Susanne Gannon
Biographic Data
| ID | 102548 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susanne Gannon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susanne |
| FAMILY NAME | Gannon |
| SIGNATURE | GANNON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2182-3615 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 397 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Arctic Terns: An Archipelago of Emergent Singularities
The Arctic Terns are six creative artists|writers|photographers|poets, who perform the paper you will encounter here. We Arctic Terns engage in collaborative writing and artmaking, connecting with each other, along with some of the other-than-human earth and animal others, through whom our own being-human is extended. We Terns become and write together as an archipelago of ‘singularities’; we have been meeting on Zoom for years, listening to and …
Gender Un/Bound: Traversing Educational Possibilities
This collection is focused on the possibilities for unbinding people from gendered expectations in and around educational spaces, and accounts for the ways gender is reconstituted in and through education. This book presents a broad interpretation of gender, of what education might mean, and where educational experiences manifest. It explores more conventional schooling spaces to communally generated inclusive spaces, families and marginalised si…
Hive writing: A post-pandemic, audience and AI-aware manifesto for writing pedagogies
This article brings together data from two complementary studies of the teaching of writing in Australia. Mobilising motifs of the hum and the hive to think together how our projects resonate, the authors highlight a key concern that emerges across both studies: the absence of real-world audiences for student writing in contemporary pedagogy. Specifically, we refer to the limited extent to which teachers have freedom to craft writing opportunitie…
Gender and schooling in Australia
This special issue presents a collection of recent papers drawing on qualitative research in and about schooling in Australia and the ways in which gender-related issues in the broadest sense continue to shape people’s educational experiences. These papers from the present are positioned in relation to the long histories of policy and research attention to gender equity in Australian education. We set the context for work in the present by scanni…
Everyone would freak out, like they’ve never seen a boy before’: Young people’s experiences of single-sex secondary schooling in NSW
Although gender expansive views are increasingly evident amongst young people, segregation according to binary notions of gender underpins the organisational structures of single-sex secondary schools. While claims of educational benefits are common, particularly for girls, gender is difficult to disentangle from socioeconomic advantage and other factors. Evidence suggests that such schools contribute to homogenised and limiting notions of gender…
Breastfeeding after return to work: An Australian national workplace survey
Breastfeeding initiation rates in Australia are high but duration rates fall well below the World Health Organization targets. Return to work is a known factor impacting 6 months exclusive breastfeeding and continuation into the infants second year of life. Work related factors can influence a woman's confidence in maintaining breastmilk supply after return to employment and determine whether she meets her personal breastfeeding goals. This cross…
Reworldings’: Exploring perspectives on the future from Danish and Australian youth during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life for all in countless ways. For young people, the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of school education and upended relations with peers, parents, and society as a whole. In this paper, we look beyond these immediate effects to explore how pandemic experiences, feelings, and thoughts suggest profound shifts in young people’s perspectives on and orientations towards the future. Our research comprises pa…
Sociality, resilience and agency: How did young Australians experience online learning during Covid-19
In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond dominant narratives of vulnerability and losses in …
Corporeal generosity: Breastfeeding bodies and female‐dominated workplaces
While gender equality at work and the gendered parameters of workplace conditions are of interest to feminist researchers, this paper brings together sociological and public health perspectives to interrogate factors impacting women who return to work (RTW) while maintaining breastfeeding. Our inquiry is focused on female‐dominated professions, teaching, nursing, and midwifery, and our findings suggest that breastfeeding obstacles exist even when…
Arctic Terns: Writing and Art-Making Our Way Through the Pandemic
We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and showed each other our artworks. The material practices we developed helped make the pandemic endurabl…
Scenes From a Collective Biography of Cold War Childhoods: A Decolonial Ethnodrama
This article is written as and ethnodrama. Approaching memory work as decolonial practice, we aimed to multiply stories of Cold War childhoods while simultaneously making the politics of collective biography processes explicit. The script is based on nonfictional reality and is expanded by both researched and speculative elements to compose an evocative text and the characters of the drama. Ethnodrama offers a sense of how it was to 'be there,' a…
Academic temporalities: Apprehending micro-worlds of academic work through a photo-serial methodology
This article focuses on academic temporalities to consider the rhythms, repetitions and discontinuities of academic work. Using a photo-serial methodology which generated an archive of images taken at the same time of day for a fortnight, we take up material and affective theories to rethink academic work as assemblages or micro-worlds that emerge through happenstance at particular moments. Our nonrepresentational, new materialist approach shifts…
Artefacts, practices and pedagogies: Teaching writing in English in the Naplan era
In secondary schools, English teachers are often made responsible for writing results in national testing. Yet there have been few studies that focussed on this key group, or on how pedagogical practices have been impacted in the teaching of writing in their classrooms. This study investigated practices of English teachers in four secondary schools across different states, systems and regions. It developed a novel method of case study at a distan…
Reducing vocational education inequality for students from refugee backgrounds
Vocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people’s life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their families and communities. In the short term, their aspirations dictate the decisions they make about educational pathways in post-compulsory years of schooling and vocational and higher education. For young people from already marginalised backgrounds, the qua…
Grim tales: Meetings, matterings and moments of silencing and frustration in everyday academic life
Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces: Ordinary lives in extraordinary times
In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children's lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actua…
Working on a rocky shore: Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work
Doing time and motion diffractively: Academic Life Everywhere and All the Time
This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research prac…
Teachers and academic partners in urban schools: Threats to Professional Practice
Seven years ago, enamoured with notions of ‘next practice’ and ‘twenty-first century learning’, my Dean sent a small delegation to England to attend a conference by the Innovation Unit and then to
Watery Configurations of Animals, Children, Pedagogies and Politics in a Suburban Wetland
“After the Humidity and Stillness of Yesterday . . .”: Drifting, Reading, Writing Self and Others, Traveling in Otherwhens and Otherwheres
This article turns to a handwritten travel journal from more than two decades ago to explore how the past might be animated in the present through provoking affective, material and imaginative encounters with the text, the subject, and the world. This experimental animation of space-time through writing draws upon the figure of the mirror in Foucault’s “heterotopias” as it sets in motion lines of force and displacement that enable openings toward…
Kairos and the time of gender equity policy in Australian schooling
Almost 20 years ago the Australian government released Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997). It was adopted by all states but almost immediately disappeared from sight after a conservative change of government. This was followed by the dismantling of gender equity units in each state, and a turn to boys’ education that eclipsed the more complex strategies and theoretical underpinnings of the Framework. This paper takes up the …
Ordinary Atmospheres and Minor Weather Events
This essay is inspired by Kathleen Stewart's call to pay attention to the affective, material, and relational qualities of everyday life, and by the posthuman imperative that we recognize how we are imbricated with all creatures, objects, and forces in our worlds. It assembles little scenes of weather in everyday life, aiming for an atmospheric attunement to the elemental and domestic, and exploring these through some of the work of critical geog…
Saving squawk? Animal and human entanglement at the edge of the lagoon
Emerging posthuman paradigms are beginning to influence approaches to educational research and pedagogy, including the 'common worlds' investigations of relations among children and wild animals in early childhood settings. This paper turns to child-animal encounters in a secondary school wetlands project to explore some of the implications of posthumanism for environmental education. It explores how singular encounters with wild animals – a swam…
Rethinking school violence: Theory, Gender, Context
The warrant for this book is laid out in its opening chapter, which argues the case for ‘rethinking’ in terms of current approaches which subsume school violence within bullying discourses that pat
The Ambivalent Practices of Reflexivity
Reflexivity involves turning one's reflexive gaze on discourse-turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) s…
The (Im)Possibilities of Writing the Self-Writing: French Poststructural Theory and Autoethnography
Poststructural theories problematize taken-for-granted humanist notions of the subject as capable of self-knowledge and self-articulation while simultaneously providing a rationale for incorporating the personal into research. The body, emotions, and lived experience become texts to be written and read in autoethnography. However, a paradox arises for poststructural autoethnography in that autoethnographic research presumes that subjects can spea…
Collective Biography and the Entangled Enlivening of Being
In this paper we explore the very particular forms and productive possibilities of collaborative writing that are generated in collective biography workshops, focusing in particular on the collaborative generation of memory stories. Drawing on conceptual resources from Deleuze and Barad we work our way through the paradox of working with intensely felt evocative memories within the poststructural conceptual space of the deconstructed -of-thought.…
Saving squawk? Animal and human entanglement at the edge of the lagoon
Emerging posthuman paradigms are beginning to influence approaches to educational research and pedagogy, including the 'common worlds' investigations of relations among children and wild animals in early childhood settings. This paper turns to child-animal encounters in a secondary school wetlands project to explore some of the implications of posthumanism for environmental education. It explores how singular encounters with wild animals – a swam…
Embodied Women at Work in Neoliberal Times and Places
n\t\t\t\t\tIn this article five women explore (female) embodiment in academic work in current workplaces. In a week-long collective biography workshop they produced written memories of themselves in their various workplaces and memories of themselves as children and as students. These memories then became the texts out of which the analysis was generated. The authors examine the constitutive and seductive effects of neoliberal discourses and prac…
(Re)presenting the Collective Girl: A Poetic Approach to a Methodological Dilemma
This article identifies the salient characteristics of collective memory work and collective biography research. Methodological dilemmas that can arise in the course of the research are identified and an argument is made in favor of imagination and creativity as essential elements of any effective response. Particular reference is made to a collective biography project completed by the author where she (re)presented the collective texts in the fo…
Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: Responding to/With “JKSB
In this article, the authors respond to Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An Immanent Plane of Composition. The book's authors (Jonathan, Ken, Susanne, and Bronwyn) and two discussants (Elizabeth St. Pierre and Norman Denzin) consider questions such as the following: What does this book open up? How might it help us to think differently (e.g. about inquiry, about collaboration, about the ethics of reading and writing in such an assemblage)? And …
Deleuzian Thought and Collaborative Writing: A Play in Four Acts
This article involves four writers exploring together the insights into collaborative writing that Deleuze can offer. Jonathan and Ken in the United Kingdom and Bronwyn and Sue in Australia have separate histories of collaborative writing, and in this collaborative project, they extend their thinking about Deleuze and work reflexively with his concepts to examine their own four-way collaboration. The thoughts of Deleuze provide a means of looking…
Doing time and motion diffractively: Academic Life Everywhere and All the Time
This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research prac…
Working on a rocky shore: Micro-moments of positive affect in academic work
Kairos and the time of gender equity policy in Australian schooling
Almost 20 years ago the Australian government released Gender Equity: A Framework for Australian Schools (1997). It was adopted by all states but almost immediately disappeared from sight after a conservative change of government. This was followed by the dismantling of gender equity units in each state, and a turn to boys’ education that eclipsed the more complex strategies and theoretical underpinnings of the Framework. This paper takes up the …
Constituting the Feminist Subject in Poststructuralist Discourse
In this article, we describe a collective biography that we convened in order to revisit the site of the radical theoretical break with the liberal humanist individual marked by the poststructuralist work of Henriques and colleagues and the feminist poststructuralist work of Weedon. These writers suggest that the new subject of poststructuralist theory will be more open to the changes desired by feminist and social justice movements. They describ…
Deterritorializing collective biography
This paper proposes a new move in the methodological practice of collective biography, by provoking a shift beyond any remnant attachment to the speaking/ writing subject towards her dispersal and displacement via textual interventions that stress multivocality. These include the use of photographs, drama, and various genres of writing. Using a story selected from a collective biography workshop on sexuality and schooling, we document how we work…
Technologies of audit at work on the writing subject: A Discursive Analysis
This article examines the everyday practices of writing in the context of the technologies of audit, as they have been practised on and by the four authors in their capacity as students and researchers. It examines the activity of writing as governmentality, through which students and academics make themselves into appropriate subjects, and also exceed and disrupt the effects of government
Working on the Ground. A Collective Biography of Feminine Subjectivities: Mapping the Traces of Power and Knowledge
In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge rel…
The Tumbler: Writing An/Other in Fiction and Performance Ethnography
This article dissolves the binary between science and literature with a performance text set in rural Australia. This performance suggests that the imaginative act of fiction writing and the social scientific act are kept apart in a false binary that reifies the privilege of presence and the audacity of authenticity. Inspired by a poststructuralist suspicion of any truth as sacred originary, the author takes a chance on an imaginative writing pra…
Ordinary Atmospheres and Minor Weather Events
This essay is inspired by Kathleen Stewart's call to pay attention to the affective, material, and relational qualities of everyday life, and by the posthuman imperative that we recognize how we are imbricated with all creatures, objects, and forces in our worlds. It assembles little scenes of weather in everyday life, aiming for an atmospheric attunement to the elemental and domestic, and exploring these through some of the work of critical geog…
Thinking through memories of childhood in (post)socialist spaces: Ordinary lives in extraordinary times
In the history of modernity, childhood represents societies' hopes and desires for the future. An offspring of modernity, the socialist project had a unique preoccupation with children and childhood for the social (re)making of societies. However, research on both sides of the Iron Curtain has explored children's lives in socialist societies by focusing on the organised efforts of state socialisation, largely overlooking how childhoods were actua…
A genealogy of the ‘future’: Antipodean trajectories and travels of the ‘21 st century learner’
In this paper, from the particular positioning of educational researchers working in Australia, we unpack the figure of the ‘21st century learner’ from both broad and specific perspectives. The paper begins with a policy genealogy that traces this figure through networks of documents, events and bodies that transcend borders and hemispheres. We suggest that although there appear to be multiple origins for current Australian policies on educationa…
Picking at the Scabs: A Poststructural Feminist Writing Project
This article takes up a number of autobiographical texts written at different times and in different styles about the same incident, the end of a marriage. The author traces discourses of femininity and romance as well as discourses about what it means to be "a writer" through fragments of these texts. In exploring the stultifying effects of the discourses that were taken up by the subject in each particular (con)text, the author struggles to ope…
Corporeal generosity: Breastfeeding bodies and female‐dominated workplaces
While gender equality at work and the gendered parameters of workplace conditions are of interest to feminist researchers, this paper brings together sociological and public health perspectives to interrogate factors impacting women who return to work (RTW) while maintaining breastfeeding. Our inquiry is focused on female‐dominated professions, teaching, nursing, and midwifery, and our findings suggest that breastfeeding obstacles exist even when…
My school redux: Re-storying schooling with the My School website
This paper explores the effects of audit cultures on school education through a highly personal reading of the My School website, launched in Australia in 2010. It situates two personal narratives, from the points of view of student and teacher, alongside the other stories available about two of the secondary schools listed on the website. Although statistics such as those generated through the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy …
Difference as Ethical Encounter
This article uses Deleuze and Levinas and those who work with their ideas to explore pedagogical encounters across difference in two texts: A collective biography story of a White teacher in an Indigenous school and an excerpt from the landmark 'Sorry' speech by the previous Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It begins with a reflection on the methodology of collective biography and speculates on how difference, and ethical encounters across d…
The market, the media and the family in a school excursion rape case
This paper examines a local and specific instance of the effects of neoliberal markets on individual and institutional subjects of schooling. It reviews a court case between a prestigious private girls’ school and an ex‐student who sued the school for failing to provide adequate supervision on a school trip to Europe during which she was raped. It considers the incident in relation to the legal and discursive complexities of school excursions and…
Rewriting “the Road to Nowhere”: Place Pedagogies in Western Sydney
Negative representations of parts of our cities are endemic in the Australian media, where certain suburbs function as motifs for failure—past, present, and future. Indeed, as one journalist put it after invoking the “interchangeable” triumvirate of Sydney’s Mount Druitt, Melbourne’s West Heidelberg, and Brisbane’s Inala, “geography is destiny” (Wynhausen, 2006). This article critiques the discourses at play in the media and explores the possibil…
Analysis of lectin binding properties on human Burkitt's lymphoma cell lines that show high spontaneous metastasis to distant organs in SCID mice: The binding sites for soybean agglutinin lectin maske…
Alterations in cell surface carbohydrates on human lymphoma cell lines with different spontaneous metastatic potential in the severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) mouse model were analyzed. A difference In cell surface carbohydrates between high‐ (HBL‐2, HBL‐7 and HBL‐8) and no‐ or low‐(HBL‐4, HBL‐6, Daudi and Raji) spontaneous metastatic human lymphoma cell lines were analyzed on a FACScan using fluorescein‐isothiocyanate (FITC)‐conjugated le…
(Re)presenting the Collective Girl: A Poetic Approach to a Methodological Dilemma
This article identifies the salient characteristics of collective memory work and collective biography research. Methodological dilemmas that can arise in the course of the research are identified and an argument is made in favor of imagination and creativity as essential elements of any effective response. Particular reference is made to a collective biography project completed by the author where she (re)presented the collective texts in the fo…
Working on the Ground. A Collective Biography of Feminine Subjectivities: Mapping the Traces of Power and Knowledge
In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge rel…
Picking at the Scabs: A Poststructural Feminist Writing Project
This article takes up a number of autobiographical texts written at different times and in different styles about the same incident, the end of a marriage. The author traces discourses of femininity and romance as well as discourses about what it means to be "a writer" through fragments of these texts. In exploring the stultifying effects of the discourses that were taken up by the subject in each particular (con)text, the author struggles to ope…
Crossing ‘boundaries’ with the collective girl: A poetic intervention into sex education
Feminist poststructuralist approaches to research can authorize different ways of working with different types of texts in search of insight into the discursive constitution of subjects. In this paper I undertake a close reading of women's memories about early sexual experiences generated in a small collective biography workshop. The collective poetic text that emerges from the workshop is analysed in terms of recent feminist sociological researc…
Out/performing in the academy: Writing ‘The Breast Project’
This paper tells the multi-layered story of how the author came to write a theatre script about breasts as part of her research. She frames this writing as ‘border-work’ as she plays at the edges of academic and fictional writing. In this paper ideas from Barthes and Cixous are interleaved with extracts from the author's own texts and with her story of writing for theatre in order to explore how poststructural theory can open up new spaces and pl…
The Ambivalent Practices of Reflexivity
Reflexivity involves turning one's reflexive gaze on discourse-turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) s…
Embodied Women at Work in Neoliberal Times and Places
n\t\t\t\t\tIn this article five women explore (female) embodiment in academic work in current workplaces. In a week-long collective biography workshop they produced written memories of themselves in their various workplaces and memories of themselves as children and as students. These memories then became the texts out of which the analysis was generated. The authors examine the constitutive and seductive effects of neoliberal discourses and prac…
Constituting the Feminist Subject in Poststructuralist Discourse
In this article, we describe a collective biography that we convened in order to revisit the site of the radical theoretical break with the liberal humanist individual marked by the poststructuralist work of Henriques and colleagues and the feminist poststructuralist work of Weedon. These writers suggest that the new subject of poststructuralist theory will be more open to the changes desired by feminist and social justice movements. They describ…
The Tumbler: Writing An/Other in Fiction and Performance Ethnography
This article dissolves the binary between science and literature with a performance text set in rural Australia. This performance suggests that the imaginative act of fiction writing and the social scientific act are kept apart in a false binary that reifies the privilege of presence and the audacity of authenticity. Inspired by a poststructuralist suspicion of any truth as sacred originary, the author takes a chance on an imaginative writing pra…
The (Im)Possibilities of Writing the Self-Writing: French Poststructural Theory and Autoethnography
Poststructural theories problematize taken-for-granted humanist notions of the subject as capable of self-knowledge and self-articulation while simultaneously providing a rationale for incorporating the personal into research. The body, emotions, and lived experience become texts to be written and read in autoethnography. However, a paradox arises for poststructural autoethnography in that autoethnographic research presumes that subjects can spea…
For Love of the Word: English Teaching, Affect and Writing
Research in the UK, USA and Australia confirms that secondary English practising and pre‐service teachers are typically characterised as great readers. Indeed the subject position of English teacher entails a ‘love’ of reading (Peel, R., Patterson, A. & Gerlach (Eds), 2000 Peel, R. 2000. “Beliefs about ‘English’, in England,”. In Questions of English: Ethics, Aesthetics, Rhetoric and the Formation of the Subject in England, Australia and the Unit…
The market, the media and the family in a school excursion rape case
This paper examines a local and specific instance of the effects of neoliberal markets on individual and institutional subjects of schooling. It reviews a court case between a prestigious private girls’ school and an ex‐student who sued the school for failing to provide adequate supervision on a school trip to Europe during which she was raped. It considers the incident in relation to the legal and discursive complexities of school excursions and…
Crime's family tree: Conflating race, criminality and family in New Zealand
This paper produces a critical reading of discourses of criminality, family and racialization circulating in an interrelated set of feature articles published in late 2006 in a major New Zealand newspaper. Through images, diagrams and written text, local crime is mapped as a familial aberration that threatens a whole city and region. Rather than demonstrating a novel approach to reporting crime, this paper argues that the representation of crime …
Twenty‐four seven on the computers’: Girls, ICTs and risk
This paper explores how girls take up, disrupt, and disavow interest in ICTs in their lives. It examines questions of access and of social risk in relation to computers in the home and how these are nuanced by gender. The paper draws on samples of text from advertisements, government websites and focus group interviews with high‐school girls in Australia in order to explore some of the risks and pleasures computers offer to young people. It consi…
Children, gender and video games: Towards a relational approach to multimedia, by Valerie Walkerdine
Children, gender and video games: towards a relational approach to multimedia, by Valerie Walkerdine." , 20(5), pp. 551–552
Technologies of audit at work on the writing subject: A Discursive Analysis
This article examines the everyday practices of writing in the context of the technologies of audit, as they have been practised on and by the four authors in their capacity as students and researchers. It examines the activity of writing as governmentality, through which students and academics make themselves into appropriate subjects, and also exceed and disrupt the effects of government
Precarious Listening
This article attempts to hold thought open in a textual space that often forecloses thought. The authors present arguments but work them through poetry, memoir, pictures, and exposition. They frame this work in particular as an improvisation around-and intervention into-more familiar practices of collective biography, narrative, and art therapies and situate it as a new pedagogy for collective academic practice. The article emerged from a project…
Doing ‘the other’ over: Narrative conservatism in radical popular films
Tom Zubrycki's documentary film Molly and Mobarak (2003) and John Doyle's television mini-series Marking Time (2003) were both released during the most vehement anti-refugee governmental regime of contemporary Australian history. Whilst the Howard government and the Ruddock and Vanstone ministries were intent on dehumanizing refugees, these film-makers—amongst other Australian artists—were intent on humanizing them. Afghani refugees were portraye…
Rewriting “the Road to Nowhere”: Place Pedagogies in Western Sydney
Negative representations of parts of our cities are endemic in the Australian media, where certain suburbs function as motifs for failure—past, present, and future. Indeed, as one journalist put it after invoking the “interchangeable” triumvirate of Sydney’s Mount Druitt, Melbourne’s West Heidelberg, and Brisbane’s Inala, “geography is destiny” (Wynhausen, 2006). This article critiques the discourses at play in the media and explores the possibil…
Deleuzian Thought and Collaborative Writing: A Play in Four Acts
This article involves four writers exploring together the insights into collaborative writing that Deleuze can offer. Jonathan and Ken in the United Kingdom and Bronwyn and Sue in Australia have separate histories of collaborative writing, and in this collaborative project, they extend their thinking about Deleuze and work reflexively with his concepts to examine their own four-way collaboration. The thoughts of Deleuze provide a means of looking…
Difference as Ethical Encounter
This article uses Deleuze and Levinas and those who work with their ideas to explore pedagogical encounters across difference in two texts: A collective biography story of a White teacher in an Indigenous school and an excerpt from the landmark 'Sorry' speech by the previous Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It begins with a reflection on the methodology of collective biography and speculates on how difference, and ethical encounters across d…
The Crucible of Classroom Practice: Alchemy and Early Professional Learning in Secondary English Teaching
This paper explores the metaphor of the classroom as a ‘crucible’ for early professional learning where beginning teachers forge professional identities in complex, unpredictable, paradoxical, affectively and physically potent contexts of practice. It works into the dissonances and contradictions of the micro-narratives embedded in the accounts that three high-achieving early career English teacher graduates give of their early professional learn…
Old-Fashioned and Forward-Looking”: Neo-Liberalism and Nostalgia in the Daring Books for Girls
In this paper, we examine The Daring Book for Girls and its follow-ups for their constructions of gender. We suggest that, as examples of how neo-liberalism finds its way into notions of proper girlhood, the books provide intentional and unintentional “lessons” to their readers in how to perform themselves in these times. In both the American and the Australian edition of the initial text, girls are instructed in complex ways to be the right kind…
Deterritorializing collective biography
This paper proposes a new move in the methodological practice of collective biography, by provoking a shift beyond any remnant attachment to the speaking/ writing subject towards her dispersal and displacement via textual interventions that stress multivocality. These include the use of photographs, drama, and various genres of writing. Using a story selected from a collective biography workshop on sexuality and schooling, we document how we work…
Sociology (53 works) · Political science (31 works) · Art (29 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Aesthetics (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Pedagogy (17 works) · Law (16 works)