2008 Engaging place(s)/Engaging culture(s)

Rita Abdul Rahman Ramakrishna

Curtin University of Technology

Lexical Borrowing in Malaysian Short Stories

This paper reports on the ways in which a nativised endonormative variety of English is used as a stylistic device in published postcolonial writings in Malaysia. A two-phase mixed method design is employed to reveal this endonormative stage of linguistic development using a sample of 184 short stories written by Malaysians from 1957 until 2006. These short stories have been drawn from various published anthologies. Selected lexical markers of Malaysian English are used to illustrate the ways a nativised variety of English embeds cultural identity as mirrored in the short stories.

Firouzeh Ameri

Murdoch University

Sacred Spaces in Contemporary English Literature: Muslim Contributions

Some Muslim narratives recently published in English have reintroduced sacred spaces into English literature, though this time the sacralisation of the texts has been done through the Muslim faith. These narratives, which are about Muslim women, are especially significant as they reemphasize the notion of the sacred in the literature of a predominantly secular western world, can involve the modern reader in a sacred, or premodern world, and can disrupt the reader’s expectations of the sacred, especially with regard to the religion of Islam. In particular the texts problematize the assumption of any direct correspondence between religious orthodoxy and engagement with the sacred and the spiritual.

This paper focuses on a novel by Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the belly, a novel by Mohja Kahf, The girl in the tangerine scarf, and two novels by Leila Aboulela, The Translator, and Minaret. The paper aims to show how sacred space is created in these novels and what such fictional spaces can tell us about the nature of the sacred in the contemporary world. It also explains why the creation of Muslim sacred spaces in English literature is important at this moment in history.

Michelle Burns

Curtin University

Love Cake: Authenticity and the Boundaries of “Eurasian” in the Hybrid Kitchen

My paper draws on research for my doctoral thesis which investigates the lived experience of people who self-identify broadly as “Eurasian” – specifically the Burghers of Sri Lanka and the Eurasians of Malaysia and Singapore. “Eurasian” is an ambiguous identity that involves notions such as hybridity and border crossings. Despite being difficult to define and having no singular identity the Eurasians within my group of research participants, most of whom are migrants to Australia, often use their country of (ancestral) origin to define and draw boundaries around what it is to be Eurasian. In this paper I focus on the concept of cultural authenticity which is called on to create and uphold what in reality are porous cultural boundaries. In particular I draw on the idea of authenticity within the kitchen, and use the Sri Lankan Love cake as an example of some of the issues surrounding cultural and ethnic authenticity. The Love cake, which is made by both Burghers and Eurasians, originated in colonial Ceylon and is representative of the vibrant cultural/culinary exchanges that occurred at the intersection of East and West. I argue that the debates surrounding the identity, ownership and authenticity of the cake’s recipe, mirror the same arguments surrounding the borders of “Eurasian

Michelle Carey

Murdoch University

Globalisation and Critical Whiteness Studies: An Examination of ‘White’ Identity Construction in the Locus of Indigenous Sovereignty

In this discussion, I engage with the globalisation of critical whiteness studies, and ask how it informs notions of the white self in relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. I focus my discussion on one particular ‘branch’ of the critical whiteness studies movement: the American-based New Race Abolitionists. The New Race Abolitionists provide an interesting case study because they purport to employ a radical methodology for social change. I argue that the Abolitionists’ modus operandi functions within a particular discursive paradigm that, when translated to an Australian context, enables the denial of the epistemic and physical violence of colonisation, and the place of non-Aboriginal people within this history of colonisation.

Cindy Yuen Zhe Chen

University of New South Wales

Chant: Creating Sacred Space Through Drawing

Throughout history, traditional cultures dedicated generations to creating sacred sites which implemented, expressed and were the axis of their religious and cultural belief systems. From Stonehenge to Borobudur in Indonesia, sacred sites played a fundamental role in establishing a spiritual connection between societies and a greater, eternal truth. Inspired by topics discussed in the course Spirit, Myth and Sacredness in Architecture, (Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW, 2006), this project explores how sound, particularly religious chanting, combines with man made environments to create a space distinct from the secular; a sacred place which is perceived intuitively. With globalisation, the internet and migration, a diffusion of cultural identity has occurred. Contemporary, multicultural societies have ceased to build their lives around an established origin as past traditions did. In the text Surface tensions: problematics of site, author Lucy Lippard states, “power of place is diminished and often lost in modern life.”

This paper examines how my studio practice attempts to fill this void. Through a purely abstract drawing process, religious chants are interpreted into a visual medium to create a sacred space within a gallery and in the viewer’s mind. Can this drawn expression of an aural, intuitive space, absorb modern viewers into a place beyond the profane and be a fulfilling substitute for the community’s traditional sacred site?

Caroline Ellsmore

University of New England

Practical Solutions to Performing the Role of Violetta Valery in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata (1853)

The tragic physical degeneration and death of a dissolute beauty, redeemed by love, has recently been represented by director, Baz Luhrmann, in his film “Moulin Rouge!” (2001). The subject of Luhrmann’s film, however, is one already present in the music and literature of the nineteenth century. Violetta Valery, in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, “La Traviata” (1853), was the forerunner of Luhrmann’s tragic character, Satine. After meeting Alfredo Germont, Violetta undergoes the beginning of a transformation from frenetic pleasure-seeker to noble, self-sacrificing lover. This paper examines Verdi’s musical portrayal of Violetta’s initial transformation in the solo finale to Act I, Ah, fors’e lui che l’anima. A performance of this pivotal number must capture the nuances of Alexandre Dumas’s descriptive novel, with yet more diverse and heightened means of expression than the spoken inflections of his play, on which the opera is based. While portraying the physical fragility of a consumptive, the singer must also perform a relentless succession of febrile vocal gymnastics in a high tessitura. A demonstration of sections of this music explores what, for an actor, might seem to be the “super –human” attributes needed to make the role not merely convincing, but compelling.

Helen Fordham

Curtin University

A Better Time and A Better Place: Global Political Consciousness and New Forms of Public Intellectualism

It is widely understood that in western democracies public intellectualism has been experiencing a crisis in its relevancy and credibility as a result of its incorporation into the specialized knowledge and power elites of late modernity. This paper argues that public intellectualism is in fact transforming and occurring in the social spaces and local contexts of social movements which provide sites of resistance against the imposition of a global neo-liberal ideology. These new forms of public intellectualism, which often take the shape of counter discourses in the areas of environmentalism, human rights and cultural identity, are legitimated by appeals to the common good and generate “public opinion that can in turn exercise political influence” (Habermas, 1996). Implicit in the changing discourse is a growing recognition that knowledge production is based upon different epistemologies and hierarchies, and is a process in which all people participate (Rappaport, 2005). This paper examines the debates surrounding this transformation in order to illuminate the shape of contemporary public intellectualism and the role it has in engaging communities and fostering an international geo-political consciousness necessary for the resolution of emerging global issues.

Sue Gillieatt

Curtin University

A Carer’s Ambivalence: Intergenerational Caring For and About Older People

Two years ago, my 82-year-old widowed father died after falling through the cracks in the mishmash of home care cobbled together by me (an only child), communitycare providers, a few friends and a neighbour. In the end, arguably, he died of neglect. In my view, his situation was neither unusual nor surprising. Australian government policy ensures that the majority of care for frail, older people will take place in family homes, giving rise to an injunction that relatives, friends and neighbours do most of it. As many of us turn our unremunerated attention to caring for and about the older people in our lives, just how well and willingly we care varies enormously. Indeed, I believe that, when faced with the call to care — if indeed we hear it — our desire and capacity to do so is hobbled by ambivalence. This has its origins not only within ourselves, but also in the colliding political, social and cultural discourses of work, family, care and the body, as well as in contradictory structural and material arrangements pertaining to intergenerational care of older people. This ambivalence is pervasive and revealed by disparities between official versions of caring and narratives of those attempting the caring. This paper will analyse the sources of ambivalence which spring from contemporary discourses, structural and material care arrangements and the act of caring for the older bodies of family and friends.

Jane Grellier and Joy Denise Scott

Curtin University

Seeking Jane and Joy: The Struggle to Become Authentic, Ethical Autoethnographers

Jane and Joy are both embarking on auto-ethnographic studies of educational communities they are very familiar with — first-year communities of practice at Curtin University and offshore Chinese higher education learning communities in Shanghai. In engaging with our subjects, we increasingly face issues of identity: our own identities as researchers, teachers and learners impinge on the ways we understand and portray the identities of our students, our colleagues and the institutions in which we work. The power imbalances in our relationships with these people foreground for us significant ethical issues, which we will examine in this presentation. Issues of race are a key element of our work: for Joy, working in a transnational context, but also for Jane, in the context of the increasing numbers of international students at Curtin. In the form of a dialogue, we will explore our responses to issues of identity, power and race in our work, sharing our personal struggles to identify and portray the lenses through which we view our subjects, and considering how different forms of narrative can bring us closer to our quest for an authentic and ethical research practice.

Jennifer Kamp

Victoria University

Threat or Thrill in Suburbia: An Artist’s Response to the Changing Nature of Place

The focus of my paper is to show how the boundaries between theory and practice, narrative and analysis, word and work can be interwoven to assist creative research into a transient suburban landscape. I examine conceptions of space and how we live, in a visual and textual exploration that loops across time seeking meaning and understanding of my changing urban landscape. As an artist through my photographic and video works I develop ways of working in a changing world with new pictorial possibilities. My work evolves as a layered and reflexive project that illuminates the past and the passage of time, and explores different ways of understanding the world, through unfamiliar technologies.

I discuss social and emotional experiences, and our relationships that give meaning to the space we inhabit. My reflexive enquiry dealing with my personal sense of loss resonates with an unsettled contemporary landscape. My enquiry combines different voices and tensions to express the edginess of shifting threats and thrills that characterise the contemporary landscape. I merge context and methodology, imagery and text with process, to investigate and visualise the subtleties and changing ways of being in today’s world. My art practice explores this edginess using digital technology to develop interplay between the past and present, linking the virtual with the actual and the technical, to engender meta-narratives that may open new possibilities.

Thor Kerr

Curtin University

Sustainability Discourse, Place and the Green Building

The world’s nations concede that sustainable development is an appropriate response to the threat of global ecological destruction caused by industrialization. The discourse of sustainable development, or ‘sustainability’, legitimizes attempts to rearrange society through reproduction of the threat that humanity will annihilate itself unless its practices are reformed. This paper provides an analysis of sustainability discourses in the building industry and the ecological modernist storyline of ‘green building’. It describes the application of Maarten Hajer’s discourse analysis methods to representations by industry professionals and academics at a series of conferences on sustainable built environments held in Australia, Singapore and Vietnam. The research findings describe how policies are produced and legitimized through nationally-contextualised sustainability discourses; and the findings indicate constraints in the production of policies for mitigating global ecological threats from industrialization.

 Susan Leong

Curtin University

Virtual Diasporas and the Dilemma of Multiple Belongings in Cyberspace

One of the most celebrated qualities of the Internet is its enabling of simultaneity and multiplicity. By allowing users to open as many windows into the world as they (and their computers) can withstand, the Internet is understood to have brought places and cultures together on a scale and in a manner unprecedented. Yet, while the Internet has enabled many to reconnect with cultures and places long distanced and/or lost, it has also led to the belief that these reconnections are established with little correspondent cost to existent ties of belonging. In this paper, I focus on the dilemma multiple belongings engender for the ties of national belonging and question the sanguinity of multiple belongings as practised online. In particular, I use Lefebvre’s notion of lived space to unpack the problems and contradictions of what has been called ‘Greater China’ for the ethnic Chinese minority in nations like Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

Shireen Maged

Curtin University

The Culturally Diverse Classroom: Challenges for Teacher Education

New Zealand’s classrooms are becoming more and more culturally diverse. This educational phenomenon is a reflection of the arguably radical cultural transformation that New Zealand society has undergone in recent years. If the rapid social growth in cultural diversity continues, then people from non-European background will be the majority by 2040 (Prestidge 2004). The current reality is that teachers are expected to teach in these culturally diverse classroom contexts and are in many cases not adequately prepared to provide relevant cultural learning spaces for their students. Consequently children who come from minority cultures may be disadvantaged. What follows is a review of literature on education for culturally diverse classrooms, focusing on pre-service teachers’ preparation for culturally diverse learning contexts. Common themes and issues from the literature are: Increasingly diverse classrooms; sociocultural competence; the role of self-reflection and self-analysis of culture; radical multiculturalism and cultural proficiency.

Soma Mandal Datta

Curtin University

The Impact of Colour

Research into the design of environments sensitive to the human psyche has been part of past and ongoing research across varied disciplines such as education, architecture, behavioral sciences and environmental psychology. Studies related to architecture have shown that architectural spatial planning and design goes beyond superficial aesthetic appeal and affects the users psychologically; the design of space can influence emotions positively or negatively. What seems to be missing is a body of knowledge in architecture that encompasses all the elements that form part of the user’s experience. Even though similar studies have been conducted in urban design (Simkins & Thwaites 2006) and some aspects of interior design such as acoustics (Evans & Maxwell 1997) there have been few architectural studies of the effects of spatial design on the psyche to date, and certainly not ones that focus on the design of learning environments, in particular in relation to children with learning disabilities. My thesis explores this nexus between architecture and psychology with the aim of investigating whether architectural spatial planning and design act in a way to improve learning aptitude for primary school children, especially for those with learning disabilities. This will be studied by examining selected elements of architectural space (colour, illumination, spatial arrangement, sound and thermal comfort) and their perception by occupants, using educational assessment tools and the investigation of conventional designs of educational spaces. This paper describes some of the concepts and theories that will be explored in the fields of colour and spatial planning in this pilot study. The inferences from this research will benefit primary school children by generating a new set of design schemes applicable to children irrespective of their backgrounds.

Nicholas Pendergrast

Curtin University

Australian Media Hegemony and the Internet

The Internet has emerged as a potentially important site of resistance to media hegemony. The Internet has been celebrated as the place to go for alternative information and ideas; a place which breaks free from the narrow framework offered by the traditional media (which includes media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television). Nonetheless, while there has been some success in the Internet being used to present ideas and topics that have been marginalised by the traditional media, the most visited websites in Australia are increasingly owned by traditional media companies, whose content is limited by the same constraints present in other forms of media. Australian media hegemony is partly due to the production of media content, including corporate ownership and commercial constraints. Websites with alternative content exist; however, it is hard to compete with the resources of traditional media companies and other large companies. Using the recent example of the framing of the 2007 Australian Federal election, this paper examines the extent to which the Internet is currently being used to frame issues in a counter-hegemonic manner. The effectiveness of such a potential challenge is also considered, in an online media environment increasingly dominated by large-scale media companies.

Clancy Read, Jaya Earnest and Gabriella de Mori

Curtin University

Meeting the Needs of Refugee Youth at a Western Australian University: A Case Study from Curtin University

A rising number of university students are from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. A small, yet defined proportion of these students have arrived in Australia on Humanitarian Visas. Students from refugee and disadvantaged backgrounds frequently find the culture of tertiary institutions alienating and experience difficulties in succeeding academically and forming social bonds. They are confronted with “… a complex web of factors that influence [their] decisions to withdraw or take extended leave” (Elliott, 2002). Given the changing demographic profile of students in tertiary institutions it is now evident that different pedagogical approaches and new teaching and learning resources are needed to facilitate the learning and socio-cultural adaptations students must make to engage with their courses of study and university life.

Whilst many Australian universities have been proactive in responding to students’ needs through orientation and support programs, very little is known about providing for the successful transition of refugee students into tertiary study. Facilitating the early engagement of students with their studies and campus life has been shown to lead to greater student satisfaction and improved rates of retention. One of the challenges that academics face is the paucity of research on teaching and learning in relation to refugee students in Australia and the absence of literature on the learning styles and academic needs of African and Middle Eastern refugee students. It is this gap that this Australian Learning and Teaching Council funded project seeks to address.

This paper reports on a Needs Analysis undertaken at Curtin University in Western Australia in Semester 2, 2007 and Semester 1, 2008 with a small cohort of refugee student using in-depth interviews. The results from the needs analysis revealed the multiple challenges students on humanitarian visas face and informed the design and delivery of a pilot teaching and learning training program at Curtin University. This paper will further discuss the design, delivery and evaluation of the pilot teaching and learning program that was designed and trialled that aims to ensure students’ needs for social and academic inclusion are met as they commence their university studies.

Anja Reid

Curtin University

Mongolian Art Under Socialism: Speaking on Behalf of the People

This essay explores state/people relations in matters of identity-making in a socialist context. In the construction of identity at any level lie public and private influences and how history impinges on what I call ‘identity fertility’. This essay takes as its study the selective appropriation of artworks (or details of them) on Mongolian postage stamps. With art a dominant part of the public culture of socialist states, it could be officially argued that the works functioned as a means of glorifying the achievements of the proletarian masses. I propose that in philately, the bureaucratic elite deliberately sought to reify or exoticise traditional nomadic life as a means to not only assert a robust identity outside one claiming to be ‘socialist’, but also to return that back to the people through symbolic appropriation. Visual means subsidised by the state for expressing forms of identity are neither simply driven by bureaucratic power, nor do they ideologically bypass individual agency in the process of identity-making. Public and private wisdoms associated with lived experiences and knowledges that are grounded in the pathology of a long history of nomadic pastoralism are both implicitly and explicitly associated with identity formation. The cultural politics underlying measures for establishing a fertile identity as Mongol cannot be critically thought about at a purely elitist, institutional level.

Janean Robinson

Murdoch University

I want to be Heard! Classroom Echoes of Resistance

Vignette – “a painting, drawing or photograph that has no border but is gradually faded into its background at the edges.” (Encarta Dictionary)

In this paper I use youth vignettes to provide a forum for marginalised voices capturing their cultural identity and experiences in the context of their schooling and family lives. These pictures are exposed to contrast against the rhetoric surrounding The Behaviour Management in Schools Policy (2001) which “requires schools to develop a learning environment that is welcoming, supportive and safe” (3). The ‘environment’ these students reveal is one in which they are expected to ‘perform’, not as the creative, expressive, engaging actor in drama, often embraced and encouraged, but as the docile, compliant unit. Student resistance to dominant discourses is thus “provoked, driven underground, where it becomes a subterranean source of acting out” (Shor 1992, p. 24). It is the intention of this paper that these vignettes have no borders; the student voices instead reveal the often hidden interpretations, understandings and responses and gradually fade into the background of the policy to ‘speak its truth’ from the edges of its own policy deafness.

Trevor Rodwell

University of Canberra

MARS: An Empty Space or a New Place?

The study of the heavens and our own solar system has been part of human culture throughout our history. The planet Mars has been of particular interest and has been the topic of debate and storytelling more than any other. Now we are on the cusp of being able to send humans to the Red Planet, but there are more than just final technological problems to overcome. The will to go and public perception of such a mission will have to be addressed in the very near future. This paper presents research being undertaken to highlight the economic and cultural issues associated with a human expedition to Mars. Research has shown that public engagement in future large-scale space missions may depend on some form of interaction with the project and, in turn, this engagement may be vital to the funding of these missions. Within this paper I also outline the concept of a first human landing monument based on the principles of Land Art with the inclusion of a Time Space Recording as a means of involving the global population and thereby creating an environment of mutual support for art, science and culture within a shared space mission.

Provoking Texts: New Postgraduate Research from the Edge: Engaging Place(s)/Engaging Culture(s)

These online proceedings have been double blind refereed and were published on the 5 November 2009.

Sense of Community

A Better Time and A Better Place: Global Political Consciousness and New Forms of Public Intellectualism

Helen Fordham

A Carer’s Ambivalence: Intergenerational Caring For and About Older People

Sue Gillieatt

Threat or Thrill in Suburbia: An Artist’s Response to the Changing Nature of Place

Jennifer Kamp

Sustainability Discourse, Place and the Green Building

Thor Kerr1

Australian Media Hegemony and the Internet

Nick Pendergrast

Meeting the Needs of Refugee Youth at a Western Australian University: A Case Study from Curtin University

Clancy Read, Jaya Earnest and Gabriella DeMori

Sense of Identity

Love Cake: Authenticity and the Boundaries of ‘Eurasian’ in the Hybrid Kitchen

Michelle Burns

Globalisation and Critical Whiteness Studies: An Examination of ‘White’ Identity Construction in the Locus of Indigenous Sovereignty

Michelle Carey

Practical Solutions to Performing the Role of Violetta Valery in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata (1853)

Caroline Ellsmore

Seeking Jane and Joy: The struggle to Become Authentic, Ethical Auto-Ethnographers

Jane Grellier and Joy Scott

Mongolian Art Under Socialism: Speaking on Behalf of the People

Anja Reid

Sense of Place

Lexical Borrowing in Malaysian Short Stories

Rita Abdul Rahman Ramakrishna

Sacred Spaces in Contemporary English Literature: Muslim Contributions

Firouzeh Ameri

Chant: Creating a Sacred Place Through Drawing

Cindy Yuen Zhe Chen

Virtual Diasporas and the Dilemma of Multiple Belongings in Cyberspace

Susan Leong

The Culturally Diverse Classroom: Challenges for Teacher Education

Shireen Maged

The Impact of Colour

Soma Mandal Datta

I want to be Heard! Classroom Echoes of Resistance

Janean Robinson

MARS: An Empty Space or a New Place?

Trevor Rodwell

Publication Editor

Dr Janet Baldwin has recently completed her PhD at Curtin University. Her thesis ‘Reading Aspects of Contemporary and Medieval Female Spirituality: Spiritualists and Mystics’ is an exploration of the mystics’ experiential devotions and an ethnographic study of contemporary Spiritualists, counterpointing one against the other to investigate the similarities and differences in their understandings, beliefs and practices. Her role as Research Culture Officer, HGSO, Curtin University, includes organisation of the annual Humanities Graduate Research Conference.

Paper Editors

Janice Baker is a doctoral candidate in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. The central focus of her research is the relationship between affect theory and museological discourse. This interest arises from her experience as a curator working in Western Australian art museums. Her main curatorial projects have been at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia.

Helen Fordham is a final year PhD student in the School of Media, Communications and Creative Arts, Curtin University. Her doctoral research explores the history of ideas that have shaped the function and future of public intellectualism. Helen completed her Master’s in Journalism at Michigan State University as an International Rotary Scholar and she has worked as a journalist, magazine editor and director of corporate communications for a variety of agencies including Business Queensland newspapers, The Queensland Law Society and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. She currently teaches feature writing in the Professional Writing Program.

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 Communication Skills 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 been a member of the Society of Editors (WA) since 2006, and has edited many postgraduate theses in Humanities. She is co-editor of a collection of contemporary Australian women’s 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 is currently project officer for the Transformation Project in Architecture Interior Architecture, and 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 is Associate Lecturer in Anthropology at Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. Her research interests intersect ethnography, anthropology, identity, sense of place, places of transition, cultural politics, symbolism, appropriation, visual and material culture. Her thesis, Stamping Identity: Dialogic, Symbolism and the Other in Mongolian Philately, concerned the complex relationships between cultural politics and symbolic appropriation. It focused on latent ambiguities manifest in the state’s manipulation of symbols appropriated for the purpose of identity-making or identity-seeking. She is further developing her analytic concept of “identity fertility” through notions of “cultural patina” – the multi-layered contexts underpinning potential symbolic meaning(s).