Description:
This article examines the results of a Freedom of Information (FOI) request into the journal ranking process that took place as part of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) project between 2008-2010. We discuss the background to the request and the information that was received. We analyse the data, as well as the gaps in the data, relating this to the rankings process with respect to 13 journals in the Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA) cluster. We note some anomalies in the rankings of specific journals and relate this to the information about the ranking process. We conclude by commenting on the degree to which the FOI request sheds light on what was essentially a secretive process, and whether academics ought to have confidence in exercises that attempt to fix quality on such a large scale. We suggest that the FOI data demonstrates that attempts to produce and fix a quantitative measure of quality in the Humanities publishing cannot adequately account for the diversity of opinion or approaches that constitute the fiel
Description:
Waltz with Bashir (Israel 2008) concerns itself with time on a number of formal and thematic levels, from its investigation of history to the use of animation to allow the recreation of an otherwise visually inaccessible past. The animated documentary’s plot interweaves historical and personal time in the form of Israeli soldiers remembering, or attempting to remember, their involvement in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. A central preoccupation of the documentary is the untimeliness of trauma, where a repressed memory kept “out of time” will return to the present in unexpected and distorted forms. This personal experience of trauma is extended to the sphere of national identity in the degree to which the documentary re-examines events that have been largely silenced within the official versions of history within Israel. It is untimely insofar as it disrupts accepted understandings and exposes events that certain constructions of Israeli national identity would rather forget. Of course the dynamic between remembering and forgetting and how best to relate to history, a theme that informs the politics surrounding Waltz with Bashir, was addressed directly by Nietzsche in his Untimely Meditations. In “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,” he warned of the dangers of an excessive concern for the past, and of the necessity for a certain amount of forgetting as a condition for acting. While Waltz with Bashir investigates directly the repression of the past, of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, it is also haunted by the events of the Holocaust. The forgetting of one is enabled by the specific forms of remembering the other, a question central to the reading of the politics of the documentary.
Description:
This issue of Arena Journal emerges from a day-long symposium held at the University of Melbourne in 2013 marking fifty years of publications by the Arena group. The event was composed of diverse presentations, some by the original editors of the first series of Arena, some by contributors to that first series, and others by editors and contributors from more recent times. The day was marked by unusual vitality as well as recognition of a unique contribution made by the publications, not only to Australian political and cultural history but also to the development of a theory of social transformation not found in publications elsewhere. There was a strong sense that something of this contribution needed to be reflected upon in a further publication looking back on those past fifty years.
Description:
Writing in 2016, it's sometimes hard to believe the influence that poststructuralist and postmodernist 'theory' had on university and intellectual culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Virtually every humanities and social-science department (and even some science departments) either adopted or at the very least was forced to confront the body of work of half a dozen (mainly) French thinkers and the English-speaking colleagues who took up the implications of their work. In the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, 'theory' was deeply polarizing - either the high point of intellectual virtuosity, the voice of a new politics or a nihilistic assault on Western culture. English and Philosophy departments fractured or split entirely, newly formed cultural-studies journals enthusiastically applied theory's insights to the quotidian world, academic publication expanded massively. Outside the academy, theory was often denounced in the mainstream media as being meaningless jargon or politically dangerous, or both at the same time, while the theorists themselves retained a cult status both inside and outside the academy.