic focus and tend to characterise social exclusion as a "state" in which people are assumed to be "excluded" from access to higher education. Such a perspective focuses attention on the point of entry but backgrounds how the relational experience of under-represented groups in learning …

Made To Measure: Taming Practices With Results-Based Accountability, Lynne Keevers, L Treleaven, Christopher Sykes, Michael Darcy

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

This paper focuses on what happens when accountability regimes, represented in calculative planning processes, migrate onto situated, sociomaterial practices. Specifically, the article investigates what happens when the practices of results-based accountability (RBA) are translated into the social justice practices of locally-based community organizations. Based on the tenets of contemporary practice theory and a threeyear participatory action research project with community organizations in Australia, the study illustrates that performance measurement and accountability frameworks such as RBA are not technologies that peer and measure innocently and disinterestedly from a distance. Rather, RBA, as a bundle of materialdiscursive practices, is part of the …

The Almanac Projects: Seasons Experienced Through The Material World, Jo Law

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

At the Australian Bureau of Meteorology weather statistics “are only calculated where it makes sense to do so” (BOM). This “sense” is directly related to human affairs and activities such as agriculture, fishery and recreation. This paper asks: are there other elements we can incorporate into the ways we think about weather, climates and seasons? What other possibilities exist if we consider weather and seasons that include non-human perspectives? What are the implications of these ways of thinking? In what follows, I draw upon Jane Bennett’s “vital materialism” to consider weather, climates and seasons as human and non-human assemblages of …

The Correspondence Of Bernard O'Dowd And Walt Whitman: Indigeneity And The Cosmopolitics Of Settler Literary Nationalism, Michael R. Griffiths

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

In the last two years before his death, Walt Whitman corresponded regularly with an Australian poet named Bernard O'Dowd. While he would later reach great prominence O'Dowd was, at this time, an obscure antipodean nobody, a poetic dilettante whose voice was yet to emerge. On 15 March 1891, Whitman wrote to his admiring antipodean correspondent noting that "[t]houghtful folks here are paying much attention to you south there & Canada north" (Whitman, Collected Writings 5:176). Despite this gesture of transnational comparison between the two countries, Whitman makes no apparent connection between the indigenous peoples of either dominion, nor does he …

The 'Afghan Girls': Media Representations And Frames Of War, Vera Mackie

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In this article, I survey almost a decade of visual representations of Afghan women, which have emanated from first world media organizations and have circulated in transnational media space. Only one of the photographs is explicitly linked with a political discussion. However, all of the photographs contribute to a set of possible statements about veiling and unveiling. Through discourse analysis informed by a genealogical approach, I demonstrate how these photographs contribute to the constitution of a set of power relations whereby the United States and its Allies have sovereignty and where it seems 'natural' that these sovereign nations can intervene …

A Partial Promise Of Voice: Digital Storytelling And The Limit Of Listening, Tanja Dreher

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The continual rise of participatory, media offers increasing opportunities for nonprofessionals and marginalised communities to tell their stories. In the policy arena, Australia's Social Inclusion Agenda and international debates on indicators of well-being name 'voice' as a key capability for social inclusion and individual flourishing. In this article, I engage recent scholarship on 'listening' and 'voice that matters' to highlight the limits of the participatory media genre of digital storytelling and of the social inclusion category of 'voice'. The discussion is illustrated via examples from public launch events for 'mini-films' produced in digital storytelling projects facilitated by Information Cultural Exchange …

Death Of The “Legendary Okama" Togo Ken: Challenging Commonsense Lifestyles In Postwar Japan, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

“What’s wrong with being a fag? What’s shameful about being a fag? Why is it wrong for a man to love a man? Why is it wrong for a woman to love a woman? What is shameful is living a lie. What is shameful is not loving others.” Tōgō Ken campaign slogan.

Transcolonial Influences On Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics Of Chinese Domestic Servants In The Philippines, Julia T. Martinez, Claire Lowrie

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

From the first years of the American occupation of the Philippines, the American colonial elite ran their households with the help of Chinese servants. The preference of government officials, including Governor William Howard Taft himself, for Chinese domestic labor was in flagrant disregard for the policy of Chinese exclusion as well as the principle of “benevolent assimilation,” according to which the Americans claimed to be “uplifting” the Filipino people by providing them with the opportunity to experience the dignity of labor. In opting for Chinese rather than Filipino domestic labor, elite Americans were replicating the traditions of the “Old World” …

Chinese Merchants In Singapore And The China Trade, 1819-1959, Jason Lim

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Chinese merchants in Singapore were involved with the China trade after the British established a trading post in Singapore in 1819. These merchants were regarded as Chinese citizens by the Chinese state and expected to be engaged in patriotic activities such as the promotion of Chinese goods as “national products” in the 1930s, and comply with Chinese government regulations during the Sino-Japanese War and after the communist victory in China in 1949. This paper traces the vicissitudes of the China trade for the Chinese merchants in Singapore as the island went through phases of political and economic stability, international competition, …

Delivering Design: Testing A New Model For Developing Regional Audiences For Touring Exhibitions And Design Projects, Jennie A. Lawson, Lisa Cahill

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Object: Australian Design Centre (Object) partnered with the Western Plains Cultural Centre (WPCC) and the University of Wollongong (UOW) to undertake a research project to examine the relationship between the touring organisation and the host venue and how strengthening that relationship may lead to increased engagement with regional audiences.

A Maze Of Metaphors Around Glass Ceilings, Paul Smith, Peter Caputi, Nadia Crittenden

Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review many of the diverse metaphors and labels that are used to highlight insights into glass ceilings – the obstacles hindering women reaching the top levels of organizations.
Design/methodology/approach – The development of metaphors and labels related to theories about the causes and consequences of glass ceilings are discussed. They are classified according to whether or not they infer women play a role in creating glass ceilings.
Findings – It is concluded that most metaphor-linked explanations focus on discrimination and prejudice towards women seeking leadership positions. A small number of metaphors …

Women In Theatre, Elaine Lally, Sarah Miller

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

This report was commissioned in July 2011 by the Australia Council for the Arts commissioned to bring the research on the issue of women in creative leadership in Australia up to the present day, and provide a basis for the sector to discuss these issues and to reach agreement on some strategies to address the situation. It gathers together quantitative and qualitative information on the continuing gender disparities, and attempts to identify structural barriers and potential levers for addressing entrenched inequalities.

Appropriated Circumstances, Derek J. Kreckler

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Two billboards by artist Derek Kreckler seek to do just that. These temporary billboard works began with the word 'appropriation', referencing the appropriation of Indigenous land, images, and culture by the first European settlement in 1788 and the broader appropriations in the world of the art.

Roy takes a break after showing Kelton the best fishing spots (detail) with Roy Kennedy and Kelton Pell sitting at APN billboard site, Waterfall, NSW; Appropriated Circumstances, 2012