Creative Margins
Conference Abstracts
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A
Sandra Adams
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Neither Here nor There: Searching the Margins for a Place to Belong
Studies of belonging seem, almost inevitably, to begin with clearly drawn distinctions between “who are they?” and “what is us?”. Likewise, investigations of the Sacred rely heavily on a set of dichotomies employed to define what it is and what it isn’t. Inherent in both is an emphasis on answers, a kind of hierarchy based on what we didn’t know then and what we know now; on the construction of (seemingly) solid ground that makes clear where we stand.
Drawing from the author’s search for belonging through art-making and pilgrimage, this paper will investigate the relationship between place, belonging and the Sacred, and will explore the shifting territory of the margins (notions of the liminal, of paradox and of ambiguity) not simply as a place/stage to pass (hurriedly) through, but for it’s own potential as a state of being where hierarchies and dichotomies blur and a new kind of awareness, belonging and experience of the world might reside.
Sabreena Ahmed
School of Education
Curtin University of Technology
Same Old, Same Old? ... (From Boring to Creative Presentations)
This paper reports on an ongoing research which compares attitudes of tertiary-level students in Australia and tertiary-level students in Bangladesh to the use of technology in lectures and in seminars. Students were shown an audiovisual recording of two seminars. The content and teacher in both were identical. One seminar, however, used a PowerPoint presentation package while the other used usual the whiteboard and marker in conducting the presentation. Preliminary findings from the research suggest that both Australian and Bangladeshi students prefer the audiovisual recording without PowerPoint as it seems more effective and interactive to them. Such findings have important implications with respect to educational planning and effectiveness of modern technology in making presentations in both of these countries.
Darryn Ansted
School of Design and Art
Curtin University of Technology
Beyond the Colour Chart: Painting a Critique of the Artwork of Gerhard Richter
In this paper I discuss how my art practice has engaged the artwork of Gerhard Richter to ask whether the discipline of painting can acquire a more critical position that retains the aesthetic achievements of Richter’s methodology. Richter has produced many various and contradictory styles of art, which have represented an endgame of painting in the late twentieth century and an impasse for painters. However, a close analysis of Richter’s methodology reveals that his dependence on ‘chance’ and ‘laws of nature’ inhibit his painting’s communicative potential. It has meant that the work struggles to commit to any solidified political perspective. Accordingly, I have critiqued the main example of Richter’s work that uses chance: his colour chart paintings, which employ chance to generate a grid of colour. Where Richter has taken paint sample cards and juxtaposed thousands of different colours in a manner that suggests the unproblematic continuation of painting as an autonomous exercise under the conditions of mass reproduction, I have instead critiqued this project by using the leitmotif of colour charts to write critical coded text, to conduct collaborative workshops and in direct juxtaposition with overtly political artwork.
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Riccardo Baldissone
Centre for Human Rights Education.
Curtin University of Technology
A Way Out of the Seventeenth Century
Deleuze wrote in his doctoral thesis: “We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other”. If this holds true, frontiers, borders and margins are not necessarily peripheral, because that which we don’t know is often hidden in plain sight, just like the purloined letter of Poe. In this case, the centre of our picture disappears just because of its obviousness. In modern Western thought, the centre comes back in sight either because it is revealed by critical analysis, or because it is reconfirmed against the analytical threat. On the contrary, a contemporary third way deals with centres as constructions, of which we can thus dispose. In my presentation I will match the modern frightened gaze on things that, paraphrasing Yeats, fall apart because the centre cannot hold, with an eager call to step out of the seventeenth century and its obsessive centralizing attitude, which still burdens us. I will support my invitation with stories linking Western modern philosophy, science, art and music.
Tim Barker
University of New South Wales
A.N. Whitehead and Digital Aesthetics
The aesthetics of media art seem to be inextricable from time and process. Surprisingly though, interaction with digital systems has traditionally been marked by spatial concepts and metaphors, turning the Internet into a virtual 'cyberspace' and thinking of the aesthetics of interaction as a convergence of space. This concern with space has restricted an aesthetic theory of media art from grappling with questions of time and the more specific questions of the temporal and 'temporalising' nature of interaction. My research seeks to address this problem by developing a process philosophy of digital aesthetics, focusing upon the event of interaction and seeking to move beyond the strict subject/object distinction that dominates traditional approaches to aesthetics. This work crosses into A.N. Whitehead's process philosophy of the early 20th century, a domain usually only occupied by other process philosophers, philosophers of science and some experimental theologians. Readings of Whitehead are not at all settled and his application to digital aesthetics signifies a new way in which to approach his work. The research that I enact thus not only uses Whitehead to rethink the digital encounter, but also brings his work into the contemporary post-digital condition and uses this to shed new light on his ideas, outside of their usual theoretical framework.
Tarsh Bates
Centre for Excellence in Biological Art
University of Western Australia
InterUterine Exploring the Reproductive Cyborg Through an Interspecies Aesthetics of Care
As a white lesbian in this biotech era, I am interested in the cultural and scientific discourses around the reproductive body. In a world where children are starving, resources are being massively depleted and species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, we are exhorted to “make babies”. As a woman approaching the end of her reproductive life my feelings about my reproductive body are complex and highly ambiguous. I struggle with an urge to produce my “own” child, when the need for foster parents is dire and the resources required to conceive, gestate and parent are enormous.
InterUterine is an artistic research project exploring the aestheticisation and technologisation of the reproductive body, reproductive and creative alternatives, an interspecies aesthetics of care, and the ambiguities of reproduction in a biotechnological era. InterUterine contributes to my Masters research and will comprise 12 glass vessels hand blown in the shape of a human uterus. Each vessel acts as a terrarium for the growth and housing of various plant, fungi and animal species used in reproductive research.
This paper describes the theoretical and artistic underpinnings of InterUterine and presents some preliminary images of the work.
Susana Ani Berliyanti
Centre for Human Rights Education
Curtin University of Technology
E N A B L E (Enabling Community to Stop Child Trafficking Through Education)
The East Java Province of Indonesia is recognized as one of critical sending areas of child trafficking. The phenomena were attributed to the high numbers of children drop out from school, poverty, and cultural value of children to parents in the area. Efforts to stop children being trafficked have been launched by some parties, including international, national and local NGOs. This ongoing project aims to asses program established by Save the Children Indonesia called E N A B L E (Enabling Community to stop Child Trafficking through Education). The Program, which applies community based approaches, has been successful in empowering local community to deal with child trafficking. It helps the community in gaining their capacity to understand the problem, establishing local network and institution and raising position in the market. However, the researcher found out that it was difficult to bring dropped out children back to school because of poor infrastructure and low motivation among the children. Moreover, the limited local opportunity to have jobs, life-style and the high attractiveness of urban life make it harder for the children to stay in their villages or remote areas. To cope with such a situation, it is very crucial to supply information on ‘migrant save’ in order to prevent the children and/or parents to be involved in child trafficking. For the interest of child villagers to migrate safely, regional legal provisions and other law instruments, which are unavailable so far, are needed without any delay.
Margaret Blackmore
School of Art Education and Art History
Faculty of the College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales
Re-mapping Territories: Art/Design Researchers and Information Engagement.
My research investigates the ways that studio-based artists and designers, within a university context, develop and utilise information engagement skills via their research practices. The study is informed by my professional practice as an information professional working within an art and design school setting. Delving into how art and design practitioner-researchers function within the domain of information literacy provides a novel and, to date, under-represented area for information professionals to consider. The aim of this research is to develop more relevant information literacy programs to assist novice studio-based researchers.
Using a phenomenographic approach, the research maps some of the creative pathways used by practising studio-based researchers throughout their research processes. These pathways are undeterred by disciplinary borders, often detouring through, or stopping in, unexpected research territories. The nature of this movement demonstrates the fluid, shape-shifting nature of information engagement within creative fields and indicates the need to extend understandings of how information professionals can assist early researchers in practice-based research, in particular by increasing our awareness of these complex, and frequently unorthodox, information engagement paths.
A snapshot of the journey, thus far, will be illustrated via the proposed conference poster.
Cherie Brits
Faculty of Creative Technologies and Media
Murdoch University
The Video Store and Australian National Identity
In this paper I will present the film establishment’s perceptions of the Australian film as an identity maker through the Video Store audience. Given that popular culture is an important influence in the development of identities, this research will determine what role the Video Store plays in the case of Australian identity creation. In addition, the research will discern whether the Video Store encourages, develops, highlights or undermines Australian national identity. The topic will be explored from three main perspectives. These include an educational angle, a cultural angle, and a commercial angle. Overall the research should indicate whether there are any apparent trends towards the rental and viewing of Australian films and how the rental and viewing of Australian films can be improved. The method of research will be a more interpretative form of studying film as a cultural marker. To effectively research the proposed area the information will be processed quantitatively. The methods of research will include an audience questionnaire, a list of interview questions for Video Store staff and management, as well as a variety of statistical reports. These reports will essentially be summaries representing the amount of Australian films available for rent and the frequency or hire rate of these titles. Fundamentally, the results will indicate whether the video store permits or inhibits the experience of film as a cultural product and how this is a reflection of Australian national identity.
Zoë Brooks
School of Education
Curtin University of Technology
A Qualitative Investigation of Perspectives on One Level of Secondary School Leadership
This study examines the unique complexities inherent within secondary school middle leadership positions. These formal positions typically have line management accountability through a school’s Deputy Principal to the Principal for the supervision of teaching and/or ancillary staff. The formal position requirements were investigated, as well as the professional perceptions and expectations of Western Australian, secondary school middle leaders. The results presented in this paper were collected during the qualitative phase of a mixed methods research project. The qualitative phase involved a document analysis of related position descriptions and nine semi-structured interviews with school leaders. The study examines the roles and experiences of discipline-based, pastoral-based and program-based middle leaders across a sample of three Western Australian secondary schools. The results of this qualitative study will be presented, exploring the dual and dynamic nature of educational middle leadership positions. Specifically, findings relating to the role tensions, role limitations, role requirements, as well as the professional experiences and expectations of educational middle leaders will be presented.
Laszlo Bubrik
School of Education
Murdoch University
Relief Teachers and the Law of Requisite Variety: An Autoethnographic Voyage about the Status of a Relief Teacher
Relief teachers (also known as substitute, supply, teacher on call (TOC)) are frequently employed to meet the day-to-day requirements of various schools. Although there is a high demand for such teachers, they are still viewed by many teachers and students as ‘baby sitters’ rather than "real" teachers. This standpoint suggests that their professional status is not highly valued and respected and that they are in fact second class citizens. The law of requisite variety in relation to relief teaching means that a flexible relief teacher with many options is better able to cope with change in a fluid, modern environment. Consequently their elasticity to change can promote continuous teaching and learning in schools. This study employs autoethnography and personal narrative writing to examine the status of relief teachers in secondary schools in Australia. The study will also use qualitative analysis to examine how students, fellow teachers, principals and relief teachers themselves perceive relief teachers’ status. Are relief teachers’ important and equal members of the professional teaching community? If so how can their perceived professional status be raised so they become accepted, properly valued and utilised as ‘real’ teachers?
Paul Byron
National Centre in HIV Social Research
University of New South Wales
The Health Researcher and the Self Researcher
This paper critically engages with sexual health narratives of contemporary social research. It emerges from my uncertain position as a health researcher focussing on sex and young people.
To research health narratives warrants self-reflexivity about the role of health research in the production of such narratives. ‘Health’ (as need), ‘sex’ (as act) and ‘young people’ (as population) are often approached by researchers as known concepts, without definition or defence. These are tools for a discussion seeking to find ‘new’ knowledge; yet knowledge that depends upon discourses already in motion, groundwork achieved, and definitions covered elsewhere.
This work constitutes an attempt to move away from a health research metanarrative that sustains itself through a persistent ordering of the researched and their actions.
Using Foucauldian and Kristevan concepts of subjectivity, I approach the subject as always ‘in process’ and involved in a creative exercise of self (ascesis). Emphasising subjectification within ongoing practices (of sex, health, and research), this framework applies to both researched and researcher. Here, research participants are not simply informers, but practitioners, whose words are ascetic. As are my own, in my ongoing research practices.
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Michelle Carey
Centre for Aboriginal Studies
Curtin University of Technology
‘Going Native’: Coming ‘Home’. Exploring Settler/Invader Belongings towards the end of the 20th Century.
This paper critically engages with a number of key texts published towards the end of the 20th century and early in the 21st century exploring the legitimacy of white Australian ‘belonging’ on Aboriginal land.
‘Belonging’, as an emergent field of academic inquiry can be read against key political events in the latter part of the 20th century, including the 1988 bicentenary celebrations, the 1992 Mabo decision, and the Reconciliation movement of the 1990’s.
This paper argues this corpus of work functions to settle non-Aboriginal Australians anxiety about the status of their belonging vis-a-vis key political events of the latter part of the 20th century. It does this by establishing a (sometimes paradoxical) set of discursive arrangements whereby non-Aboriginal people appropriate of Aboriginality/Indigeneity as a marker for identity; position Indigenous people as the impediment to non-Indigenous belonging; and, appropriate the experience of Aboriginal dispossession, thereby repositioning non-Aboriginal people as the ‘dispossessed’. Ultimately, this corpus of work serves a recolonising function, legitimising non-Aboriginal occupation of Aboriginal land.
Jamila A Chowdhury
Faculty of Law
University of Sydney
Swelling Women Rights in Bangladesh: Law, Society and a new promise for mediation
Women in Bangladesh are moving through a passage of change where the predominant traditional mind-set is undergoing a gradual transformation of knowledge in the society- from patriarchy to gender equity. This change over time is being reflected in pro-women legislation and case law. The prime objective of this chapter is to set the context of the life of women in the changing society of Bangladesh. There is a notion that laws enacted in a developing country like Bangladesh reflect a patriarchal social structure that places women in an underdog position; however, this chapter will argue that contrary to this notion, the rights of women in Bangladesh are evolving over time through the development of pro-women legislation and liberal interpretation of personal laws by the courts in the country. Besides, legal awareness programs from different human rights Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are also contributing to change the social knowledge about women’s rights and raise the voice of women in society. Finally, this chapter will link the positive changes of laws and legal awareness to the improved participation of women in mediation. It will be argued that development of pro-women legislation and case law might have a synergetic effect, changing the social knowledge that empowers women to negotiate effectively in mediation.
Caryn Coatney
School of Media Culture and Creative Arts
Curtin University of Technology
Read all about it: John Curtin’s key to generating positive news coverage, 1941-1945©
As a forceful orator, skilful writer and former hard-hitting journalist, Australia’s wartime Prime Minister, John Curtin, led significant innovations that transformed the nation’s media and created a legacy in political communications. Yet a major gap exists in the literature about Curtin’s use of the mass news media to secure popular support for his World War II initiatives. The proposed conference paper aims to take his journalism strategies away from the academic margins. I will investigate the following question: How did Curtin achieve such success in his management of the news media? The paper will focus on this Prime Minister’s groundbreaking initiatives in the press, film and radio broadcasts. My research will be located in the field of scholarship developed by John Curtin historians such as Bobbie Oliver and David Black, political scientist Chris Hubbard, as well as based on the theories of journalism experts Steve Mickler and David Pyvis. Within this context, the paper will argue that Curtin was a brilliant media strategist due to his persuasive skills in influencing reporters to support his foreign policies, providing valuable lessons for managing information needs during global conflicts.
Thea Costantino
School of Art and Design
Curtin University of Technology
The Uncanny Pleasures of the Past: The Grotesque as a Paradisciplinary Mode of History
The institutional model of history aims to present an objective reconstruction of the past as it really happened. However, this notion of an objective and reliable narration of the past is problematic, and philosophers of history have long critiqued empiricist historians’ claims to objectivity. An oppositional understanding of history has emerged, in which the historical document is critiqued as a narrative construct rooted in the aesthetic and ideological imperatives of literary discourse.
Hayden White’s literary analysis of historiographic texts suggests the possibility of paradisciplinary parallels or counter disciplines to official modes of history. White’s arguments can be used in support of alternative modes of historical representation, including literary fiction and visual art. As proper history’s ‘other’, overtly creative representational modes offer alternatives to the covertly poetic tradition of empirical or realist historiography. Pursuing White’s ideas, it can be argued that the treatment of historical themes in creative modes has a metacritical element.
I will propose the grotesque as an oppositional and paradisciplinary mode for the representation of history. In its historiographic incarnations, the grotesque often functions as counter-history, working to disrupt the claims and methods of objectivist historians. In this context, history and historical representation are both rendered grotesque: shifting, monstrous and marginal - the uncanny double of monumental history.
Christine Couanis
School of Education
Curtin University of Technology
An Investigation of Academic Self-regulation in Young Adults in Vocational Education and Training in a Technical and Further Education College
The problem underpinning this research is a general concern amongst academics that many younger students in Vocational Education and Training are unwilling or unable to take control of their learning despite this being a key component of the learning environment. Being able to regulate your own learning is viewed by educational psychologists and policy makers as the key to successful learning, however, most students struggle to attain this. The intent of this research is to investigate academic self-regulation characteristics of young adults in Vocational Education and Training. Using a collective case study method, a purposive sample of approximately 15 students will be invited to participate. All participants will be full-time Business and Management students at a Technical and Further Education College, aged between 18 and 25. All participants will be in their first semester and enrolled in a unit that requires the submission of a written report. Semi-structured interview following submission of the report will be the main form of data collection in this qualitative study. Interview questions and data analysis will be guided by Paul Printrich’s 2003 conceptual framework of academic self-regulation in college students. The results of this study will contribute to current academic literature and to the development of policy initiatives relating to sustainable quality teaching and learning practices in Vocational Education and Training.
Julee Cunningham
School of Fine Arts
College of Fine Arts
Paddington Sydney
StoryDoctoring
How can non-fiction be turned into artful moving images and best configured to tell of the power of story itself with emotion as its main protagonist and antagonist? This riddle concerns real people with serious diseases and a New Zealand Doctor qualified in immunology and psychotherapy who has steered them into remission through artfully turning over their emotional stories. To fully explore how this takes place requires spanning the deeply personal to the meta-narrative of our culture which need a rewrite. This project will be a part of the rewrite and so requires new methods, also involving the interactivity a website offers. The project is underpinned by such philosophical questions as: Is the shape of progress in science a steady rise upward? Or does nature's rise and fall rhythm provide a more realistic modelling? Is all the research money pumped into the “hard sciences” such as genetics a kind of viagra which eschews important subtle forms of enquiry, especially when it comes to medicine? What knowledge is excluded because of medicines walled off body/mind categories? In the enantiodromia of our current moment is the body challenging the mind as the earth is now challenging us to new ways of being and thinking?
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Soma Mandal Datta
School of Built Environment,
Curtin University of Technology
Architecture as an Aid to Classroom Based Education
Our physical environments have been long known to influence our emotions and behaviour. This nexus forms a largely unexplored area of research in built environment though the idea is familiar in other disciplines like behavioural sciences and education that have attempted to incorporate the findings into their respective practices. However there exists a gap within the discipline of architecture that would help practitioners make informed design decisions. This paper is part of thesis exploring the influence of built environment on human behaviour through an inter-disciplinary study across architecture, education and environmental psychology with specific focus on enhancing learning aptitude of primary school students with learning disabilities. Through such a study, I intend to develop design strategies for learning environments that aid concentration, limit distractions or stress caused by physical conditions of space .Furthermore, it may be found that these design considerations would also benefit other children in the same learning environments. This paper attempts to present a brief overview from ongoing case-studies in a double streamed classroom of which one is a control group accommodated in a non-modified classroom and other in modified classroom.
Brooke Davis
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Scribbling in (and out of) the Margins: Finding a Space to Grieve with Didion, Lewis and Woolf
In an era that rejects binaries as reductive, we would like to believe that we have moved beyond the idea that there is a ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ way to grieve, and that we have opened up spaces for grief that are more inclusive. Yet, if – as Philippe Ariès has suggested –Western culture subscribes to a ‘social obligation’ to strive for happiness, surely it is grief itself that is viewed as ‘abnormal’. And if the culture does indeed push grief into the margins – into a space not considered ‘normal’ – what happens to those who want to explore their grief; to grieve openly and (to paraphrase Darwin) actively? Bringing together Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed, and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, as well as including the experience of representing a version of my own grief in a fictional work, I ask, where is the space to grieve in a culture that interprets sadness as failure? And what of those who want to do more than merely scribble in the margins?
Sarah-Mace Dennis
Media Arts
College of Fine Art
University of New South Wales
Reconfiguring Forgotten Ecologies: Exploring the Invisible Spaces of Perception
The paper will discuss the project’s interest in the relationship between perception, consciousness and what constitutes an ‘inspirited’ geography, outlining the way that connections between these ideas changed during my time researching and filming the operating gold mine in Hill End (NSW). When asked to describe a place that he felt was ‘inspirited’ one of the geologists said that the amount of gold in Hill End must make the energy of the landscape feel special, and that possibly people ‘could be perceptive enough to pick up on that (…) without actually seeing it’.
Referring to the research undertaken with the mine and drawing on the writings on perception by Arakawa and Madeline Gins and Christof Koch’s ideas on consciousness, the paper will explain the project’s evolving desire to work with the brain sciences, investigating how, why and if we can perceive, feel, or be conscious of information without actually seeing it. I will discuss how interviewing geologists and members of the Hill End community about what they believe constitutes an ‘inspirited’ space, has pushed the video art and thinking associated with my PhD research in new directions, shifting my conception of ‘inspirited’ away from a notion of a physical place toward ideas more closely aligned with the way that neural activity taking place from within the brain effects how we understand, feel and comprehend not only the things we see, but also the things we can’t see.
Jane Donlin
School of Creative Industries
Communication and Art
Edith Cowan University
Craft in the Post-traditional Period of Late Modernity – Rescuing Tradition from the Madness of Dissolution
Using cultural reflexivity as a tool for research and praxis, I draw on Giddens’ concept of late modernity being post-traditional. A central dilemma of modernity is the dissolution of traditions and a devaluation of the crafts. Building on Adorno’s ideas of conserving tradition through a critical relationship and Habermas’ distinction between the authority of the sacred and that of the institution, I argue that tradition has become a fragile entity that has been transformed into the invisible, the insignificant, the no longer self-evident. Tradition, as critical theory establishes, is at odds with the age of late modernity and in terms of the crafts, technology replaced the hand a long time ago. To therefore work with the traditional after the dissolution of tradition is to work within the creative margins of the subordinate, to make art using craft is to experience the challenge of ridicule.
Based on the arguments of contemporary critical theory, I cross the ideological boundaries modernity constructed for the crafts. In keeping with Adorno’s assertion that there is no real aesthetic substitute for tradition lost, that in the absence of tradition the qualities of humanity are destroyed, ultimately, I blur the boundaries between the crafts and art and use ‘traditional’ weave, stitch and dye to make work. I propose that to work with the crafts in a thinking, critical way is a post-traditional means of carrying forward the legacy of tradition, of taking seriously the allegations of critical theory.
Heather Dreyer
School of Social Sciences and Asian Languages
Curtin University of Technology
The Difficult Art of Remaining Visible: The National Party and the Australian Media
This paper addresses the influence of the mass media upon the public image of the Australian National [formerly Country] Party, its values, policies and place in Australian politics and culture. In Western Australia the Party has a long history of alliances with the conservative and Liberal Parties, and a considerable body of legislative achievements to its credit. Yet the Nationals have been described in the past as little more than a Liberal offshoot, essentially irrelevant in modern politics, their initiatives being overshadowed in the public mind as Coalition or even Liberal achievements.
What role has the media played in shaping the public image of the Party? How has the Party sought to capture media attention in order to disseminate its message and promote its constituents’ interests? It is argued that the media’s concentration on controversial political issues as contests between Liberal and Labor, particularly during election periods, has been detrimental to the Nationals’ public visibility. Given the Nationals’ own allegiance to country as the source of national wealth and the real locus of Australian identity, might the reworking of popular images and stereotypes of Australian society in the media potentially benefit the National Party and its public image?
Paula Dunlop
Queensland University of Technology
Fashion Design and an Ethics of Making
Traditional approaches to fashion design are largely dependent on an ontology of design as a pre-conceived system determined by its end product. The same tradition presupposes that designers are individuals who transcend the everyday in the quest to create ‘the new’. These two presumptions result in a separation, but also an opposition between plan (or pre-determined outcome) and process, in which process is relegated to a subsidiary role to the plan as well as to the designer’s intention. This paper proposes an alternative ontology of design based on an ethics of making. Through an investigation of non-professional sites of clothing production, it explores design as grounded in an experiential engagement with the world. By looking at activities where conception and creation are heavily negotiated around constraints, I consider design as an activity where plans sit within both the material and immaterial conditions of the making process. This positions plan and control as approaches embedded in pre-existing and mutable conditions. By connecting the designer with the materiality of the planned design process, this paper challenges conceptions of design that privilege both the pre-determined plan and the autonomous creativity of the designer. It elucidates an ethics of making that underpins the recent concern for environmental and social responsibility in the fashion industry—connecting the designer to the ‘everyday’ conditions through which they conceive of and undertake their practice, to reposition designers as part of larger systems of making.
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Caroline Ellsmore
University of New England
Disarming the Dangerous Woman: Violetta Valery and the posizione of the singer in Giuseppe Verdi’s “La traviata”(1853)
There is little doubt that, although able to achieve an enviable professional status within her own milieu, historically the courtesan has existed on the margins of acceptable society. Alexandre Dumas fils called her world the demi-monde, that social twilight between the legitimate and the criminal. Her relationship with society, the situation which Verdi termed posizione, has been regarded with both fear and secret admiration. She is the archetypally dangerous woman from whom respectable women’s eyes are averted, surviving in a man’s world. For centuries there has existed a link between the courtesan and the singer. The pleasurable arts of the Japanese geisha , the Chinese ji, the sacred Indian temple prostitute and the cortegiana Venetiana of the Renaissance all included the cultivation of skill in music and particularly in the seductive power of song. Any woman who, like Verdi’s mistress Giuseppina Strepponi, ventures onto the operatic stage, takes on by association the mantle of the siren-courtesan. A demonstration of Verdi’s music in La traviata first shows Violetta and her alter ego, the singer, in the posizione of skilled and virtuosic seducer. Gradually it divests her of her dangerous brilliance until she is sacrificed to simplicity and love – the siren disarmed.
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Helen Fordham
School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts,
Curtin University of Technology
The Dried Blood in the Codes: The Australian History Wars and the Erosion of Public Intellectualism
The History Wars were a battle over the nation’s cultural resources and the right to define Australia’s past. Intense political struggles opened up over race, sovereignty and national identity as ways of sketching the nation’s character and conscience. Historians who sought to find Foucault’s ‘dried blood in the codes’ and the hidden stories of the past, clashed with those who saw the ‘artificially constructed unities’ that unquestioningly celebrated Australia’s colonial past as a necessary component of national stability and unity.
The polemic and hyperbole that characterized the public discourse of the wars defined the mainstream public intellectual terrain between 1996 and 2007. This paper examines the way in which these conflicts operated to damage the central functions of intellectual discourse in speaking the truth to power and finding sites of peaceful coexistence.
Michelle Frantom
School of Art
Curtin University of Technology
Truth to Image - Making Archetypes Visible
This paper assigns and examines a specific context for the imagination and its role in the human psyche. Instead of dismissing imaginal wanderings as fantasy it proposes that images appearing to the imagination not only have meaning but the ability to effect change on a deeply psychic level. Winquist states that ‘imaginal elaboration’ can ‘alter the texture of consciousness’ because ‘representability’ allows symbols to be transposed into thinking.
As a derivative of Jungian theory, Imaginal Psychology is concerned with both archetypes and visual images. According to Hillman, all archetypes reside in the collective unconscious. They can be expressed as images and are seen only through imaginal experience. An archetype is also an idea and can therefore be expressed as both an image and a concept. If this is so, how do visual image and concept relate to each other and how do we negotiate the territory between them?
My research dwells in the liminal zone of the imagination, the margin between the two creative disciplines of Imaginal Psychology and visual art. It upholds the image as a way of providing insight into our relationship with place and explores how we can make ‘archetypes of the unconscious visible’ through art practice.
Lynette Frey
Murdoch University
Lucy Hopkins
University of Western Sydney
Enunciations: A Generative Exchange
Roland Barthes once described “the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical.” This paper will interrogate the notion of voice and the complex interactions between different registers of expression: personal, public, academic and disciplinary. Writing a collaborative paper through an email exchange, we hope to play out the slippages and border-crossings between personal and academic languages, to explore the possibilities for enunciation, disclosure and meaning-making that writing in different registers might provide.
Susanne Gannon suggests that the generation of knowledge through writing is necessarily linked to an imaginative excursion into the space of the Other. By engaging in a generative, unstructured written exchange, we hope to perform an embodied sort of writing which, in its very orientation as a epistolary exchange, is an invitation to respond, rather than a closed statement: a reciprocal act of thinking and writing across the spaces of otherness.
Our investigation turns, finally, on an ethical provocation: what might it mean to invest the personal written form with academic significance? And what problems might be associated with this sort of authorial intentionality, since we've identified a theoretical agenda even before we've embarked on our exchange?
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Caleb Goods
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Working our Way Out of a Crisis: The 'Green Jobs' Solution
The world and its political leaders are currently grappling with two crises of global scale and importance, the first is a global economic crisis and the second in the destruction of the global environment. The connection between the economic sphere and ecological sustainability is becoming evident as public policy and debate willingly advance economic policies that also seemingly promote environmental sustainability. The connection between the economic and ecological is consequently becoming an integral aspect of sociological research and inquiry as ecological issues increasingly impact on state policy, economic relations and electoral politics. This presentation will seek to understand this growing interconnection via the concept of green jobs, which are being promoted by governments, businesses and organised labour as a central solution to both the economic and ecological crises. The concept of a green job, although widely used, has not been adequately defined and so often remains very ambiguous. Therefore the focus of this presentation will be to scrutinise the elusive nature of the concept by unpacking the broad notion of a green job, examining whether or not a green job is truly definable and how the concept of a green job fits within the boundaries of the contested resolution of two critical issues confronting the modern world.
Ellen Greenham
School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Murdoch University
Watching the Universe – Watching Me
When we look to the edge of the universe, do we see god? An empty void? Ourselves, looking back? Or simply more of the same? For millennia humankind has looked up in wonder to the darkness above, beyond their terrestrial reach, to dream of what lay in the depths of the night sky. As human culture and society developed, so too did a view of the universe as machine, an eternal mechanism put in place by an intelligent external other and set in motion. In time, such cosmology was accepted as religious canon and remained in place for centuries until challenged by Copernicus in 1543. What he began, was a scientific dialogue that continues today, a search for what it is, this universe we live in. This paper will examine the quest for the margins of the universe in the fiction of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert and H.P. Lovecraft, who dared to look beyond the dogma of the past to possibilities for the future where its margins can be rewritten and relocated, the effect of which will resonate back to the centre from where that question is asked, back to human consciousness.
Jane Grellier
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Joy Denise Scott
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Wild Minds Searching – Early Scholars Groping in the Gap
This presentation continues from our earlier co-constructed narrative in which we articulated our struggle as beginning researchers to become authentic, ethical autoethnographers. A year later, we now find ourselves groping in the gap between self and other, seeking to understand the nature of this place and of our positionality in it. Through a multivoiced, multimedia presentation, we will explore the spaces in which we meet, engage with and represent the participants in our ethnographic research. Ours is a tangled, wiry engagement that reveals our vulnerability as we pursue open rather than closed relationships, and write narratives that reveal the personal lived experiences of ourselves and others.
As apprentice researchers we make the call for a sensitive approach to research writing. We grope with the need to resist the traditional research approach where the researchers always retain the superior position. Fusing Michelle Fine’s concept of ‘working the hyphen’ with Eastern and Western art, mythologies and modern cultural artefacts, we will grope in the margins and the centres, the spaces and the presences, and the possibilities offered by Eastern dialectics to help dissolve the Western dualism of Self and Other.
Amy Griffiths
College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales
A Matter of Space- Issues of Available Space Regarding Artist Run Initiatives in NSW
Affordable and human supportable exhibition and studio space is and has been a constant struggle for the inner city artist. The rising costs of rental properties and the re-development of existing space into gentrified residential zones is a battle that is constantly fought between the developers, councils, residents and artists.
As Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg outline in There Goes the Neighbourhood, a reader on the politics of space, gentrification has never been so fashionable. The term gentrification was first used by Sociologist Ruth Glass to describe people from wealthier backgrounds moving into inner city working class suburbs, such as the suburb of Islington in London, in 1964. Today the definition is used to describe the same phenomenon but on a global scale. Artists are intrinsically involved in playing a direct role in stimulating gentrification through creating the desirable and bohemian community caused by artists living and working in the area. Artists are the avante- garde of gentrification, explains Lucas Ilhein, a member of the controversial artist run initiative (ARI) Squatspace. David Ley, a researcher and theorist on gentrification and social geography, states that gentrification instigated by artists involves the exact same trajectory as the classic Duchamp transformation of garbage into found objects: the movement of a place, from junk to art and then onto commodity. It’s a catch 22 situation though, as once the gentrified community move into the suburb, it is no longer affordable for those whom created the desirable and fashionable bohemian community originally.
Artists have reacted to lack of available space in a multitude of ways, including finding abandoned properties and ‘squatting’ till forcefully removed, such as in the case of Squatspace in NSW, to grouping together and collectively getting into exorbitant amounts of debt and purchasing a venue, as did the founders of the Red Rattler in Sydney’s Marrickville.
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Richard Hammersley
Murdoch University
THE Epistemology of Addiction Theory: Explaining Paradigmatic and Professional Tension in the Australian (and International) Drug and Alcohol Treatment Sector
The phenomenon called “drug addiction” is a plural and multifaceted social malady. That is, there is not such a thing as “drug addiction” but rather “drug addictions” – different blends of biological, familial, social, cultural, psychological, emotional, existential, and perhaps even genetic anomalies occurring in differing proportions and modes within and without a plethora of “addicted subjects”. Hence, what is an appropriate and effective treatment for one “addicted” individual is not necessarily appropriate or effective for another. Thus, any optimal macro and/or micro strategy in dealing with this serious social problem would necessarily involve a concerted and creative application of all available treatment paradigms and techniques. However, each individual professional paradigm (and indeed subparadigm) within the Australian drug and alcohol treatment industry tends to be searching for, or promoting, a singular “silver bullet” treatment for “drug addiction” as conceived as a homogenous phenomenon with a unitary underlying cause. That is, each paradigm, due to the constraints of its own theory of knowledge, conceives a partial or even specific aspect of this diverse and complex malady as being the overarching “truth” about “drug addiction”. As a result, each paradigm, viewing itself as a receptacle of truth, regards its own account of, and treatment for, “drug addiction” as the correct one. This, in my experience, has led to much theoretical tension, practical conflict and professional schisms within the drug and alcohol treatment industry (and even within specific institutions) that compromise the possibility of a collaborative sector-wide approach. Hence, for this paradigmatic tension to be eased and a consensus to be forged, paving the way for a more collaborative culture and treatment approach within this sector, the underlying epistemological incommensurability (and resonance) between these treatment paradigms must be critically analysed and articulated. It is the objective of this research undertaking to affect such a critical inquiry, disclosure and analyses with a view to not only explain the theoretical dissonance between conflicting paradigms but also to demonstrate theoretical convergence between seemingly dissociative paradigms.
Roger Horton
Murdoch University
Tapping on the Touchstone of Recognition/Why Memory is Critical to Adaptation
In a practice-led research project in Creative Writing, I am exploring issues involved in Adaptation. I aim to develop a model of adaptation for the process of adapting one form of writing to another.
The project requires production of several pieces of writing, all based in some manner on the same narrative concept. For this project they include a novella, a stage musical, and a feature length film script. The creative work will provide the foundation for a critical study of the process of adaptation, and formation of a practical model.
It seems that memory, the recognition of previously encountered images (written, spoken, visual), is a crucial element for adaptation to be possible. Some aspect of the original piece of writing must be echoed in the new product for adaptation to succeed.
Memory and recognition need somehow to accord in the minds of writer and audience for effective adaptation to occur. Tapping on the touchstone of recognition encourages desire in the audience for a new presentation of a story it already knows.
The possibilities of creative adaptation are potentially infinite, apparently lying along the margins of memory.
Christina Houen
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Re-authoring Lives: How a Multi-media Performance of Life Narratives in a Regional Community Transcends the Given and Creates New Ways of Being
My paper tells the story of a creative writing project in regional WA, one in which women’s secret lives are shared and woven into a narrative. This collaboration attracts funding and culminates in a multi-media performance at the community arts festival, with transformative effects for the participants and, reportedly, for many in the audience. Interviews with participants and facilitator will be drawn on to explore how such a venture can change lives and touch a whole community, with the potential to become a model for other regional communities to create new myths to live by.
I interpret the unravelling and re-weaving process of the production in Deleuzian terms, as a rhizomatic proliferation of desire, folding, unfolding and refolding selves in different, fluid shapes, enabling ordinary people to transcend the conventions and limitations of their lives and become different, more self-creating than other-created. This links with the work of life writing in contemporary society: to re-author lives through self-storying and creative performance.
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Matthew Jackson
Edith Cowan University
The emancipatory role of art in blurring gender boundaries
Both my art practice and theoretical research focus on issues of gender identity, primarily the fluid space between gender’s traditional binary concepts of masculine and feminine. My position as a creative practitioner finds me engaging with both art as an aesthetic process and also as an emancipatory tool, through which change can be made to outdated rigid perceptions of gender identity.
Approaching these concepts reflexively requires an embracing of a certain ambiguity when representing gender in the visual arts, as a binary approach can limit the artist’s capacity to present an image of gender that is ostensibly in constant flux. To explore authentic gender ontology in visual art, it is necessary to acknowledge existing boundaries, as they play an essential foundational role in identity positioning. However, it is doubly important to endeavour to cross these boundaries in order to represent valid aspects of fluid gendered identity.
Using the theories of Nicholas Bourriaud on the role of relational aesthetics in art and politics and Queer theorist Nayland Blake’s suggestion of re-coding existing paradigmal representation, I position art’s role as both an aesthetic arena and an integral socio-political mechanism in re-framing gender identity.
EunJeong Jeon
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Emotional Object Creation: “Doing though knowing” “Doing though experiencing”
This paper presents our understanding of bodily aspects of human-to-object interactions. The main aim of the research is to develop concepts and design principles of movement-based interaction for inducing emotion, focusing on wool clothing as an interactive object.
In this sense, there are two design approaches as method. Firstly, it is theory-based research on “doing though knowing,” which describes how action (body movement) and emotion are integrated and how they are communicated by focusing on clothing as an interactive object. Second approach is practice-based research on “doing through experiencing,” which explains how the body has its own kind of knowing - consciously or unconsciously - which may be tapped into for new levels of understanding and through the related manipulation of garments. It includes how objects are created and appreciated in practice with serendipity, which involves planned insight coupled with unplanned events.
The paper concludes by describing some outcomes of a design prototyping activity within the context of ‘object playing with movement’ treated as a source of comfort and enjoyment, called shape change “Trans-For-M-otion.”
This research contributes to the interactive design field how designers can incorporate behavioural concerns into their design process. This research has highlighted the potential of design practice, as a trans-disciplinary design approach, in terms of the interrelatedness of design elements between creativity, space and clothing in relation to human behavior and spatial cognition.
Emil Jonescu
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin university of Technology
Mere Contraptions of Psychological Affliction - Short Term Custodial Design is Capricious and Arbitrary: Formulating a Humane and Specialised Architectural Strategy Which Serves the Needs of the Custodian and Those Held
Current Police Custodial Facilities (PCF’s) within the Western Australian Criminal Justice System, perform the unique and specialist function of temporarily detaining or holding suspects. However, due to incompatible architectural strategies and severe deficiency in specialist literature and insufficient specific architectural research, current PCF’s essentially continue to reflect out-dated early prison architecture and theory which are based upon entirely different parameters and have separate functions. This spatial incongruity clearly suggests a continuance, of inadequate knowledge relating to architectural relationships and theories, and in addition, a lack of critical consideration of the requirements for an appropriate and specialised spatial design strategy to inform the most appropriate architecture for PCF’s.
In this work in progress paper I will show how current Police Custodial Facility design in Western Australia, is architecturally incompatible to the functional requirements placed upon it through police policy and procedure. As a prelude to this I will show how I have explored early police history as a possible precursor, attributing to what appears to be a sub-standard architectural component within the Criminal Justice System.
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Helena Kadmos
School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Murdoch University
Unearthing the Mother: A Search for the Mother’s Narrative Voice
The mother’s voice is underrepresented in literature. She has been a silent figure, always present, often near, featuring in the story of another, but rarely the focus of the story. The mother has been spoken for, about and around, but rarely has she been credited with the wherewithal to speak for herself.
The mother’s story, in narrative fiction and memoir, must be valued and available alongside theoretical discourses around motherhood. The lived reality of motherhood refuses to be contained within the limits of any one theory or ideology. Narrative offers the ability to hold the complexities and ambiguities experienced in motherhood; to listen to the mother’s story without the urge to further theorize it.
This paper outlines a search the mother’s voice, theoretically and creatively. The “cave”, traditionally a metaphor for restriction and ignorance in western discourses, is re-interpreted as a positive concept with which to view some experiences of mothering, which can be isolating and physically restricting, while at the same time personally transforming. The cave provides a tool to help negotiate creatively the blurred boundaries between the theory and lived realities of motherhood, informing both the reading and writing of motherhood.
Penelope Kennish
School of Education
Curtin University of Technology
Senior School Student Engagement in Classroom Learning
Student engagement in classroom learning has taken on increasing importance in Western Australia since the passing of legislation to raise the school leaving age to 17 years by 2008. There are now more students retained at schools in Years Eleven and Twelve than previously. Engaging these students in learning is of the upmost importance for secondary schools.
This paper presents a hypothesised model of student engagement in classroom learning that is based on the principles of Flow Theory, i.e. a person achieves the state of flow when there is a match in high skills and high challenges. The hypothesised model proposes that student engagement exists when there is a balance between student learning capabilities (skills) and the expectations of student learning (challenges). The research sought to determine which items that comprise the student engagement in classroom learning were the most difficult and easiest to identify in Year Ten and Eleven students. It also sought to determine whether gender; school year; subject; and whether favourite or least favourite subject accounted for variance in scores. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Thor Kerr
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Negotiating Green Building at the Margins
Green buildings are represented as performing better than standard buildings in terms of mitigating climate change and other ecological threats. Green buildings are connoted in many parts of the world by rating symbols, such as Green Star in Australia. The legitimacy of these rating symbols is contingent upon negotiations within expert networks made up of representatives of industry, government and academia as well as subsequent successful market take-up and public relations. In the same way that these symbols are negotiated, so are individual green buildings at the margins of building industry discourse through a process in which property developers set out to achieve corporate objectives through negotiations with investors, tenants, architects, engineers, contractors, rating agencies, local authorities and communities around the building site.
I will present a method for analyzing the negotiation of green building at the margin where building industry discourse meets local community discourse based on the identification of discursive mechanisms operating in texts around the contested North Port Quay development project in Fremantle.
Maryam Khalid
University of New South Wales
Gendering Orientalism in the War on Terror
Drawing on my PhD research, my paper explore how representations of men and women in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse are manipulated and deployed to justify military interventions, for example in Afghanistan and Iraq. Examining mainstream images and texts, I interrogate the ways in which the War on Terror has been constructed using Orientalist and gendered representations of the ‘other’. Mainstream International Relations (IR) scholars have generally obscured the operation of gender and race in the international political arena. I find myself at the margins of IR (as discipline and as practice) as I position myself against accepted ways of approaching knowledge in this context – against approaches that take for granted assumptions of neutrality and ignore IR’s use of Orientalist and gendered knowledge. I intend to interrogate and unpick the fields of knowledge that obscure gendered and racialised politics at play in representations of men, women, masculinity and femininity in the War on Terror. I use Orientalism as a critical tool, reconfiguring the theory by reading gender into the ways in which Orientalist knowledge is produced and deployed in the US context. Manoeuvring between the competing interests of Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism, I hope my research will help to challenge and unravel these Orientalist and gendered representations.
Natalie Kon-Yu
Murdoch University
Mixing Memory with the Desire to Forget
This paper will examine what happens when characters in realist texts refuse to disclose those details of their past that may bear relevance to their present circumstances. What might readers take from a text in which the characters simply refuse to remember?
Rather than simply being used as a method for recuperating the past, I will argue that characters’ memories can be written as incomplete, contradictory and full of omissions. I will suggest that rather than using memories or the act of remembering to recuperate the past, a writer can encourage the reader to reflect upon why certain narratives cannot be told with the familiar trajectory of revelation and reconciliation. Within my own creative text, my protagonists’ refusal to remember the past in any complete sense suggests the ways in which their own histories define them; and their desire to forget, rather than to remember, indicates that their histories actively determine their behaviour. I will suggest that alternative approaches to remembering the past might highlight how revelation and closure within the realist text can preclude the probing of some subtle and significant questions about narrating and making sense of the past.
Svenja Johni Kratz
Queensland University of Technology
Lines of Flight: Cell Culture, Tissue Therapies and Contemporary Art
The proposed presentation will provide an overview the PhD study Evolutionary Transgressions: Mapping Becoming through Contemporary Arts Practice - a practice-based project that uses cell and tissue culture to investigate the flows between different biological bodies and systems of knowledge.
Discussion will centre on two recent creative works, The Absence of Alice, a multi-medium exhibition based on the experience of working with human and insect cell lines, and The Human Skin Equivalent/Experience Project, a collaborative study involving the creation of personal jewellery pieces incorporating human skin equivalent models - three dimensional skin substitutes created from human skin and hair follicle cells.
The presentation will also address the methodological and ethical issues that arise when working across different disciplines including: reconciling artistic and scientific methods of inquiry, the use of human cells and tissues in the creation of artworks, as well as the logistical problems involved in obtaining ethical clearance for projects that fall outside established University guidelines.
Yen-Ruey Kuo
Faculty of Science and Engineering,
Curtin University of Technology
Students’ Multiple Representations and Motivation for Learning University Physics
This case study was conducted with first year students who were enrolled in non-major Physics units in a university in Australia. Two questionnaires on the topic of Thermal Physics and Optics, respectively, were designed for assessing students’ conceptual understanding of the way in which multiple representations were used to explain the concepts. Students also responded to a Physics Motivation Survey to gain an understanding of their motivation for and interest in studying Physics. The data for the first stage of the study are now being analysed. Students’ motivation for and interest in studying Physics was lower than comparable group that have responded to the instrument previously. The questionnaires that assess students’ understanding of multiple representations in Physics showed how a large number of students were unable to present their knowledge more than one representation. The second stage of the study (which is not described here) is engage students in using more than one representation in their understanding of Physics.
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Liam Lynch
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Unseamlessly Reconciled: Oscar Wilde’s Irish Context
When Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) is discussed, several predictable themes associated with his life and times tend to emphasised. From the importance of his sexuality and his incarceration because of his homosexuality to present day attitudes to the influence of his eccentric behaviour and celebrity status on consumerism and the media values of today, debate about Wilde focuses on what can be seen as ‘the usual aspects’. More recently there has been some critical work which emphasises the importance of Wilde’s oeuvre to fin de siecle artistic thought and understanding. In most readings of his life and work, however, little serious attention has been given to the Irish influence underpinning Wilde’s creative and philosophical development. When it is indicated, Wilde’s Irish context is introduced as an interesting periphery or he is seen as contributing greatly to the cause of Irish independence. Citing from all the genres in which he wrote and using Bakhtin and Bourdieu to interrogate Wilde and some of his life events, the present paper will attempt to describe Wilde’s ‘Irish habitus’ and the way this is a dynamic force influencing his creative and philosophical development. The paper will also depict Oscar Wilde as a figure that was not so much comfortably assimilated or ‘seamlessly reconciled’ with a historical cause, but was instead thrown open because he bordered Irish/English socio-ideological positioning.
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Lara Mackintosh
School of Engineering and Energy
Murdoch University
Too Cool for School: Investigating Strategies to Improve the Sustainability of Existing Government Primary Schools in Perth, Western Australia
Addressing the issue of sustainability in schools is complex and multifaceted. Current approaches taken range from introducing sustainability into the curriculum, to initiating sustainable activities within the school community, and providing sustainable educational facilities that incorporate ESD (Environmentally Sustainable Design) principles. It is the aim of this paper to address the provision of sustainable educational facilities through the investigation of current design practice for primary schools in Perth. In doing so, it challenges the belief that existing school buildings are unsuitable and require replacement, and identifies action that can be taken to improve existing facilities sustainably.
This paper focuses on primary schools as this is where we begin to value both the natural and the built environment through learning and play. Improving sustainability is taken to mean reducing the environmental impact due to the use and operation of school facilities, primarily through energy used to heat, cool and light rooms, while providing an environment that promotes positive educational outcomes and support health and wellbeing. Government facilities are investigated as these are often constructed to an established standard pattern. There are around 100 ‘standard pattern’ primary schools currently in Perth, and the potential benefit of improving their use and operation is shown to be significant in each of the recognised three pillars of sustainability – economic, social and environmental.
One of the outcomes of this paper, which is part of a dissertation completed for a Masters of Science in Environmental Architecture, is the recognition that the key element of this improvement is acknowledging the role of the users, namely teachers and administrators, in the operation and management of school buildings.
Neil MacNeill
School of Education
Curtin University of Technology
The E-interview: A Twenty First Century Approach to School-Based Data Collection
The qualitative interview is a time-consuming process, and in school environments it has become more difficult to obtain quality interview time with school administrators and teachers due to an increasing number of organisational factors. The impact of New Public Management, with its emphasis on managerialist concepts of efficiency, has changed the nature of schools in the past two decades, making the use of time an accountable variable for school administration. For the qualitative interviewer, asynchronous internet and other digital communication technologies offer solutions to both the temporal and methodological issues faced by researchers, when all parties are digitally connected.
A key issue for the researcher during any interview is the problem of how best to represent the respondents’ responses. In the audio recording of interviews there is a temptation for the researcher to write an authentic representation of the colloquial speech of respondents. While it can be argued that this is a true account of what was said, it may demean the respondents. An advantage of the e-interview is that both parties can review the written (emailed) text as it passes back and forth between the interviewer and interviewee, and make corrections if they are needed. Additionally, the spell check and grammar check alert respondents to errors in their responses.
It is argued that when dealing with literate respondents, in purposive samples, the e-interview facilitates more considered, valid responses to the questions in the interview process.
Bryan J Mather
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
“Thinking Computers” are an oxymoron.
Our physical world is in a continuous process of translation and interpretation by algorithms into a new digital reality; we are creating a simulacrum composed of electronic ones and zeros that exists without place, intangible and abstract. With algorithmic human-machine interfaces, our sensory experiences and thoughts are translated into digital text, digital photographs, TV and video.
Extending the ideas that we are constrained to a reality that exists in language, this paper proposes the digital reality we create is also constrained by the computer languages we use to speak it into existence.
Using language as the common thread, a parallel will be drawn between this translation in humans, and translation by computers. This paper uses a cross-disciplinary approach to the question; “Algorithm” is part of the computer science vocabulary, “Language” is part of the vocabulary of linguistics within humanities, “Mind” and “Intelligent Behaviour” is part of “the process of thought”, and placed within cognitive psychology.
Helen McCarthy
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Backboards to Blackboards: Rebounding from the Margins
This interpretivist autoethnographic doctoral study evolved from being professionally and personally involved since the 1980’s in Aboriginal education, and listening to many Aboriginal parents and teachers frequently talk about the irrelevance of Western systems of education for their children. The relationship between the teacher and the taught in their view ought to be organic, engaging and personal. Yet the configuration between Western imperatives of education and the culturally relevant educational goals of Indigenous peoples continues to be an instrument of discord.
In this paper I discuss my involvement with a group of “at risk” Aboriginal girls attending a metropolitan secondary Aboriginal College involved in a specific project known as the Girl’s Academy. This story tells what happened when a group of educational and sporting professionals, developed an alternative, emergent curriculum framework known as the Yorgas Program. This culturally intuitive program encouraged the girls to become engaged within the school leading to the unimaginable: my findings indicate that the “at risk” girls committed to their learning began to attend classes regularly significantly improving their social, physical and cognitive behaviours, resulting in them staying at school and becoming Year 12 graduates.
Ehsan Milani
Department of Media and Communications
Macquarie University
Web of Public Sphericules: News Discussions and Margins of Deliberation
Internet and public sphere has reinvigorated the old notions of political participation and public opinion. The main discussion has been either to conceive the cyber space as an equivalent to public sphere or to compare values of Habermasian public sphere to online deliberations. Introduction of Web2.0 and popularity of user generated content in various news dissemination websites has created a new margin for analysis. In this paper I am arguing that this phase in diffusion of information is presenting a landscape for new research on public opinion and fundamentals of deliberation among the Netizens. By focusing on news forums in BBC’s “Have Your Say” I am presenting an analysis of intervening discourses in news discussions that has led to evolution of a matrix of thought in a web of public sphericules that present a direction in CMC and online deliberative discourses.
Jacqui Monks
Edith Cowan University
Merging Theory and Practice: Examining the Reality of Self Through a Visual Praxis
In this presentation, I will explore the relationship between the internal, subjective self to the collective whole, and how it moves the creative researcher from the subjective margin of artistic practice, to the broader social world. I will outline the merging of theory and practice – or ‘praxis’ – as a methodology in which to ground a visual art practice. I will also discuss the role of reflexivity as an essential component of praxis in relation to the social world
I will assert that by employing the use of a reflexive praxis, the researcher is given a tool by which to monitor their own subjectivities as they are determined (or mediated) by the social constructs of their world. In this way, the researcher is able to track their own mediation within the social field, and thus, their own potential biases. In doing so, the researcher is perhaps better able to recognise both the limitations of their own point of view, and how those limitations might influence the outcome of their work.
My praxis in the area of the reality of self will be discussed as a model in which reflexive praxis as a research method has been employed.
Des Moon
Faculty of Education and Arts
Edith Cowan University
Patterns and Processes of Invasion: The Dispersion of Introduced Avian Species in Southwestern Australia
Since European settlement the Southwest of Western Australia has become the most intensely settled region of the State. Historically its economy has relied on primary industries such as mining, forestry, farming and agriculture. The development of which has required extensive clearing of native vegetation resulting in habitat loss and alteration of the natural environment. Threats to the highly endemic regional environment have caused it to recently be identified as a ‘biodiversity hotspot’. A further threat to the region is invasion of the remaining biota by exotic plants and animals. The aim of this study is to investigate instances of avian invasion which have occurred in association to the influence of geographic and anthropogenic factors on colonisation success and the subsequent dispersion of species. The methodology was designed to support the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and utilises sightings data from several sources. Spatial-autocorrelation analyses were conducted and maps depicting dispersion in association to a range of factors were produced. Differences between patterns of spread are evident, despite some invaders sharing a similar ecology to others. The study augments existing knowledge of biological invasions and the methodology can be applied to other species and areas.
Yaya Mori
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Towards the Retrieval of the Political Public Realm: Truth, Knowledge and Doxa in the Reign of Modern Natural Science
Absolute truth… cannot exist for mortals.
For mortals, the important thing is
to make doxa truthful…
(Arendt 1990:84)
In order to seek creative revisioning, coming up with new and innovative ideas are not the only ways to carve out the edges of our disciplinary fields. This presentation, rather than proposing pioneering ideas and thoughts, explores the hiatus which modern intellectual history has left behind. The spectacular rise of natural science has had immense impacts on our perspectives of the world, but at the expense of dislocating the ancient understanding of truth and certainty. I argue that its consequence was a tremendous decline of the political public realm where truth had been confirmed with the certainty of human senses. Hannah Arendt, one of the most controversial political philosophers, contends that truth and certainty are no longer revelatory nor communicative but understood by way of introspection. This presentation scrutinizes “how” the development of natural science has overturned the old understanding of truth, in particular, positivism’s relation with our making activity. It concludes with the Socratic solution of doxa to truth. By examining the key intellectual foundation that absorbs contemporary researchers, the paper aims to reengage us with the understanding of the way we have hitherto investigated the world so that truth might be approached by alternative canons.
Alison Muir
College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales
What Do Recycled Water and a Kimono Have in Common?
In the 21st century textiles are being used in creative practice to project a voice in the World, to inform on issues of importance using everyday artefacts.
'fresh and salt: messages in stitched textiles' was an exhibition of 12 stitched textile banners which used the combination of image and text as defined by W. J. T. Mitchell's The Picture Theory to transform scientific advice into information design about fresh and salt water. The public art project simultaneously reflected on the deep ecology of water, recycling and the water cycle.
Audience feedback was collected using a questionnaire from 3 exhibitions of the 12 stitched textiles banners of differing demographics within the Sydney Basin across a 9 month period.
This paper documents the serendipitous results of the qualitative and quantitative analysis and the audience response to the ability of the textile medium to deliver the subtle nuances of an environmental message.
‘Great to see people using recycled materials as the source of their art. We need to, as artists, become sustainable and aware of our wastefulness’ was a consistent message from the audience of 'fresh and salt: messages in stitched textiles'
Alexandra Myer
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Rock Scissors Paper: Games for Social Change
With the emergence of new technologies and new virtual spaces our society has become part of a computer-mediated world. Children are growing up in this society learning new media literacies and moving seamlessly between online and offline worlds. The world of digital games and experiences they allow form the basis of my research.
A great deal of attention has been given to digital games as being extremely violent, overtly sexual, and incredibly competitive. My research takes these concerns and asks how might we embed socially responsible themes and issues such as tolerance and cooperation in games that children play? I will be engaging in the creative practice of designing and creating a computer game and will investigate how the game design communicates positive social values and current world issues.
Through the creative practice of designing and producing a computer game I hope to present new systems of representation that focus on positive values and attitudes.
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S Zaung Nau
CUSP
Curtin University of Technology
Public Transport Demand Model Based on Social-Economic Factors, Urban Form and Public Transport Connectivity in Perth, Western Australia
The main objective of the proposed research is to use a unique combination of urban form, socio-economic, “Vulnerability assessment for mortgage, petrol and inflation risks and expenditure” (VAMPIRE) index and public transport system accessibility and service quality data to create the mathematical model which explains the public transport usage in Perth based on travel patterns over the July 2008-June 2009 and explore its explanatory power with June 2009-July 2010 data. To provide better public transport services to Perth residents, it is very important to understand their travel patterns of public transport usage based on the revealed preference approach with actual trip datasets and their relationships with their socio-economic factors, urban form and public transport accessibility which influence their decision making about public transport.
The policy implications of the findings will also be explored and the application of the model developed to other cities will also be analysed. The developed knowledge on these relationships and the model produced will be an addition to academic understanding of demand for public transport. It will also contribute policy-relevant information for Perth in the field of urban and transport planning, which will inform the provision of better public transport services based on changing social economic factors. Indirectly this knowledge will assist in reducing.
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Michael Openshaw
School of Education
Curtin University of Technology
Technology for the Future: The Use of Online Discussion Fora to Support Learners’ Cognitive Organisation
This conference paper examines the theory of cognitive organisation and the use of online discussion fora in a secondary high school setting. The theory of cognitive organisation is delineated through an expose of its key elements and an introduction to the Diagnostic Framework created in order to map cognitive organisation in individual learners. The mapping of learners’ cognitive organisation occurred in a high school setting. Participants engaged in the use of online discussion fora and their online discussion comments were collected as data to map against the Diagnostic Framework. A qualitative content analysis was used as the major research strategy. This conference paper offers a new critical approach for understanding cognitive organisation and a new perspective on the use of online discussion fora in high school education.
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John Pratt
Edith Cowan University
Beyond Stage Realism and TV Reality
The introduction of the screen to the stage opened all sorts of doors into all sorts of places. Getting free of the shackles of realism in both media was like walking into a whole new dimension. The possibilities of what the combination offered seemed endless. The juxtaposition of what was taking place on the screen with the action on stage becomes a comment in itself. What Joan Littlewood achieved in Oh What a Lovely War (1963) with the use of teletype statistics of war deaths and casualties crossing the back of the stage while Pierrots sang jolly jingoistic popular songs of the time was the prototype on which I based the use of the large plasma screen in Inside Out. The fourth wall and the walls between different media did not exactly crumble but they were no longer impermeable. They did not need to be disassembled in order to pass through them. ‘Reality’ no longer mattered and therefore became malleable. A character from one medium could easily transfer to the other. A dead character does not have to become a ghost in order to speak to the living.
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Anja Reid
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Cultural Patina, Diplomacy and Symbolic Appropriation: Philatelically Negotiating Identity(s)
This paper concerns the diplomatic negotiation of identity(s) through strategic symbolic appropriation on postage stamps. The international reach of philately creates opportunities for alternative methods of reinforcing identity(s) as well as influencing how those identity(s) may be defined and/or defended within and between regions. In order to invoke the concept of cultural patina I draw upon Shibashis Chatterjee’s definition of a region as a “theatre of operations—past, present and future”. Cultural patina as metaphor engenders the more complex processes of identity formation, enabling recognition of the tensions and challenges for symbolic appropriation and the resurfacing of certain elements. The reactions with and between internal and external elements over time may disguise, even disfigure original cultural features without necessarily obliterating them. To demonstrate how the creative margins of diplomatic, historical and cultural significance may fudge identity-making I will analyse one Japanese stamp and one Mongolian souvenir sheet, each issued to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Japanese-Mongolian diplomatic relations. When designed and issued to cement neighbourly relations, certain philatelic symbols appropriated as political propaganda have the potential to stimulate antagonism or alternative views of a people and their state institutions by others.
Diana Roberts
School of Art and Design
Curtin University of Technology
Changing Places: Positioning Regional Art Practice in a Global Context
In recent decades art history has developed its methodologies to embrace new forms and fields of inquiry. These trends were affirmed at an international congress in the history of art held in Melbourne in 2008. Linear narratives of style and the avant-garde set in Europe and North America are no longer privileged. Increasingly art historians are adopting methodologies from other disciplines, such as ethnography and anthropology to discuss creative practices in what were considered the ‘margins’.
This paper will consider a ‘creative margin’ – contemporary regional art practice in the South West of Western Australia – by discussing the work of two regionally-based artists, Tony Windberg and Katherine Hall. Tony Windberg moved to Northcliffe in 2005, and his work has become increasingly influenced by his new environment. Conversely, Gracetown artist Katherine Hall draws inspiration from first-hand encounters with Indigenous culture in the Kimberley, and a fly-in-fly-out job on the North West shelf of Australia.
Methodologies embracing local and global perspectives enable art history to reflect on multiplicity and simultaneity. In the light of these new trends, I will look at how Windberg and Hall respond to their own situation, and work across boundaries. Challenging the concept of ‘creative margin’, I will position regional art practice in a global context.
Matt Roberts
Edith Cowan University
Marginal stories don’t exist
In this paper I will explore the value in writing about a family on the East Coast of South Africa sixty years ago. This is just one example of a marginal story – but it reverberates more widely with the value of the marginal story. These stories do not have any direct relationship to the majority of people’s lives. So why do some people have connections with these kinds of stories? Is it because these readers are compassionate? Is there something condescending in that? It is similar to the apparently benign racism that leads to a patronisation of the ‘other’. Marginal stories have a value in their own right without us having to give them space.
These stories appeal to people because most of us experience a feeling of being marginalised. The mainstream presents us with how we would like our lives to be, but it is the marginal story that connects us through the idea of what it is to be human.
That these stories are so far removed from our lives – but have such resonance – gives them power. It allows for a paradox to exist because they are both marginal and universal. Would they have the same impact were they to become the mainstream? What place would there then be for the unattainable capitalist idea of where we are meant to be?
Janean Robinson
Murdoch University
Helen Ferrara
Murdoch University
Classrooms without Borders: Socially Democratic and Creative Spaces
Using a dialogic approach, this presentation has at its core the purpose to engage with the creative spaces that classrooms can be: open, democratic, puzzling, curious and inviting to all. This is in contrast to what is presently the situation for many sixteen year olds in 21st century public schooling where voices are often silenced. The spaces for such voices are often restricted not because they are deviant, corrupt or defiant, but because they do not conform to codes of conduct based on uniformity and compliance. When a classroom can be ‘dialogic' it opens up spaces for people to bind together and feel a sense of belonging. There is no need to compete for confirmation of the 'self' if there is enough room for acceptance.
But what does it actually feel like to be in such an open space? The audience of this collaborative presentation will be invited to participate in a role play of both types of classroom.
Melissa Russell
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Sade’s “Other”: The Religious in Sade’s Ethics
The presentation will describe the religious elements of the ethics of the Marquis de Sade. Sade, who is (in)famous for the controversial and pornographic, as well as philosophical, content of his novels, is known as one of history’s most notorious atheists. However, when considering his philosophy, and particularly the ethical system underlying it, Sade’s atheism is problematic. Sade is not usually considered an ethicist, yet some thinkers, notably Jacques Lacan, have recognised a system of ethics in his work. However, it is not the fact that Sade possesses an ethics that is of importance to this presentation, but the insights that this can provide about his relationship to the religious. Like his philosophy, his ethics rest upon the transgression of social, cultural and moral norms, especially those grounded in religion. In essence, they are an ethics of evil, entirely dependent upon the “other,” which, to make the very transgression of sinning possible, is God. Sade’s ethics are committed to challenging and outraging God, who is both the target of Sade’s contempt, and the object of his obsession. Therefore, the presentation will argue that Sade’s ethics refer to and respond to the religious, and actively encourage an ongoing dialogue between religion and philosophy, two interconnected disciplines that have shared a contentious relationship since the Enlightenment.
John C. Ryan
School of Communications and Arts
Edith Cowan University.
Palm-like Fingers Holding a Coarse Line of Air: Poetics as a Method of Enquiry into South-west Australian Flora
Photographs and paintings capture single-instance idealized images of plant form and colour. Botanical illustration further tends to extrude the plant from its habitat and its seasonality, whilst dissecting the plant visually and two-dimensionally. Yet, plants as living ecological beings are mutable, and their more- rounded representation necessitates a diachronic and multi-sensory approach. This presentation explores the potential of poetics to represent in greater depth the sensate and ecological dimensions of flora through the researcher’s investigations at regional sites of remarkable botanical diversity. Scholarship by such authors as Leggo on poetics as a qualitative research methodology has revealed the value of poetic process in the social sciences. Poetic enquiry into botany, however, has a long-standing tradition, as illustrated in the works of American naturalist, H.D. Thoreau, and English poet, John Clare. The researcher describes a ‘botanical field aesthetics’ along with the ‘sour fruits’ of conducting enquiry at the nexus of botanical science, philosophical aesthetics, and landscape poetics. He concludes with a short reading of poetry composed at the study sites, recited against optically compelling images of South-west Australian endemic flora.
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Sarah Simpson
Department of Media
Macquarie University
The Screenplay as Philosophy
Traversing, blurring and subverting the conventional margins between the fields of film studies and philosophy, my interdisciplinary doctoral research explores the philosophical significance of the screenplay medium. This paper outlines how my research challenges the screenplay’s tendency to be depreciated and often entirely overlooked in scholarly film circles, particularly within the developing niche area of film-philosophy. I controversially argue that the screenplay possesses uniquely creative, dynamic and hitherto unrecognised capacities for not only illustrating pre-existing philosophical thought, but even for functioning as an original form of genuine philosophy itself.
Employing screenwriting exemplars, this paper investigates how the screenplay possesses specific tools, mechanisms and exciting opportunities for conducting philosophy beyond those offered by the orthodox philosophical text. Thus I highlight how my research questions and broadens traditional critical conceptions of what constitutes legitimate philosophical practice. Within this paper I illustrate how the screenplay can creatively construct a vivid form of philosophical argument or reflection and thought experiment. I additionally consider how the screenplay can contribute to generating philosophical effects/meaning within the filmic image, and how viewing film can complete a philosophical process. Overall, my research reveals how in practice film/screenplay studies and philosophy exist in a mutually enhancing and dynamically dialogical, intertwined relationship.
Nicola D Smith
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Creative Individuals Live at the Edge, in the Margins”… Or Do They?
At a time when Governments are promoting innovation as a catalyst for economic growth and encouraging creative industries to move from the margins to the mainstream, are they neglecting to recognise the creativity at work in the everyday lives of the public?
For creative individuals such as design professionals, being ‘at the edge’, ‘in the margins’ and labelled as ‘an outsider’ can often be a badge of honour, a kind of reverence and mark of individuality. But the boundaries are unclear. How do we define creative, and where are these margins – are they really ‘outside’ and far beyond the everyday?
This paper will explore the notion that creativity is at work in the everyday lives of individuals, and that the applications of innovation and ‘design knowledge’ are not the marginal activities of creative ‘experts’ that they so often seem to be. With reference to research studies using design ethnography, this paper will look at what it means to have ‘design knowledge’, and ways in which individuals engage in design activities in the home, often seeking to achieve both mainstream outcomes and uniquely individual solutions.
Julian Stadon
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Project SLARiPS: An Investigation of Mediated Mixed Reality Existence
The paper will address social online engagement in 3D environments, particularly Second Life through the SLARiPS (Second Life Augmented Reality in Physical Space).
The project aims to explore ideologies of post human existence, particularly notions of identity and the authorship of created content in 3D online platforms. This is achieved through the bridging of virtual and physical space, via an augmented reality application that allows for data exchange between it and Second Life.
This paper examines the mixed reality visualisation techniques for SLARiPS and the cultural significance of the outcomes, with particular regards to collaborative creative processes and shared virtual studio spaces.
The paper will also address the trans-disciplinary research collaborations that have been necessary for these processes to occur. Particular focus will be on a recent residency undertaken at HITLab New Zealand as part of my PhD research.
Nathan Stevens
Edith Cowan University
In the Brink: Reflex in the Shared Margins of Artistic Practice and Arts Research
Working concurrently as an interdisciplinary artist and arts researcher, the task of critically positioning one’s practice can be complex. In order to do so, the artist/researcher must continually negotiate the margins of personal and social identity through their practice to locate positions that afford reflexive possibilities.
This paper examines the shared margins of my practice resulting from a dual role as both
interdisciplinary artist and arts researcher. I will analyse how the processes of making art and researching art impact upon one another and how a reflexive methodology is necessary to facilitate productive synergy between art and research. While my artistic practice is currently focused on communicative boundaries within social interaction, my research into the development of a specific attention to sociality within contemporary art facilitates reflexivity within this practice.
Offering a brief analysis of my activities as an artist/researcher through two recent projects, the development of a community run pirate radio station and the facilitation of a collaborative artist residency, I will specifically focus on collaborative approaches and the evolution of the inter-subjective processes involved in these types of artistic activity. The paper discusses how reflexive methods of investigation and/or instigation might function through shared margins of these subjects, in an effort to elucidate the challenges of this specific research.
Samantha Stevenson
School of Social and Cultural Studies
University of Western Australia
Wombing the Situationist International: Recuperating a Forgotten Origin of Postmodern Feminist Ideas
The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a neglected field of study until 1989, when Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century read punk rock and popular art as a response to avant-garde movements such as the Situationist International and Dadaism. Since then publications have centered on ‘recuperating’ the Situationist International to one or another of a particular cultural value, such as post-punk music, art history, architecture, revolutionary or leftist politics, and film or media theory—thereby affixing its value within an exchange of cultural ideas. However, there remains a lack of feminist input and perspective surrounding studies of the Situationist International, and a need to explore feminism within a situationist context. Contemporary poststructuralist and postmodern feminist ideas—such as the spectacularization of the female body, and feminist aesthetic practices—can be situated as an extension and interrogation of the political, artistic and democratic potentials of the Situationist International (such as those explicated in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle), thereby establishing new margins within which to interpret the Situationist International.
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Noparat Tananuraksakul
Centre for International Communication
Faculty of Arts
Macquarie University
The Cool Medium of English and the Message in an Australian Context
The paper addresses an extension of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ and four laws of media to the use of English among non-native English students in an Australian context and the concept of ‘personal security’ as an effect on their feelings. English played ‘a cool medium’ of communication and instruction which contained low definition and required the students to highly participate in daily conversations and class discussion. Without a high degree of participation, they misinterpreted the information, hardly made sense of the world around them and failed to extend their voices inside and outside the classroom. Qualitative findings indicated that the medium of English was the message itself in that it affected the students’ personal security and caused them to encounter ‘World Englishes shock’ and ‘repetition shock’. In addition, McLuhan’s four laws of media crystallised the role of English in the present context.
Neeti Trivedi
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Building Identity: Home for Urban Poor
The paper aims to explore issues related to identity elevation of the urban poor by reinforcing their socio-cultural dimensions through their built form. Identity is the crest in the development of both people and place. Herein the study attempts to create a dialogue between identity and built environment and questions whether identity for the urban poor can be re-created and re-invented by a new approach to the design of built form and would it resolve the issues for urban poor, who are stigmatized and are looked upon as deficient, different and abnormal.
Questions of ‘who we are’ are often intimately related to questions of ‘where we are’. Herein the interrelated dimensional structures of Self-Identity and Place-Identity are systems of defining and expressing the personal identity of the individual in relation to the physical environment. However, acknowledging the presence of multiplicity of identities in relation to self and place, the paper examines approaches used to remove the stigma over Urban Poor by creating a liveable space for them that gives them a sense of ownership leading to social empowerment. Empirical examples and case studies will be discussed.
Mattie Turnbull
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Jasper Jones - an Outsider/Insider
Jasper Jones is the quintessential Outsider. He lives in a small wheatbelt town and he is about 16 years of age. Everyone knows him but they know nothing of him except that he is bad and dangerous. He lives somewhere on the edge of town with a dangerous father who comes and goes for long periods of time. Jasper Jones is left to his own devices: he is trouble – and he’s half Indigenous. Because he is blamed when things go wrong, he is the Outsider. But he is also the Insider because he know who is to blame.
My paper will discuss the ambiguities of the character Jasper Jones, the recent novel written by Craig Silvey. My paper suggest that Jasper Jones, like Mersault in Camus’ Stranger, permits others to define him and to create a social identity for him. Like Mersault, Jasper Jones understands the necessity for their construction of the Outsider, but he doesn’t care.
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George Verghese
Built Environment
Curtin University of Technology
The Margin is the Centre of Design
Out of an existing universe of ideas, what we know constitutes only a small fraction that we bind with margins and call an existing body of knowledge. The boundaries are arbitrary and dependent on a wide variety of factors including but not limited to scientific, psychological, cultural, and sociological. Our concern should not be about locating the margin, but rather to ask, why do designers want to constantly transcend it. Extension across a new threshold is a dangerous yet essential human endeavour, and involves aspects of habitus, potentiality, and the willingness to take risks in design.
The paper will draw from a variety of sources in order to map this terrain, and will refer to the work of Bourdieu and Peirce, as well as other leading designers and design theorists. The paper explores my research question that is focused on new materiality and its relationship to innovative interior design. Examination of the concept of risk in relation to the use of untested materials and their application constitutes design at the margins. However, this is what designers do best — they test the margins, and this testing is central to a designerly way of thinking.
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Yvette Walker
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
Writing the Extreme: The Ethics of Representation in Holocaust Fiction
My creative project, Letters to the End of Love, is an elegiac, epistolary novel that utilises the art of rhetoric in its philosophical investigations of love and suffering. My novel is an imaginative response to the historical traces of the Holocaust that persist in the present day. In the book, two of the central characters (John Carpenter and David Pabst) are witnesses to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp. In my writing so far, some of the most difficult creative decisions I have had to make centre around my representations of such extreme and extraordinary experiences. In this paper I will examine the creative and ethical difficulties I have encountered in writing fictional representations of survivor testimony. This examination will be framed by a discussion of the work of Holocaust theorists Michael Rothberg, Marianne Hirsch, and Robert Eaglestone.
Hilary Wheaton
Faculty of Humanities
Curtin University of Technology
All in the Name of Research: Crossing the Boundary Between Work and Play
Virtual worlds offer a new space for ethnographic study that integrates the researchers role as participant and observer. The necessity to engage in virtual worlds in a style similar to computer gaming, by means of creating/customizing an avatar, mastering the computer controls and learning the social etiquette can sometimes blur the boundary between research and play. By crossing the boundary between researcher and active participant/player can one gain a greater comprehension of the individuals experience of sex and embodiment in the virtual world? This paper explores my study of Second Life and the subculture of 'Furries' in an effort to develop an understanding of sexuality and embodiment in virtual worlds. 'Wearing' the body of a 'Fur' with my avatar, and identifying with the subculture through social participation, I engaged in interactions that were both sincere as a member of the community and also allowed me to achieve my research aims.
The qualitative nature of social science research always engenders risks; amongst other considerations, in this instance, the balance of personal desires and professional motivation for the researcher with privacy and anonymity for the subject. This paper will argue that despite the risks associated with blurring the play/researcher role, with proper ethical application, the benefits are substantial compared to other methodologies.
Katherine Wright
Media and Communications
Macquarie University
Relating to Manicured Nature: A Case Study of the Armidale State Forest
Studies of human relationships to place demand an inter-disciplinary approach that stretches across established binaries of western thought. This paper will provide a case study of the Armidale State Forest (affectionately known by locals as ‘the Pine Forest’) to engage in an inter-species, inter-cultural dialogue that explores the complexities and ambiguities of notions of belonging, emplacement, indigeneity and authenticity.
As a plantation, the Pine Forest raises intriguing questions about the definition of the ‘natural’ world. This analysis contributes to the recently established ecological humanities discipline that seeks to de-centre Cartesian rationality in favour of a more inclusive set of philosophies, and to emphasise connectivity as imperative to inter-subjective dialogues and environmental and social healing.
In this research I welcome ambiguity, seek out plurality, and aim to use place as a way to localise, connect and problematise disparate philosophies that emerge from scholarly work and from Other, often silenced, voices such as Indigenous ecological perspectives. I look to narrative as a way to capture these different voices, and establish place not simply as a setting but as a story-teller in its own right, using a combination of imagery, poetry and critical academic analysis to capture local engagements to this artificial forest that has become undeniably part of the community.