Description:
Abstract: Historian Greg Dening writes of history as performance. In his book Performances, he considers the limits of knowledge, claiming: we cannot describe the past independently of our knowing it, any more than we can describe the present independently of our knowing it. And, knowing it, we create it, we textualise it. That is the circle, hermeneutic if you like, of our human being. In the light of Dening's statement, I would like to reconsider my own exploration of the Australian colonial archive in writing for performance. My point of departure is a performative lecture, The More I Study Nature: Georgiana Molloy and the Code of Modernity, that I wrote as part of a larger creative work - a play, as yet unproduced, called Orchids and Insects. In the performative lecture, I follow the life story of Georgiana Molloy (1805-43), an early settler of Western Australia, and ask my reader - or audience - to consider the codes of knowledge and behaviour that we in the twenty-first century might have inherited from our colonial predecessors. My research journey led me to reflect upon the kind of stories we draw from the past, so that we might know ourselves in the present, and the role performance might play in this. I consider the choices we make about the stories that we as a culture celebrate and also, as I was to discover, the stories that we repress.
Description:
In 2005 the so-called 'Aboriginal History wars' moved from Tasmania to a new convincing ground in Victoria. Michael Connor contested the historiography behind an alleged Aboriginal massacre at a site known as the 'Convincing Ground', at Allestree, on the coast some ten kilometres north of Portland. The site came to public attention in January 2005 when Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Officers halted bulldozing and development work that had begun as part of a proposed coastal residential development. It subsequently became the subject of a Federal Court Native Title case and a Victorian Civil Administrative Tribunal hearing. The dispute with the residential developer was settled in February 2007 when it was agreed that an area of land that encompasses the Convincing Ground would be set aside as a reservation.
Description:
Shaun Tan's picture story books, The Viewer (with verbal text by Gary Crew) and The Lost Thing explore the theme of lostness in a city landscape. Both picture story books can be read as tales of extraordinary, lost individuals who are different from everyone around them and suffer as a result. The story of The Viewer concerns the baby Tristan who grows up to become a teenager obsessive about collecting items from the rubbish dump; in all probability he ends up in a kind of living death, immured in the Viewer machine that he has salvaged from the dump. In The Lost Thing, the boy narrator finds a peculiar being, a lost thing for whom he eventually locates a better place among others somewhat like it; but, as the verbal text comments, none of these strange beings really belongs there. The lost thing's condition has improved by the end of the story but it is still in some sense lost.
Description:
The significant opportunities that the plays of Shakespeare and some of his more famous contemporaries offer for the exploration of heightened text are discussed. The key aspects and features of the training built on and provided at the Ballarat Arts Academy to ground students in acting skills and studio practice from a contemporary perspective are highlighted.
Description:
The significant opportunities that the plays of Shakespeare and some of his more famous contemporaries offer for the exploration of heightened text are discussed. The key aspects and features of the training built on and provided at the Ballarat Arts Academy to ground students in acting skills and studio practice from a contemporary perspective are highlighted.
Description:
This essay examines the way in which, after establishing a broad literary and journalistic reputation in both England and Australia, Adams adopted a split writing position in Songs of the Army of the Night. Comprising mostly ballads in the style of Chartist protest poetry, the Songs are intertextually determined; to some extent they have a generic life of their own. Yet in adopting the form of popular verse, using vernacular forms and diction, Adams nonetheless constructs a persona that is consistent with much of his more "literary" writing. Songs of the Army of the Night does more than demonstrate conflict in Adams' work between the claims of "art" and "life," between his upper middle-class cultural affiliations and working-class political sympathies. Despite this element of conflict, the configuration of speaking positions is not dialectic, but dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. (2) That is, the voices or speaking positions in the poetry do not work through opposition to achieve synthesis or progress, or to generate a new set of dialectical terms; rather, they co-exist in a synchronous multiplicity that allows the "implied poet" of the whole volume to be constructed as both a member of the oppressed masses and a middle-class sympathizer.
Description:
This essay examines the way in which, after establishing a broad literary and journalistic reputation in both England and Australia, Adams adopted a split writing position in Songs of the Army of the Night. Comprising mostly ballads in the style of Chartist protest poetry, the Songs are intertextually determined; to some extent they have a generic life of their own. Yet in adopting the form of popular verse, using vernacular forms and diction, Adams nonetheless constructs a persona that is consistent with much of his more "literary" writing. Songs of the Army of the Night does more than demonstrate conflict in Adams' work between the claims of "art" and "life," between his upper middle-class cultural affiliations and working-class political sympathies. Despite this element of conflict, the configuration of speaking positions is not dialectic, but dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. (2) That is, the voices or speaking positions in the poetry do not work through opposition to achieve synthesis or progress, or to generate a new set of dialectical terms; rather, they co-exist in a synchronous multiplicity that allows the "implied poet" of the whole volume to be constructed as both a member of the oppressed masses and a middle-class sympathizer.
Description:
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) opens with a series of long takes of a car winding steadily down a road in the Iranian countryside. In other words, it opens with a sequence which, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognizable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More (1992) returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with one; such sequences turn up in Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Taste of Cherry (1997); the protagonist of Where is the Friend's Home? (1987) is too young to drive, but we see him from a distance meandering in a similar pattern on more than one occasion (and sequences of the same type return in Certified Copy (2010)). As with the other sequences, the opening of The Wind Will Carry Us is beautiful, intriguing and, with its muted semi-screwball feel, kind of funny. By the time of the film's release, however, the car on screen was bringing this cinematic history with it. Thus there is something self-aware or even self-effacing about these opening images: Kiarostami is referring here, both seriously and playfully, not only to his previous works but also perhaps to himself, and to the by-then internationally recognizable figure called "Kiarostami." So if Jean-Luc Nancy is right to say that such long aerial takes are Kiarostami's "signature" ( Evidence of Film, 10)âthat "a person or a car's zigzagging path on the background of an unchanging landscape traverses, like a single trajectory, five movies [...] and turns into an emblematic summary of all the films" (24)âthen this is complicated here by a certain irony. Indeed it would be possible to read the reflexivity of these images as playfully mocking Kiarostami's own signature, and thus perhaps as problematizing the very notion: Kiarostami doesn't let us forget that we are watching one of his films, and pokes fun at us, and at himself, in reminding that fact. This is to say that in the opening sequence of the film Kiarostami cites his own signature, with all the epistemological and metaphysical complications that such a gesture entails. Yet this self-effacing gesture is not simply ironic, and it is not in spite but also partly because of its extreme reflexivity that the opening sequence of this film in particular is so beautiful, intriguing, and gently funny. After all, gestures of self effacementâironic nods to the mediality of cinemaâare perhaps as typical of Kiarostami's films as are long aerial takes of meandering cars. If Kiarostami is citing his own signature, then that is also his signature. Thus I want to disagree with Nancy when he writes that "there is no room for reflexivity" (18) in Kiarostami's cinema. Yet I also want to agree with the intuition that appears to be guiding Nancy's statement. For what's remarkable about Kiarostami's films is how his relentless problematization of the real, his dogged insistence on the mediality of the image, does not leave us in some Baudrillardian hall of mirrors, or quasi-Derridean free play of significations: if the opening sequence of this film is an example of "intertextuality," it is not because Kiarostami is spruiking some pop postmodernism. Rather, in problematizating the category of representation in this way, Kiarostami has been able to raise the question of the real in a new and profoundly affecting manner. His repeated attempts at turning our attention to the medium itself, to the very fact of film, do not produce a Verfremdungseffekt. Or if they do, this distancing is bound up with the powers of the films themselves. Note that this is not really paradoxical: my argument is that what Kiarostami shows is how the real can be evokedâ or "evidenced," to use Nancy's termâ precisely by undermining our attachments to the philosophical picture and cinematic frame of representation.
Description:
There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics and animality, link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope.
Description:
Garth Nix's novels 'The Ragwitch', 'Shade's Children' and 'Sabriel' in the psychoanalytic contexts of the Freudian concept of the uncanny and the Jungian concepts of rebirth and individuation are highlighted, arguing that the theme of premature burial functions in these books both as a Freudian locus for the uncanny and as a Jungian locus for individuation and rebirth. The heroic Jungian worldview of sword and sorcery in these novels encounters the more pessimistic Freudian worldview of Gothic horror, an uneasy point of contact from which Nix's fiction derives much of its idiosyncratic flavour.
Description:
We apply combinatorial methods to a geometric problem: the classification of polytopes, in terms of Minkowski decomposability. Various properties of skeletons of polytopes are exhibited, each sufficient to guarantee indecomposability of a significant class of polytopes. We illustrate further the power of these techniques, compared with the traditional method of examining triangular faces, with several applications. In any dimension d 6= 2, we show that of all the polytopes with d2 + 1 2 d or fewer edges, only one is decomposable. In 3 dimensions, we complete the classification, in terms of decomposability, of the 260 combinatorial types of polyhedra with 15 or fewer edges.
Description:
We apply combinatorial methods to a geometric problem: the classification of polytopes, in terms of Minkowski decomposability. Various properties of skeletons of polytopes are exhibited, each sufficient to guarantee indecomposability of a significant class of polytopes. We illustrate further the power of these techniques, compared with the traditional method of examining triangular faces, with several applications. In any dimension $d\neq 2$, we show that of all the polytopes with $d^2+\frac{d}{2}$ or fewer edges, only one is decomposable. In 3 dimensions, we complete the classification, in terms of decomposability, of the 260 combinatorial types of polyhedra with 15 or fewer edges.
Description:
We apply combinatorial methods to a geometric problem: the classification of polytopes, in terms of Minkowski decomposability. Various properties of skeletons of polytopes are exhibited, each sufficient to guarantee indecomposability of a significant class of polytopes. We illustrate further the power of these techniques, compared with the traditional method of examining triangular faces, with several applications. In any dimension d 6= 2, we show that of all the polytopes with d2 + 1 2 d or fewer edges, only one is decomposable. In 3 dimensions, we complete the classification, in terms of decomposability, of the 260 combinatorial types of polyhedra with 15 or fewer edges.
Description:
We apply combinatorial methods to a geometric problem: the classification of polytopes, in terms of Minkowski decomposability. Various properties of skeletons of polytopes are exhibited, each sufficient to guarantee indecomposability of a significant class of polytopes. We illustrate further the power of these techniques, compared with the traditional method of examining triangular faces, with several applications. In any dimension $d\neq 2$, we show that of all the polytopes with $d^2+\frac{d}{2}$ or fewer edges, only one is decomposable. In 3 dimensions, we complete the classification, in terms of decomposability, of the 260 combinatorial types of polyhedra with 15 or fewer edges.
Description:
When critics consider young people’s practices within cyberspace, the focus is often on negative aspects, namely cyber-bullying, obsessive behaviour, and the lack of a balanced life. Such analyses, however, may miss the agency and empowerment young people experience not only to make decisions but to have some degree of control over their lives through their engagement with and use of technology, which often includes sharing it with others in cyberspace. This was a finding of research conducted by Nicola Johnson, which also informs the two novels considered in this article, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Brian Falkner’s Brainjack. The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of acts of resistance (Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, 1998) to demonstrate how these fictional representations of hacker heroes make a direct address to their readers to use their technological expertise to achieve social justice. Rather than hacking primarily to “see if they can do it,” the protagonists of these novels acknowledge the moral ambiguity of hacking and encourage its responsible use.
Description:
This paper explores features of secondary school English as Second Language textbooks in use in China. It examines a number of textbooks in relation to surface and deep learning approaches,particularly as these relate to western constructs of Chinese learners.
Description:
This paper explores features of secondary school English as Second Language textbooks in use in China. It examines a number of textbooks in relation to surface and deep learning approaches,particularly as these relate to western constructs of Chinese learners.
Description:
The flow of international students to study in Australia increases each year. It is a challenge for students to study abroad in a different sociocultural environment, especially for postgraduate research students, as they experience numerous difficulties in an unfamiliar and vastly different study environment. A study aimed to investigate the experiences of international research students and how this impacted upon their studies at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). This study also provides insight and guidance regarding the experiences of current and future international research students in Australia and universities globally. It also offers to educational services and relevant government agencies a greater understanding on how to support international research students more effectively. Qualitative research methods were used to gain deeper insights about the issue. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten participants who were selected randomly from different faculties within the university. All collected data were analysed by Nvivo version 10. Constructivist grounded theory was the basis of qualitative data analysis. The findings indicate that there are five main areas of difficulty when international research students are studying in the Australian tertiary education context. These are; language barrier, time management, research resources, educational background and cultural background. The findings of the study provide guidelines and references for current and prospective international research students in the Australian university context.
Description:
The flow of international students to study in Australia increases each year. It is a challenge for students to study abroad in a different sociocultural environment, especially for postgraduate research students, as they experience numerous difficulties in an unfamiliar and vastly different study environment. A study aimed to investigate the experiences of international research students and how this impacted upon their studies at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). This study also provides insight and guidance regarding the experiences of current and future international research students in Australia and universities globally. It also offers to educational services and relevant government agencies a greater understanding on how to support international research students more effectively. Qualitative research methods were used to gain deeper insights about the issue. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten participants who were selected randomly from different faculties within the university. All collected data were analysed by Nvivo version 10. Constructivist grounded theory was the basis of qualitative data analysis. The findings indicate that there are five main areas of difficulty when international research students are studying in the Australian tertiary education context. These are; language barrier, time management, research resources, educational background and cultural background. The findings of the study provide guidelines and references for current and prospective international research students in the Australian university context.
Description:
The article discusses the creation and development of the dynamic social space from which the Black Swan Theatre Company's 2004 production of the Indigenous Australian performance work "Yandy" emerged. "Yandy" is based on Jolly Read's adaptation of his book "Kangkushot: The Life of Nyamal Lawman Peter Coppin" and describes the Indigenous workers' fight for wages and basic freedoms. The social and economic landscape created by mining and mining interest in Western Australia and the economic framework for the story of resistance are also explored.
Description:
Anal jokes abound in Andy Griffiths' trilogy of novels for children, The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001), Zombie Bums From Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon (2005). The titles of the second and third volumes give a fair idea of the quality and makeup of these jokes: they generally take the form either of double entendres (Uranus or "your anus", a joke likely to be lost on American readers because in the USA "anus" is a taboo word and Uranus is therefore mispronounced "urinous") or anal transmogrifications of common words (Bumageddon for Armageddon). Such jokes can be found on almost every page of the trilogy, sometimes more than once on a page. To date, Griffiths' Bum trilogy has received scant critical attention with the exception of Yvonne Hammer's 'Interrogating the Humanist Subject in Carnivalesque Quest Novels' (2006); but its extreme focus on matters anal in both wordplay and plot invites scrutiny from those theoretical perspectives that take an interest in the scatalogical. In this paper I shall be considering the trilogy's fondness for anal jokes and bums from three such perspectives, those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud.