Margaret Somerville
Biographic Data
| ID | 766346 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Margaret Somerville |
| GIVEN NAMES | Margaret |
| FAMILY NAME | Somerville |
| SIGNATURE | SOMERVILLE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Sydney University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The affect(s) of literacy learning in the mud
This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case ‘getting muddy’. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations and repetitions (re: muddiness). Children learn from their mistakes, from social interaction, due to t…
Bioethics in the news: The values at stake
Bioethical issues are complex, often involve factual uncertainty, and have broad and long-term potential consequences for individuals, institutions and society. Simplification is a strategy used by so-called ‘progressive’ values advocates to promote acceptance of their values. It results from excluding consideration of complexity, uncertainty and potentiality in the values disputes around bioethical issues. In order to engage effectively in publi…
Researching With Children of the Anthropocene: A New Paradigm
This chapter takes the age of Anthropocene as the time of human entanglement in the fate of the planet, dated by some from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We propose, however, that the full awareness of the consequences of this entanglement will only be felt by children born in the twenty-first century into an entirely different world than the one we know and understand. Interestingly, in the light of this contention, early childhood leads…
Posthuman Theory and Practice in Early Years Learning
Anthropocene’s time
Posthuman literacies: Young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds
This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s lingu…
The Anthropocene’s Call to Educational Research
Converting the ‘Right to Life’ to the ‘Right to Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia’: An Analysis of Carter v Canada ( Attorney General ) , Supreme Court of Canada: Table 1
In its landmark decision Carter v Canada (Attorney General), the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the criminal prohibition on physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia for certain persons in certain circumstances violated their rights to life, liberty, and security of the person in sec. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and thus was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in effect overruled its earlier decision, Rodriguez v British …
Mobilising community? Place, identity formation and new teachers' learning
This paper analyses data from a longitudinal study which foregrounds the category of 'place' to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work, and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching? Surveys and ethnographic interviews were carried out with 35 new teachers over a three-year period in a region of rural Australia known for its disadvantage. In this paper we focus on the analysis of ethnographic data ab…
Climate Change and Regional Identity in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria
The recent Australian federal election results suggested that climate change remained on the agenda of the Australian electorate even if it had slipped off the agenda of the major federal political parties. It is generally accepted that the Federal Labor Government, under the previous Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, after becoming a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and proposing a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, failed to implement policy or develop…
The Watcombe Housing Study: The short term effect of improving housing conditions on the health of residents
Objective: To assess the short term health effects of improving housing. Design: Randomised to waiting list. Setting: 119 council owned houses in south Devon, UK. Participants: About 480 residents of these houses. Intervention: Upgrading houses (including central heating, ventilation, rewiring, insulation, and re-roofing) in two phases a year apart. Main outcome measures: All residents completed an annual health questionnaire: SF36 and GHQ12 (adu…
Changing storylines and masculine bodies in Australian coal mining organizations
In this article we are exploring gendered subjectivity and workplace change in male dominated industrial organizations. The empirical base is a study of Australian coal mining companies implementin
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…
Conversations between disciplines: Historical archaeology and oral history at Yarrawarra
The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partner…
The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit
Every day we hear news about medical or scientific breakthroughs and the complex ethical issues they raise. Feats that were never before possible, including cloning, genetically modifying food, mapping human chromosomes, and using animal organs for human transplants, have opened up a Pandora's box of ethical questions. Technology is advancing at such rate that the issue is not so much what we can do but rather whether we will do it. Margaret Some…
Tracing bodylines: The Body in Feminist Poststructural Research
This paper traces body lines in feminist poststructural research by identifying the conditions under which research into the lived body can be brought into discursive relation with contemporary theoretical formulations of the body. It begins by identifying the erasure of the corporeal body in the somatophobia of essentialism and the exclusive focus of poststructural research on the constitution of bodies in language. Potential methodologies for r…
Trainers and learners constructing a community of practice: Masculine work cultures and learning safety in the mining industry
This article begins with the practical problem of the failure of training in safe work practices to result in changes to the rate of accident and injury in mining workplaces. A review of the literature in workplace training and workplace learning suggests that there has been little investigation of the relationship between how trainers train, and what learners learn in the workplace. Interviews and participant observation were carried out with 20…
Border work in the contact zone: Thinking Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Collaboration Spatially
This paper explores different ways of conceptualising Indigenous/non-Indigenous research collaboration and partnerships. It begins with a brief outline of the problem of current conceptualisations within the critical paradigm in qualitative research. It proposes the idea of the contact zone (Pratt, 1992) as a useful way to theorise the site, and border work (Haig-Brown & Archibald, 1996) as a way to understand the emotional and intellectual work,…
From local concern to randomized trial: The Watcombe Housing Project
Background A randomized study of the effect on people's health of improving their housing is underway in Torbay. The link between poor health, particularly respiratory health, and poor housing conditions has been recognized for a long time, but there have been few intervention studies to demonstrate that improving housing can improve health. In 1994, South and West Devon Health Authority set up a community development project in a deprived area o…
Body/Landscape Journals
Reading this book is like falling through a faultline, as we respond to poesis, both as poetry and as thought creation. Margaret Somerville attended the 1984 Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp where urban women and Aboriginal women demonstrated against military bases. As she moved through the landscape of this and other very different places, she recorded her interactions: with Aboriginal women in the desert in the mountains and at home, and with white …
Eating Place: Postcolonial explorations of embodiment and place
In this paper we explore 'living off the land' at Red Rock in coastal NSW in conversation with local Indigenous people. We document our research through journal writing, photographs, recorded conversations, memory work and self-reflexivity in relation to the various performances of this script. Within a feminist poststructural framework we take up the postcolonial challenge that 'Colonisation is primarily a spatial conquest and postcolonial trans…
Life (Hi)story writing: The relationship between talk and text
This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs 1. Life (hi)story writing lies uneasily on the boundary between biography and autobiography and as such challenges many of our assumptions about telling and writing a life. It has traditiona…
Conversations between disciplines: Historical archaeology and oral history at Yarrawarra
The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partner…
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…
Tracing bodylines: The Body in Feminist Poststructural Research
This paper traces body lines in feminist poststructural research by identifying the conditions under which research into the lived body can be brought into discursive relation with contemporary theoretical formulations of the body. It begins by identifying the erasure of the corporeal body in the somatophobia of essentialism and the exclusive focus of poststructural research on the constitution of bodies in language. Potential methodologies for r…
Border work in the contact zone: Thinking Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Collaboration Spatially
This paper explores different ways of conceptualising Indigenous/non-Indigenous research collaboration and partnerships. It begins with a brief outline of the problem of current conceptualisations within the critical paradigm in qualitative research. It proposes the idea of the contact zone (Pratt, 1992) as a useful way to theorise the site, and border work (Haig-Brown & Archibald, 1996) as a way to understand the emotional and intellectual work,…
The Watcombe Housing Study: The short term effect of improving housing conditions on the health of residents
Objective: To assess the short term health effects of improving housing. Design: Randomised to waiting list. Setting: 119 council owned houses in south Devon, UK. Participants: About 480 residents of these houses. Intervention: Upgrading houses (including central heating, ventilation, rewiring, insulation, and re-roofing) in two phases a year apart. Main outcome measures: All residents completed an annual health questionnaire: SF36 and GHQ12 (adu…
Life (Hi)story writing: The relationship between talk and text
This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs 1. Life (hi)story writing lies uneasily on the boundary between biography and autobiography and as such challenges many of our assumptions about telling and writing a life. It has traditiona…
Mobilising community? Place, identity formation and new teachers' learning
This paper analyses data from a longitudinal study which foregrounds the category of 'place' to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work, and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching? Surveys and ethnographic interviews were carried out with 35 new teachers over a three-year period in a region of rural Australia known for its disadvantage. In this paper we focus on the analysis of ethnographic data ab…
Changing storylines and masculine bodies in Australian coal mining organizations
In this article we are exploring gendered subjectivity and workplace change in male dominated industrial organizations. The empirical base is a study of Australian coal mining companies implementin
Trainers and learners constructing a community of practice: Masculine work cultures and learning safety in the mining industry
This article begins with the practical problem of the failure of training in safe work practices to result in changes to the rate of accident and injury in mining workplaces. A review of the literature in workplace training and workplace learning suggests that there has been little investigation of the relationship between how trainers train, and what learners learn in the workplace. Interviews and participant observation were carried out with 20…
The affect(s) of literacy learning in the mud
This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case ‘getting muddy’. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations and repetitions (re: muddiness). Children learn from their mistakes, from social interaction, due to t…
Anthropocene’s time
Eating Place: Postcolonial explorations of embodiment and place
In this paper we explore 'living off the land' at Red Rock in coastal NSW in conversation with local Indigenous people. We document our research through journal writing, photographs, recorded conversations, memory work and self-reflexivity in relation to the various performances of this script. Within a feminist poststructural framework we take up the postcolonial challenge that 'Colonisation is primarily a spatial conquest and postcolonial trans…
Life (Hi)story writing: The relationship between talk and text
This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs 1. Life (hi)story writing lies uneasily on the boundary between biography and autobiography and as such challenges many of our assumptions about telling and writing a life. It has traditiona…
Body/Landscape Journals
Reading this book is like falling through a faultline, as we respond to poesis, both as poetry and as thought creation. Margaret Somerville attended the 1984 Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp where urban women and Aboriginal women demonstrated against military bases. As she moved through the landscape of this and other very different places, she recorded her interactions: with Aboriginal women in the desert in the mountains and at home, and with white …
Eating Place: Postcolonial explorations of embodiment and place
In this paper we explore 'living off the land' at Red Rock in coastal NSW in conversation with local Indigenous people. We document our research through journal writing, photographs, recorded conversations, memory work and self-reflexivity in relation to the various performances of this script. Within a feminist poststructural framework we take up the postcolonial challenge that 'Colonisation is primarily a spatial conquest and postcolonial trans…
From local concern to randomized trial: The Watcombe Housing Project
Background A randomized study of the effect on people's health of improving their housing is underway in Torbay. The link between poor health, particularly respiratory health, and poor housing conditions has been recognized for a long time, but there have been few intervention studies to demonstrate that improving housing can improve health. In 1994, South and West Devon Health Authority set up a community development project in a deprived area o…
Trainers and learners constructing a community of practice: Masculine work cultures and learning safety in the mining industry
This article begins with the practical problem of the failure of training in safe work practices to result in changes to the rate of accident and injury in mining workplaces. A review of the literature in workplace training and workplace learning suggests that there has been little investigation of the relationship between how trainers train, and what learners learn in the workplace. Interviews and participant observation were carried out with 20…
Border work in the contact zone: Thinking Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Collaboration Spatially
This paper explores different ways of conceptualising Indigenous/non-Indigenous research collaboration and partnerships. It begins with a brief outline of the problem of current conceptualisations within the critical paradigm in qualitative research. It proposes the idea of the contact zone (Pratt, 1992) as a useful way to theorise the site, and border work (Haig-Brown & Archibald, 1996) as a way to understand the emotional and intellectual work,…
The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit
Every day we hear news about medical or scientific breakthroughs and the complex ethical issues they raise. Feats that were never before possible, including cloning, genetically modifying food, mapping human chromosomes, and using animal organs for human transplants, have opened up a Pandora's box of ethical questions. Technology is advancing at such rate that the issue is not so much what we can do but rather whether we will do it. Margaret Some…
Tracing bodylines: The Body in Feminist Poststructural Research
This paper traces body lines in feminist poststructural research by identifying the conditions under which research into the lived body can be brought into discursive relation with contemporary theoretical formulations of the body. It begins by identifying the erasure of the corporeal body in the somatophobia of essentialism and the exclusive focus of poststructural research on the constitution of bodies in language. Potential methodologies for r…
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…
Conversations between disciplines: Historical archaeology and oral history at Yarrawarra
The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partner…
The Watcombe Housing Study: The short term effect of improving housing conditions on the health of residents
Objective: To assess the short term health effects of improving housing. Design: Randomised to waiting list. Setting: 119 council owned houses in south Devon, UK. Participants: About 480 residents of these houses. Intervention: Upgrading houses (including central heating, ventilation, rewiring, insulation, and re-roofing) in two phases a year apart. Main outcome measures: All residents completed an annual health questionnaire: SF36 and GHQ12 (adu…
Changing storylines and masculine bodies in Australian coal mining organizations
In this article we are exploring gendered subjectivity and workplace change in male dominated industrial organizations. The empirical base is a study of Australian coal mining companies implementin
Climate Change and Regional Identity in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria
The recent Australian federal election results suggested that climate change remained on the agenda of the Australian electorate even if it had slipped off the agenda of the major federal political parties. It is generally accepted that the Federal Labor Government, under the previous Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, after becoming a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and proposing a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, failed to implement policy or develop…
Mobilising community? Place, identity formation and new teachers' learning
This paper analyses data from a longitudinal study which foregrounds the category of 'place' to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work, and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching? Surveys and ethnographic interviews were carried out with 35 new teachers over a three-year period in a region of rural Australia known for its disadvantage. In this paper we focus on the analysis of ethnographic data ab…
Converting the ‘Right to Life’ to the ‘Right to Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia’: An Analysis of Carter v Canada ( Attorney General ) , Supreme Court of Canada: Table 1
In its landmark decision Carter v Canada (Attorney General), the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the criminal prohibition on physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia for certain persons in certain circumstances violated their rights to life, liberty, and security of the person in sec. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and thus was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in effect overruled its earlier decision, Rodriguez v British …
Posthuman literacies: Young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds
This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s lingu…
The Anthropocene’s Call to Educational Research
Posthuman Theory and Practice in Early Years Learning
Anthropocene’s time
Bioethics in the news: The values at stake
Bioethical issues are complex, often involve factual uncertainty, and have broad and long-term potential consequences for individuals, institutions and society. Simplification is a strategy used by so-called ‘progressive’ values advocates to promote acceptance of their values. It results from excluding consideration of complexity, uncertainty and potentiality in the values disputes around bioethical issues. In order to engage effectively in publi…
Researching With Children of the Anthropocene: A New Paradigm
This chapter takes the age of Anthropocene as the time of human entanglement in the fate of the planet, dated by some from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We propose, however, that the full awareness of the consequences of this entanglement will only be felt by children born in the twenty-first century into an entirely different world than the one we know and understand. Interestingly, in the light of this contention, early childhood leads…
The affect(s) of literacy learning in the mud
This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case ‘getting muddy’. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations and repetitions (re: muddiness). Children learn from their mistakes, from social interaction, due to t…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Ecology (5 works) · Indigenous (5 works)