2009 Creative margins
The Tenth Humanities Graduate Research Conference
5 – 6 November 2009
This year we celebrate the tenth annual Humanities Graduate Research Conference through the theme of ‘Creative Margins.’ As researchers we often find ourselves working at the edges of our disciplinary fields as we search for new ways of approaching knowledge or an understanding of the world around us. We recognise that these creative leaps at the margins of the field, the slippages between one discursive framework and another, the liminal zones of practice, that enrich and enliven scholarship, producing the edgy, the groundbreaking, the stimulating, that push creative intellectual boundaries, often are sited in the first-stage research community: the honours, postgraduate and early career researchers.
In this interdisciplinary conference we want to hear and see the creative re-visioning that honours, postgraduate and early career researchers are imagining, working through, and experimenting with. We welcome oral presentations, posters or creative production, individual or collaborative, that articulate and visualise the research you are undertaking as you work in the creative margins.
Abstracts
Riccardo Baldissone
Curtin University
A Way Out of the Seventeenth Century: Human Rights Beyond Modernities
The ethnocentric legacy of human rights discourse is expressed in individualistic legal and moral approaches that inform most philosophical reflections on human rights. I will sketch a path towards a broader theoretical framework that can better sustain and articulate human rights claims of human dignity and well-being. For this purpose, I reconsider human rights discourse within the general modern context. In particular, I describe human rights entitlement as an instance of a fundamentalist modern approach that is constructed upon supposedly objective facts that assume the value-free order of nature. I underscore that acknowledging the performativity of science can assist to disentangle contemporary thought in general, and human rights discourse in particular, from modern fundamentalist assumptions. Finally, I suggest that we reconceptualise human rights as the result of negotiation processes, in which all humans are potential stakeholders.
Margaret Blackmore
University of New South Wales
Dimensions of Awareness: Art/Design Researchers & Information Engagement
From the basis of ongoing practitioner research into the ways that art and design researchers engage with information, this paper explores the difficulties and possibilities inherent in the learning and teaching of tacit knowledge. To know something tacitly is one of many layers coexisting with other more explicit dimensions of individual awareness. Although powerfully instrumental in directing and informing expert thought and actions, tacit knowing is often unarticulated and unacknowledged, which can be problematic in learning and teaching environments. The exploration of dimensions of awareness is a common thread throughout the paper, linking Michael Polanyi’s theories on tacit knowing with the phenomenographic research approach, the outcomes of which can promote transformational learning.
Paul Byron
University of New South Wales
Manières de faire: Research, Everyday Life and Young People’s Sexual Health
Social science research rarely considers itself as creative practice, but sometimes considers the practices of its researched populations in this way. Yet this focus is predominantly on subjectivity as social practice rather than creative practice. Through my research into discourses of young people’s sexual health, I wish to illuminate various subjective practices of both researched and researchers, serving to unsettle distinctions between these, and emphasising shared spaces of creative practice. Distinctions between researcher and researched can be used to colonise knowledge, whereby the researcher has knowledge of the researched, whose own knowledge practices may be disregarded or simplified for the purposes of a research agenda. A social science strategy built upon objective and routine analysis can encourage the researcher to enter ‘the field’ as though she is external, impartial and unhindered by her everyday practices.
Within my studies, I seek a self-reflexive research practice in which it can be understood that the researcher, like the researched, is engaged in ascesis (self creation through ongoing practice). Employing Certeau’s theory of the everyday allows a more nuanced engagement with the binary of researcher/researched, in particular the contemplation of strategies and tactics that both researchers and researched engage with. From this theoretical standpoint, strategies of the field – the spaces in which we all operate – can be challenged or circumvented through various tactics – our creative ways of doing (manières de faire). In relation to this, Certeau’s metaphor of ‘the renter’ is considered as a tactic that is potentially useful in complicating research spaces. Operating as renters, researchers can extend the possibilities of a less hierarchical, less colonising, and more creative research practice.
Caryn Coatney
Curtin University
Read All About it: John Curtin’s Key to Generating Positive News Coverage, 1941-1945
As an orator, writer and former journalist, Australia’s Prime Minister John Curtin led significant innovations that transformed the media and created a legacy in political communications. Few publications exist on his use of the mass media to secure popular support during World War II. This paper aims to take his journalism strategies away from the margins, where they have not previously received much scholarly attention. I will investigate the question: How did Curtin achieve success in his use of the news media? The paper will focus on his groundbreaking initiatives in the press, film and radio. My research will be located in the multimethod 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, providing valuable lessons for managing information needs.
Caleb Goods
Curtin University
Working our Way Out of a Crisis: The ‘Green Jobs’ Solution
The connection between the economic and ecological is becoming an integral aspect of sociological research and inquiry as ecological issues increasingly impact on state policy, economic relations and electoral politics. This paper examines the growing interconnection between economic and environmental policy via the concept of green jobs, which are increasingly being promoted by governments, businesses and organised labour as a solution to the short term economic and the longer term ecological crises confronting modern society. In this paper I examine the ambiguous nature and theoretical foundations of green jobs. This paper also scrutinises the Australian government’s policy approach to green jobs and the significant contest surrounding this policy agenda. This paper also examines divisions within the Australian union movement over what can be defined as a green job and the potential benefits or costs of establishing green jobs in Australia. This paper proposes that the current focus on green jobs may inhibit transformations that could more adequately address environmental degradation.
Roger Horton
Murdoch University
Tapping on the Touchstone of Recognition: The Role of Memory in Adaptation
The possibilities for adaptation in the creative arts are potentially infinite, apparently lying along the margins of memory where the recognition of previously encountered images — written, spoken or visual — becomes a crucial element in the process of adaptation. When a writer sets out to adapt a story, intending to produce a new version, some aspect of the original piece of writing must be echoed in the new telling for the adaptation to succeed. It will succeed when the memory evoked by the writer is recognised by the audience. By tapping on the touchstone of recognition, the writer generates a desire in the audience for a new presentation of a story which is already known. The final section of this paper, presented as a coda, outlines a research project investigating the nature of adaptation (including the role of memory) as the basis for a model of the process of adaptation in writingy.
Christina Houen
Curtin University
Unravelling: The Impact of a Collective Multi-Media Performance of Life Narratives in a Regional Community
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
Emil Jonescu
Curtin university
Police Custodial Design is Capricious and Arbitrary: Formulating a Specialised Architectural Strategy Appropriate to Short-Term Custodial Facilities
Police custodial facilities (PCFs) in the West Australian criminal justice system perform the unique, specialist function of temporarily detaining suspects. However, because of incompatible architectural strategies, severe deficiency in specialist literature and insufficient specific architectural research, PCFs continue to reflect outdated prison architecture and theory based on entirely different parameters and serving separate functions. This spatial incongruity clearly suggests continued inadequate knowledge of architectural relationships and theories, and a lack of critical consideration of the requirements for an appropriate and specialised spatial design strategy to provide the most appropriate architecture for PCFs. This research is therefore concerned with developing a specialised architectural strategy to eliminate the contemporary disparity between the architectural incompatibility of PCFs and the functions they need to serve because of police policy and procedure.
Helena Kadmos
Murdoch University
Motherhood and the Cave: A Search for the Mother’s Story
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. This paper outlines a search for the mother’s story, and offers “the cave” 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.
Thor Kerr
Curtin University
Negotiating Green Built Environment at the Margins
The Creative margins described in this paper were manifested in the conceptual systems of people engaged in public discussion of the environmental and social appropriateness of a property development concept known as North Port Quay in Fremantle, Western Australia. The concept was launched publicly in May 2008 by a consortium of property developers claiming that North Port Quay would revolutionize environmentally sustainable living and achieve the highest possible rating for environmental sustainability. The consortium’s legitimization strategy relied on North Port Quay meaning green urbanism in the minds of people making representations in the public domain. An analysis of newspaper texts describes how this strategy failed when the language deployed by North Port Quay’s backers in legitimizing the project encountered a diverse variety of languages in the community of Fremantle.
Jacqui Monks
Edith Cowan University
Merging Theory and Practice: Examining the Psychoanalytic Self Through a Creative Practice
This paper outlines the merging of both creative and theoretical research – or praxis – in conjunction with the application of reflexivity, as a methodological and investigative approach with the outcome of visual creative work. Integrating the philosophical ideas of cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, and the creative work of artists Bill Viola and Patricia Piccinini, as a base from which to explore the notion of the reality of Self as a transient and mediated state, the researcher’s own creative practice is extensively interrogated as an example of praxis in practice.
Michael Openshaw
Curtin University
Technology for the Future: The Use of Online Discussion Forums to Support Learners’ Cognitive Organisation
Learning is a complex process influenced by many factors. But what actually happens during the learning process? This paper explores the processes involved in learning and cognitive organisation. Cognitive organisation refers to the arrangement of knowledge within a learner’s mind through systemic classification and reorganisation of conceptual schemata. Cognitive organisation is fundamental to learning and new advances in technology offer modern educators the ability to support this process outside of the traditional classroom environment. The invention of Computer Mediated Communication technologies, such as online discussion, can be used as pedagogical scaffolding tools to assist learners in the process of cognitive organisation. This paper examines the literature that underpins the theory of cognitive organisation and a pilot study that explores the use of online discussion forums to support learners’ cognitive organisation.
Melissa Russell
Curtin University
Sade’s “Other”: The Religious in Sade’s Ethics
This paper will describe the religious elements of the ethics of the Marquis de Sade. Sade is known as one of history’s most notorious atheists, but when considering the philosophical and, more importantly, ethical, systems that can be found in his work, Sade’s atheism is problematic. Sade’s ethics rest upon the transgression of social 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, 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
Edith Cowan University.
Palm-like Fingers Holding a Coarse Line of Air: Poetics as a Method of Enquiry into South-west Australian Flora
Visual forms of botanic representation—taxonomic illustration, wildflower photography, landscape painting and picturesque prose—depict plants as idealised images fixed in space and time. Scientific language further objectifies the plant, extruding it from its broader ecological and cultural contexts, while visually dissecting it into two-dimensional planes. Yet, flora is poiētic, that is, perpetually unfolding and shifting between life cycle states according to seasonal rhythms. Multi-dimensional representation of flora, therefore, moves between specific synchronic visual moments and broad diachronic multi-sensory patterns. Scholarship on artsinformed enquiry characterises poetry as a qualitative research methodology and a poiētic process. A long-standing tradition of poetic enquiry into flora predates contemporary theoretical models of arts-based research, and is exemplified by the work of American naturalist H.D. Thoreau. In examining the potential of poetic enquiry in the multi-layered representation of flora, this paper employs a structure that intersperses theoretical discussion with poetic interludes about Southwest Australian plants.
Noparat Tananuraksakul
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. English was a cool low-definition medium of communication and instruction, requiring students to participate actively in daily conversations and class discussions. Without a high degree of participation, they misinterpreted information, hardly made sense of the world around them and failed to extend their voices inside or outside the classroom. Qualitative findings indicated that the cool medium of English was the cool message itself in that it negatively affected the students’ identity security. The effects concomitantly caused them to encounter ‘World Englishes shock’, ‘repetition shock’, ‘intercultural identity negotiation shock’ and ‘identity shock’. McLuhan’s Four Laws of Media crystallized the role of English as the cool medium and the cool message in the present context.
George Verghese
Curtin University
20-20 Vision with the Margin at the Centre of Design
Designers take risks. Although the twin forces of change and continuity are always in their minds they tend to gravitate to the margins in all that they do. This is what designers do best — they test the margins, and this testing is central to a designerly way of thinking. As an example, this paper focuses 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 a critical dimension of design at the margins. The paper will draw from a variety of sources in order to map this terrain, and will refer to the work of Bourdieu and Kingwell, in association with those of other leading designers and design theorists.
The paper is in three parts. The first briefly explores the idea of marginality in relationship to design practice. This is followed by a reinterpretation of the Naturalistic Inquiry Model by Kate Bunnell (1998) that is translated to refer to the application of new materials in design. Lastly, using this revised model and secondary research, a mapping of the key factors facing innovative material agents will be presented in order to demystify the terrain.
Hilary Wheaton
Curtin University
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 researcher’s role as participant and observer. The necessity to engage in virtual worlds in a style similar to computer gaming, by means of creating/customising an avatar, mastering the computer controls and learning the social etiquette can sometimes blur the boundary between research and play. The qualitative nature of social science research always engenders ethical risks; this paper argues that despite the risks associated with entering a virtual world, the benefits result in authentic and credible findings that would otherwise be hard to gather. This paper examines the complications that emerge in virtual worlds and the methods employed to conduct research and reduce ethical risks within them, it then illustrates these issues by using Second Life as an example and focusing on the subculture of ‘Furries’.
Katherine Wright
Macquarie University
Manicured Nature: Nativism, Authenticity and Belonging in the Armidale State Forest (NSW)
Studies of human relationships to place demand an inter-disciplinary approach that stretches across established binaries of western thought. This paper provides a case study of the Armidale State forest, more affectionately known by locals as the ‘Pine Forest’, to engage in an inter-species, inter-cultural dialogue on the ambiguities and possibilities of place-based identities. As an exotic plantation the Pine Forest raises a litany of intriguing questions on notions of nativism, authenticity and belonging. In examining emotional attachments to the introduced conifers, I demonstrate the inadequacy of narrow definitions of ‘nature’, and challenge the discursive boundaries of introduced flora. This analysis welcomes ambiguity and seeks out plurality, combining imagery, public dialogue and critical academic analysis to capture local engagements with this artificial forest that has become undeniably part of the community.
Proceedings
Provoking Texts: New Postgraduate Research from the Edge: Creative Margins
These online proceedings have been double blind refereed and were published on the 11 October 2010.
A Way Out of the Seventeenth-Century: Human Rights Beyond Modernities
Dimensions of Awareness: Art/Design Researchers & Information Engagement
Manières de faire: Research, Everyday Life and Young People’s Sexual Health
Read all about it: John Curtin’s Key to Generating Positive News Coverage, 1941-1945
Working Our Way out of a Crisis: The ‘Green Jobs’ Solution
Tapping on the Touchstone of Recognition: The Role of Memory in Adaptation
Unravelling: The Impact of a Collective Multi-Media Performance of Life Narratives in a Regional Community
Police Custodial Design is Capricious and Arbitrary: Formulating a Specialised Architectural Strategy Appropriate to Short-Term Custodial Facilities
Motherhood and the Cave: A Search for the Mother’s Story
Negotiating Green Built Environment at the Margins
Merging Theory and Practice: Examining the Psychoanalytic Self Through a Creative Practice
Technology for the Future: The Use of Online Discussion Forums to Support Learners’ Cognitive Organisation
Sade’s ‘Other:’ The Religious in Sade’s Ethics
The Cool Medium of English and the Cool Message in an Australian Context
Palm-like Fingers Gripping a Coarse Line of Air: Poetry as a Method of Enquiry into Southwest Australian Flora
20-20 Vision with the Margin at the Centre of Design
All in the Name of Research: Crossing the Boundary Between Work and Play
Manicured Nature: Nativism, Authenticity and Belonging in the Armidale State Forest (NSW)
Editors
Publication Editor
Julie Lunn is a historical researcher who has worked on Municipal Heritage Inventories, Conservation Plans and commissioned histories. For the last two years she was the historical researcher on a Curtin and ARC linkage project Remembering the Wars: The community meanings of war memorials in Western Australia. Currently she works part time as project manager on another Curtin project, Understanding the Creative Workforce. She is also one of two Humanities Graduate Studies Research Officers who are responsible for organising the Humanities Research and Graduate Studies workshops and conference.
Paper Editors
Dr Janice Baker is Adjunct Postdoctoral Associate in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. Her current research involves contemporary art, museums, film theory, affect, continental philosophy and cultural studies.
Dr Alex Gerbaz completed his PhD in Cinema Studies at Curtin in 2007. He was subsequently a Research Fellow at the National Film and Sound Archive and a recipient of the Margaret George Award from the National Archives of Australia, where he investigated the history of Australian experimental and independent filmmaking. His work has been published in journals such as Film-Philosophy, Metro, Memento and Screen Education, and he co-edited Curtin’s 2005 publication Palimpsests: Transforming Communities.
Jane Grellier is a PhD student in social sciences at Curtin, conducting ethnographic research into Curtin students’ experience of their first year at university. She is a coordinator in the First-Year Communications Program in the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin, and has had many years’ experience as an educational writer and editor of syllabus documents, academic articles and teacher support materials.
Dr Christina Houen has a PhD in Life Writing. She has edited many postgraduate theses in Humanities. She is co-editor of a collection of contemporary Australian women¹s writing published in 2006, and editor of a monograph by Dr Nonja Peters on Netherlands East Indies children who recuperated post-World War Two at Fairbridge Farm School. She has been project officer for the Transformation Project in Architecture Interior Architecture, and is now assisting Interior Architecture with two major publications to be launched in 2011. She was Publications Coordinator for the Interrogating Trauma conference held at Curtin in 2008. She is Associate Editor for the journal Life Writing (Routledge).
Thor Kerr is a PhD candidate in Curtin’s School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts. With 15 years of experience in journalism and publishing, Thor has contributed to The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Law Institute Journal in Australia as well as The Times and BBC World Service in the United Kingdom. He has been an editor of BCI Asia’s FuturArc journal and architecture@ yearbooks in Singapore, a sub-editor for The Jakarta Post newspaper and a proof reader for the International Review of Social History in the Netherlands.
Dr Anja Reid lectures in the social sciences at Curtin and Murdoch Universities, Western Australia. Also having an art background, her research interests intersect ethnography, historical anthropology, identity(s), place, transitional spaces, symbolic appropriation, and the public/private agendas of visual expression. With a keen interest in Inner and East Asia, specific issues include the multilayered articulation(s) of diplomacy between countries and the complex dialogic tensions between cultural politics and symbolic representation. Her ongoing research into the philatelic archive broadly concerns stamps as a legitimate and important resource for short term and longitudinal scholarly inquiry into the articulation of states’ and nations’ society, culture, politics and economy. Anja’s publications reflect these links in a Mongolian context.